For the longest time, I’ve wanted a device to help me learn Japanese. I’m pretty decent at the spoken language but I’m almost completely illiterate. I can read the 92 letters of the phonetic alphabets but written Japanese also uses tens of thousands of Chinese characters for the bulk of the written language. I know, like, 10.

What I wanted was some device that would let me draw a Japanese kanji character (the characters that come from Chinese) and then have it tell me what that character meant. Now, with my iPhone and the free app “Kotoba!” I have it! In the image, I have drawn the character “Kotobuki” which means felicitation. If you’ve got an iPhone and you’re interested in Japanese, check it out.

In other news, I’ve finished Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 of Jumpgate Blues. A couple of characters are being held against their will by the military! Will they be able to escape? The funny thing is, I’m not totally sure myself. Only time will tell…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.