I like the site, and you are an inspiration. All the way, dude!
I have been living in kyoto for two years with my japanese wife, and have made slow progress in my japanese due to my own laziness. I needed the kick in the bu** that reading this site gave me, so thanks for blazing the trail…

Right now though I’m enjoying the Fuji TV series ‘Security Police’ (available at d-addicts). The dialogue is available at dramanote.com ( http://www.dramanote.com/?cid=27078 ). If anyone hasn’t been following this, I recommend it - it’s great fun

BTW - when you’ve got a moment Khatz, could you just give a *general* comment on the accuracy of the Japanese at dramanote - I assume it’s all good stuff, but I’d hate to enter hundreds of sentences from dramanote only to later discover that all the scripts there are typed by dsylexic 5 year olds.

I don’t really care whether the dialogue on dramanote is absolutely accurate with regard to having every single line of dialogue from a drama — I just want to know that I can enter it into my SRS with confidence that the Japanese itself is good and doesn’t contain grammar/vocab errors.

Thanks!

Ginjiro talks more or less like a ヤンキー.
Ginjiro’s dad talks like a lot of men do in every country in the world — mumbled and slack-jawed; regardless of country, it always seems to be women that are the ones who speak clearly.

I would agree that it is very different compared to your run-of-the-mill drama; story-wise, it’s highly original. And not only was the show itself funny and entertaining, but the cast were a highly memorable bunch too. (Plus I loved how the classical rakugo stories revealed in each episode could be weaved into the stories of the main characters themselves. In fact, for most of the episodes, the sudden coming in of the punchline always managed to surprise me.)

Glad to know that the dialogue’s realistic (’colloquial’?) though! (Especially since I’ve ripped out the audio and printed the Japanese subtitles for all episodes of Tiger & Dragon, and am working my way through them now.) Looking forward to your next article, Khatzumoto!

T&D was very realistic (8/10? 9/10?), both in terms of dialogue and in terms of age cross-section — people really do talk like that. A lot of other shows are more “realistic” in terms of storyline or situation (girl works at company and falls in love), but have stiff, fake dialogue that’s delivered without life or feeling: it’s like the first draft of the script and they’re reading it word for word…

By the way, do other shows display life in Japan like Tiger and Dragon did? Not that I’m an expert, but it seemed to give you a cross sectional look at areas fuch as: Theater, Love Hotels, Hostess Bars, Spas, Resorts, Formal dinners, restaurants, family meals, game shows, etc. Granted, no one ever seemed to take the train anywhere. Storyline aside, how realistic would you rate T&D?

I used to do the same thing, typing hiragana was a KILLER. Now I use Anki and my SRS woes are gone forever. Auto-hiragana is awesome. It also supports importing from Mnemosyne, and quite frankly, I have never looked back to Mnemosyne once I tried Anki. The author constantly updates the programs (with feedback from users).

Get it from http://repose.cx/anki/

I guess this has become the official thread for the program:

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=556&p=1

Lately, as I improve, I only add hiragana for kanji I don’t know how to pronounce. Still, this takes some time to do. What should I do to speed up this process? Any ideas? I’ve been working at this for most of the summer and only have 880 or so example sentences in my SRS. Of course, I generally only have 30 - 60 minutes available a day to enter stuff into Mnemosyne.

Thanks for any help!

For my interviews, I looked up these
敬語
ビジネスメール
面接
ビジネスメール２
ビジネス文書

Generally, the first 4-5 hits should serve you well.

khatzumoto-sensei~

i was wondering if you could recommend any resources (drama, books, anything in japanese ^^) that one could use to learn/mine 警護 and ビジネス日本語. I work at a japanese company in US, and I’d like to learn some of these expressions to 1. grow in japanese, 2. impress my japanese bosses/superiors, 3. be on the ‘fast(er) track’ to getting a project/relocation in japan. any recommendations would be most appreciated~

thanks and glad you enjoy the drama site~!