I saw this page from How To Learn Any Language a while ago (it might be that someone put it in comments) but neglected to link to it despite how cool it is: a headshot jackpot mother lode of Japanese audio materials with transcripts. They range from children’s books to some more, what’s the word, anyway, there’s a lot of range. What’s exciting to me about this is that it has links to all those European fairy tales you and I grew up with (yay!). I’ve been listening to Snow White and The Emperor’s New Clothes this morning. Anyway, give it try. AFAIK, it’s all free! Freeee!

Hey, so, lately I’ve been looking for a portable, region-free DVD player…Don’t know if I’ll end up actually choosing one or not. But anyway, I used these websites to do some (well, all) of the research. And they’re in Japanese. And it seemed like it would make great reading material. So here are the links:

• Original Google Search
• M1: probably my favorite collection of player specs and info
• DVD.co.jp: nice players
• Region-Free.jp: the product I saw sucked, but I haven’t looked at everything yet…anyway, it’s still good for reading
• Kakaku.com: helps you find some of the lowest prices in Japan

OK, so I’ve been collecting links for another big post of website recommmendations, but that’s just gonna have to wait. I mean, it’s just gonna-have-to-wait. Because I have found the goods that you need so badly. At least, the goods I needed when I was in the early stages of acquiring Japanese. Here they are:

Instruction manuals for the PlayStation series.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you’ll find the manuals for the original PlayStation. These come with full furigana. The same goes for PocketStation and PS one. And of course they have sweet diagrams and stuff, too. Enjoy!

Edit: While we’re at it, here are the Wii manuals. These come with furigana and in color!

You know, one of the things we take for granted is knowing what websites to visit. When you’re trying to immerse yourself in a language, you may not know where to go on the internets for good stuff to read. Well, here I am to save the day again, with more website recommendations.

• A friend of a friend (actually, he’s totally just plain “friend” now, and he says I’m his favorite ) runs this blog that’s tangentially related to his graphic design business. Mostly it’s just about cool-looking stuff he sees and people he meets in daily life. It’s got lots of photos, which helps as a learner because it boths keeps your attention and clues you in to what’s being discussed.
• Goo appear to have launched a new lyrics search service. Mercifully, it’s text-based. None of that Flash nonsense that people have been trying to force on us for a while. Effen Flash, riding roughshod on my lyric-reading attempts.
• Watching Japanese dubs of movies and TV shows you’ve previously seen in another language, or any audiovisual materials that are from a culture with which you are already deeply familiar, is a great learning tool. And so is reading about them. At Goo, you can read film synopses, like this one of The Rock (1996) — “You want me to stick this into my heart?”. You can find more such things using Google Japan. Run a query like [(荒筋 OR あらすじ OR 粗筋) (name of the film in Japanese or original language) 映画]. It’ll get you even meatier explanations of the plot, such as this one.
• Luce e ombra (light and darkness?), by a Japanese person living in Italy. The author, Kanako, has visited this site, so you already know she’s cool. Subject matter is art and personal experiences.
• Ikeda Nobuo writes cool books about economics. And also a runs a blog about it so you can read it for free .
• This blog is all about the musings of a private home tutor. He mainly discusses 国語 (Japanese language) education (for Japanese kids, of course).
• Another blog by someone in the education industry (why do I have so many of these?). This time by a mathematics teacher.
• JSTAGE — The Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic. You can find lots of academic papers here (with a focus on physical science/engineering/computer science) for free. The papers are primarily in Japanese.

That’s all for now. More later .

久々に日本語記事を書こうと思えば・・・前回の記事から現在までの大量入力（インプット）に基づいて築いて来た言語力（国語力？）の自身と裏腹な不安も抱いている俺。何でかというと、幾ら「AJATTの勝元」でも私にも間違える可能性は十分あるからだ。というよりは、誰でもそうじゃん？日本生まれ育ちの生粋の日本人だってね。しかし、私の場合は、「やっぱりアイツ外人だね」と、国籍に言葉の間違いを然う〔「コイツどんだけ漢字変換するっちゅうねん」と考えていらっしゃる方もいらっしゃるでしょうが〕帰せられるのが、やっぱり嫌だ。で、さき申し上げたんだけど、やっぱり俺は「AJATTの勝元」で、言わば「常識に囚われない画期的な日本語独学法」の、斯う、代表者というか提唱者なんだから・・・要するに、従来の考えを覆す大いなる主張には大いなる責任が伴う。換言すると、「語学の新説を唱える癖に下手な日本語を使うなっつーの！」って奴だ。

