A handbook of common Japanese phrases A handbook of common Japanese phrases, compiled by Sanseido, translated and adapted by John Brennan. OhioLink record John Brennan’s translation for Japanese learners of publishing house Sanseido’s book of language etiquette originally intended for Japanese native speakers has many common set phrases (highly developed and sometimes lengthy collocations) for congratulations, condolences, making speeches, giving gifts, addressing people (eleven set phrases for “Have you got a moment?

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Roko Belic’s 2011 documentary film Happy (Hoopla) had many memorable situations but the one I keep returning to is co-housing. Around the 39th minute, the film discusses the system in Denmark, where where several families live on a plot of land or a single building even, where specific duties, amenities, and projects are shared by all co-housers. The film explains the system through a case study of a single mother who describes the Jernstobereit co-house as the “miracle” she was looking for.

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I am very pleased to announce the release of Ebisu and Ebisu.js! These are are public-domain software libraries intended to be used by quiz or flashcard apps for intelligent, Bayesian quiz scheduling. They are released under the completely free Unlicense, and can be used anywhere by anyone without any conditions 🎆. The underlying algorithm is based on a principled application of Bayesian statistics, and has many nice features compared to existing scheduling algorithms 😁.

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I am very pleased to announce a web app I’ve been working on: KanjiBreak! It’s a tool to help create new databases for kanji/hanzi decomposition, i.e., kanji break-downs 😉. If you’re familiar with Sino-Japanese writing, you know that a character like 場ba (“place/area”) is made up of 土 (“ground”) on the left, then 日 (“sun” or “day”) on the top-right, below which we find 一 (“one”, the number) on top of 勿.

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Hey. Do me a favor. Take a look at six images. Japan: 566 km This shows Honshu, the big island of Japan, as well as Shikoku and the Korean and Chinese coastlines, from a vantage point floating east of the Asian continent, 566 kilometers above the surface. (The International Space Station hovers around 405 km.) The huge blob of yellow light in the lower-middle is the Tokyo megalopolis. If you follow the nearer coastline left (southwards), you’ll hit the next sprawling blobs of light, the Nagoya metropolis, then the Osaka–Kobe metropolis, on either side of the Nara peninsula.

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