After stumbling upon this blog with very casual and personal posts on Japanese immersion, I decided to give what this post says a try: “Listen to 10,000 hours of Japanese over the next 18 months.” I wouldn’t want to have my J-Pop tunes on repeat as that would probably make me sick of them in the end so I resorted to Japanese internet radio.

livedoor ねとらじ lets you listen to various user-created streams in Japanese (probably since livedoor is a Japanese portal and that the Japanese interface would scare off 外人 がいじん Foreignergaijins who have nothing to do with Japan). The streams vary from anime and J-Pop music to Japanese rants to random Skype conversations.

You can sort the list of user-generated programs (as shown in the image above) according to listener count, title, name of DJ, air time and bitrate. There’s also a refresh button to update the list of current streams.

I listen to streams every time I’m not watching anything or listening to my iTunes library and that includes the time I’m typing this post. It’s not too distracting (well, that depends on what stream you’re listening to) so I suggest you also listen to this in the background while working. As for me, I also leave it playing while I lull myself to sleep. Who knows, you might pick up an expression or two.

I use the VLC Multimedia plugin for FireFox (which is an optional feature when you install VLC) to listen to the streams.

livedoor ねとらじ　[Japanese net radio]

Summer term is [cursed] bestowed upon a handful of us [not so] lucky daigaku no gakusei 大学の学生 (college students). But anyway, I’m not entirely cursing this summer term for taking away my precious drama-watching, spazzing, lazing and nihongo-benkyou time because I’d still be able to have my dose of Nihongo Benkyou 日本語勉強(Japanese language study) while at the university.

Hai! I took JSP1 (Japanese Language and Culture I) as my foreign language elective. This is one of the 3 subjects that we’re supposed to complete this summer term. It covers the first 5 lessons of the Genki I textbook. Now, don’t scoff at me for taking this self-study-able subject. I seriously need an A or an A to pull up my [predicted] Statistics grade. Besides, taking this subject would probably give back a third of my stolen precious drama-watching, spazzing, lazing and nihongo-benkyou time.

That’s it for now. For anything else, you can follow me on Twitter and [please stalk me] on Plurk.

Being one of the sites I visit on a daily routine to learn Japanese vocabulary, iKnow!’s more-than-a-day-long maintenance wasn’t new to me. I’ve actually missed learning 10 new kanji (five a day) because of it. It took that long for the people behind the amazing flash card site to relaunch it as smart.fm.

So what’s new besides the new image-studying feature? The name. It seems to follow the two-letter TLD trend that’s been going on in the Web 2.0 scene today (i.e., ping.fm, last.fm, ma.tt, etc). Also, the site aims not to be a web app but a collection of web apps hence the rebranding of the site itself for distinction between the site and the web app. iKnow! would’ve been a great brand name though. Right now, the only web apps in smart.fm that I know of are iKnow! (learning), Dictation (listening) and BrainSpeed (speed-testing) but seeing their intention of generating a “learning stream” for users, I’m guessing there would be new apps in the future. An iPhone app would be great!

The design is something to be commended. It might look dragging to the usual eyes but personally, I like the image-less look of it. Big Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and the like have very minimal images in the layout itself. The color scheme should be improved though as without images, that’s the only thing that can bring the layout to life. To sum it up, smart.fm has gone minimalist.

Aside from the slower loading time, I haven’t experienced any major problem with it. I’m positively sure the people behind smart.fm are getting buzzed up right now especially with the negative feedback they’ve been getting since the relaunch. However, it’s just the first few days and bugs are inevitable. Besides, the smart.fm team must’ve been lacking sleep because of this. Apparently, we, the users of this wonderful free service, are not the only ones who want smart.fm to be better.

Now, if only an iPhone  app of this would be released…

NIHONGO TANGO:

変わる (kawaru)

vi, v5r – to change, to be transformed, to vary, to be revised, to be different, to move location. (JLPT 3)

official statement from the wonderful people at smart.fm.