さて、此間テレビに関する記事（嘆き？）を書いた僕（はい！吾輩は一人称の選べない人間である）なんだけど、ネットサーフィンがてらにこのブログにて「テレビ番組の低俗化に関する一考察」という、テレビをジャンクフードに準えるカナリ興味深いポストを見付けちゃった。僕的には、日本語の勉強に役立って来たテレビはもう完全に見て居られない。今では面白いドラマとか有ったら、DVDで観れるまで待つぐらいだ — 大事な思考力が馬鹿馬鹿しい番組に衰退させられないように。だからこの記事を読んで大同感しました。皆ちゃんも読んで見てね。

テレビが低俗しているのではなく、元々低俗なモノだったという考えもあるみたい。確かに今までパッと見た昭和時代のテレビから判断すると、当時でも特に高尚な番組があったとは限らぬ。どっちみち、俺はもうテレビを見ないけど。

最後に、テレビジョンの悪口を散々言って来た私も、繰り返しだけど実はテレビっ子だった — テレビのお陰で日本語が解る私が居る。なんつーか、語学と地理学の最適無敵な道具なんだ、テレビってのは。あるレベル迄ね。なので、どんだけいかほど低俗な番組でも、その内容をまだ理解できない人には、拒否・批判する資格は無い。テレビを批判するのは、語学的にちゃんと理解できるようになってからの特権なのだ。だから、或る言語を勉強中の方には、その言語でのテレビを大量無差別に見る事を是も非もお勧めしたい。そして、理解できるようになったら、番組を真剣に選んだり、テレビそのものを全面的に否定したりしても構わない。

まあ、恐らく真の問題はテレビの低俗化より、低俗化と面白くない化の同時進行。面白くて低俗ならしょうがいないし、面白くなくて高尚でも受け入れられるが、低俗で面白くないは到底赦せぬ！

So, to my pleasant surprise one of the best/my favorite comedy duos in Japan, 爆笑問題/Bakushou Mondai/The Laughter Question/BSMD, do a radio show called 爆笑問題カーボーイ/Bakushou Mondai Cowboy (carboy?). Unfortunately, radio seems hard to get in Japan, at least in my experience — the signal strength for all stations is set to “super weak sauce”, so…you basically don’t get reception anywhere. Anyway, enough griping — fear not! There is hope! They have a podcast and a website right here.

The format is simple, OOTA Hikaru/太田光 does the dryly delivered silliness or “boke (呆け)”, 田中裕二/TANAKA Yuuji does the straight-man-slash-wisecracks-on-the-side or “tsukkomi (突っ込み). The quality of subject material, the timeliness of Tanaka’s tsukkomi, and how blase Oota can be while making ridiculous statements, make both BSMD as a group and this show, worth your attention. Oota manages to weave politics into a lot of his discussions without ever sacrificing humor. Tanaka’s rebuttal timing is perfect, down to the millisecond. And the fact that Tanaka can go from saying something very profound to something completely stoopid in the same tone of voice is always fun; that’s quality boke. The other thing that’s cool is that Oota sometimes literally falls in love with certain words or phrases. And he’ll get excited and keep saying them over and over again even when it doesn’t make sense “それからドーした？！！？”. I laugh just thinking about it. Funnily enough, I do the same thing a lot: a few weeks ago, my friend H-star had to listen to me say “豪華にね、ゴーカに” every few minutes for like 6 hours. I thought it was just something I did because Japanese was new to me — ‘guess not. Oh yeah, Oota is also a voracious reader, going through over 100 books a year. So you input fiends take note — if you want to talk like the man, consider reading like the man, too. And just when you thought he couldn’t get any cooler, according to the ‘Pedia, Oota was effectively banned for a time from Nippon Broadcasting System (NBS) in the early 1990s; the deal is that he was sitting in one night for Beat Takeshi, who had a severe cold, and as a joke he very gravely announced that Beat Takeshi had, in fact, died due to complications from the cold. If you know Oota, you can picture him doing something like that; reading about it, I thought it was hilarious. NBS appear to have had a cow…

Anyway, even if you don’t understand all the talk on Bakushou Mondai Cowboy, I encourage you, exhort you, call upon you, to listen to it. The dialogue is really natural, and it’s a good chance to hear someone explain themselves on the fly, as Oota does. You’ll definitely pick up a thing or two, and you’ll start laughing soon enough.

BSMD also do tons of work on TV, so…keep an eye out.