What are some differences between Americans and the Japanese?

Aaron & I did some “research” (ie: we surfed the internet during our lunch break) and put together this fun comic. A special thanks to our friend The Oatmeal for inspiration.

Enjoy…and feel free to share!

Speekit now has Free Japanese Lessons Everyday!

Hooray! So, here’s what this is all about…We’ve been secretly working on our latest project to bring you more awesome Japanese stuff. And it’s our pleasure to finally introduce you to the UPDATED Speekit.com!

The Details:

Everyday we’ll be posting a different Speekit lesson on our homepage for all to enjoy. It’s fun, education, and best of all Free!

We’ve also made it easy to share the love with your friends and fellow Japanese enthusiasts!

• Have a social networking account? We’ve made it easy for you to post about our daily lessons to your friends and contacts.
• Have a blog? Embed the lessons on your site for your viewers to enjoy
• Don’t have either? We’ve even made it easy to email your friends about the Free Lesson of the Day!

We’ve also made the Premium Member experience more streamlined, thanks to the input from our awesome community!

Come see and experience the New & Improved Speekit.com for yourself.

Hope to see you there!

Your friends,
Aaron & Kevin

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a foreigner or not, but it never fails. If you spend any amount of time in Japan, I bet you will experience the exact same thing.

So here is how to answer:

The easiest, most common way to answer is to simply say:

__(your profession)__ です (desu).

Here is a list of common professions that I thought of off the top of my head:

• Office worker (this could be lots of things… pretty much any typical desk job.) : かいしゃいん (kaishain)
• Teacher : せんせい (sensei)
• Doctor: いしゃ (isha)
• Soldier: ぐんじん　(gunjin)
• House wife: しゅふ　(shufu)
• Consultant: コンサルタント (konsarutanto)
• Engineer: エンジニア (enjinia)

If I didn’t list your profession here, head over to Jisho.org and look it up! If you want help learning and remembering more Japanese words, try Speekit!

Hope this helps.

Best,
Aaron

So Sarah is one of those straight-A model student types and is a super-disciplined, hard-worker.

She also studied Japanese like crazy. She went to Saturday school as a child to learn the language, aced every Japanese class in middle school and high school, and even earned her college degree in Japanese and graduated with honors!

If I told you she was fluent in Japanese, you probably wouldn’t be surprised, right? Well, that’s what I always just assumed.

Now what if I told you I recently found out that Sarah can’t speak Japanese at all?

Are you completely shocked, baffled, and confused? I was too! I just had to know more.

Sarah told me that plain and simple, none of the information stuck. Even though she studied hard for all of the tests (and aced them), she was shoveling the information in her mind using simple memorization techniques. The second the information was no longer necessary, her brain clicked the permanent delete button and said sayonara to all of it.

Well, are you depressed and disheartened yet?

Don’t worry, I was too at first. But then I figured it out. I found the common thread amongst all of my fluent Japanese speaking friends that Sarah didn’t have.

So here it is:

Aaron and I always talk about staying motivated and having fun learning Japanese. That’s important for sure. But you also need to challenge yourself and make language discoveries on your own.

If I told you that ‘kore wa pen desu’ means ‘this is a pen’ in Japanese, your immediate reaction should be to try to make similar sentences like ‘this is a house,’ ‘this is a car,’ etc.

Challenging yourself and discovering the language on your own is like building a bomb shelter around your castle of Japanese knowledge. Once you start making discoveries, you never forget them.

Don’t believe me?

I bet the guys who discovered the Ichabodcraniosaurus (a dinosaur) will never forget its name, where it was found, and what bone they unearthed first.

You and me, on the other hand? Chances are pretty good we won’t even remember the name of the dinosaur 30 seconds from now.

But back to being serious, don’t make the mistake Sarah did. Studying hard is good. But don’t rely 100% on your tutor, your textbook, or your nifty software program.

Find something that works for you, and let it push you along to help you make your own discoveries.

Ganbatte,
Kevin

Well, we fixed it! Watch the new demo video to see how it works (about 1/2 way through).

New Demo Video:

Log-in now to try it out for yourself!
Find any lesson and click the “Take Quiz” button.

What do you think of the new quiz design? What about the new demo video? Leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you!

Pictures:

Here are some pictures of the new interface. Click to enlarge.

1. The new welcome screen:

2. It says a word for you to find. Find it in under 10 seconds. The longer it takes you to find the item, the fewer points you receive.

3. If you find the correct item and click on it, you’ll see this! Good job!

4. Updated navigation. If the item isn’t on the picture, move your mouse to the top to move to a different one.

5. Your results! With less clicking, it’s easier to earn points! Go get ‘em!

Share:

]]> http://www.speekit.com/blog/updates/update-improved-quizzes/feed/ 5 http://www.speekit.com/blog/japan/how-japanese-are-you/ http://www.speekit.com/blog/japan/how-japanese-are-you/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:36:22 +0000 admin http://www.speekit.com/blog/?p=36

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Embed this on your site:<div style="width:600px;text-align:center;font-size:8px;"><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="swfobj_0" width="600" height="462"><param name="movie" value="http://speekitmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/sushi-samurai-quiz/main.swf" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><!--[if !IE]>–> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://speekitmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/sushi-samurai-quiz/main.swf" width="600" height="462" wmode="transparent"> <!--<![endif]--> <p>The sushi quiz only works if you have the Flash plugin installed.</p> <p> <!--[if !IE]>–> </object> <!--<![endif]--> </object><a href="http://www.speekit.com/learn-japanese">Learn Japanese</a> at Speekit</div> <p>