tonymcnicol.com: news Archives

January 29, 2008

Interviewed

Not so long ago I was interviewed for a magazine published by the Japan Foundation. The article is here - all in Japanese I am afraid.

As it was part of a series on students of Japanese and their jobs, they asked me to take along some of the texts I had used to learn Japanese. I chose two manga books and a collection of poetry by Aida Mitsuo.

Hopefully I come across better than my last online interview, where I ended up suggesting I did most of my research by reading manga.

Posted by tony at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2007

Giving up on Asian languages

The BBC had an interesting article today on how Australians are giving up on learning foreign languages.

That's a shame. Some of the best Japanese speakers I've met here (other than Japanese people of course!) have been from Australia and New Zealand. I'm always jealous of people who learned Japanese at school and did homestays here.

Given the economic reality in the world, I could understand Australians passing over Japanese for Chinese, but that doesn't seem to be the case. According to the article Japanese is still one of the more popular languages (albeit for reading manga rather than doing business, I suspect).

But one student in the article complains about hard Japanese it."Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) are very difficult and it's impossible to conquer."

Can agree with that. About the only way is to cram kanji every day for several years like Japanese schoolchildren.

Makes you wonder what happened to globalization though. Or maybe it's the predominance of business English that's the problem?

Posted by tony at 02:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 16, 2007

under the watchful eye of Japan's leader

Lovely quote from Prime Minister Abe in a BBC article on world economic woes.

"I think the Japanese economy has remained strong but I will be watching it carefully," he said.

. . . nothing to worry about then!

Posted by tony at 05:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 18, 2007

New Worlds, Old Politics

"Surprisingly, in a country with some of the fastest broadband speeds and a wide internet penetration, it is now illegal for candidates to create new websites or update existing web pages between now and election day, 29 July."

The BBC has an article about internet campaigning in Japan (or rather the lack of it).

One thing the article didn't mention is that Japan's politicians are overwhelmingly elderly, male and un-wired. I suspect many of them struggle with e-mail, never mind Second Life. And obviously, the politicians most likely to have the power to change the rules are the oldest and most analogue too.

P.S. If anyone wants to explore the Japanese Second Life with me, I am Burton Nozomi. (Might be an idea to email me first as I am rarely logged on)

Posted by tony at 06:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

Kabuki props

Working on an article about Kabuki props at the moment. Mattias Westfalk took this photo at the props company we visited today.

View image

Posted by tony at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

Horiemon

very interesting analysis of the Livedoor scandal from the Japan Today website.

click here

Posted by tony at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2005

Araki (Japan Times)

"40 rolls of film a day!"

Posted by tony at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2005

"my parrots went absolutely nuts"

earthquake in North Wales

Posted by tony at 07:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2005

human beans

Japanese beans get chatty

BBC article

Posted by tony at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

game reset

"About 15 percent of elementary and junior high school students in Nagasaki Prefecture believe dead people can be resurrected, according to a recent poll by the prefectural board of education."

. . . from an article in the Japan Times

because they play computer games apparently! but note the caveat at the end of the article.

Posted by tony at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)