From Friendly Demons to Eromanga in South West Queensland

Sunday, February 7th Link Post

It might  have been fitting for the week of the Japanese festival setsubun that j-bloggers explored the demonisation of foreign populations. Deas posted a photo of a protest placard denouncing unwelcome American bases in Guam, Okinawa and Japan. It seems people have short memories. Japan was a brutal occupying force in Guam, not to mention Manchuria and the Korean Peninsula.

Japanese xenophobic policies persist even today, with Japanese born children of foriegn-born parents being expelled from the country. In an excellent guest post on LoneleePlanet Scott Jeppesen explored a time when the shoe was on the other foot for Japanese in Peru. Perhaps we should be welcoming our demons in!

On this blog I released the slides from my most recent eduFire class on how to ace the JLPT, while people were celebrating (or comisserating) their 2009 results on Twitter. Now it's time to get your read on, and learn how to put the fun back into your study. Self paced learning is the way to go, over the next few months you'll hear lots from me on putting your social network to work for you. Meanwhile pick up a few tips about quality items for your SRS from Liz.

You ought to be thinking about quality learning techniques, because as this post shows, you can never rely on machine translations. As they say, the only constant is change, what you learn today might be out of fashion in 10 or 20 years so please don't stop learning. It really would be tough to be dumped from your job in eikaiwa and forced to live in a blue tent, but maybe it's just that kind of immersion you really need to accelerate your Japanese.

At least you can read about it, and I'll be exploring these themes in the lead up to my learn to read manga class on edufire with natsukigirl. Don't get the wrong idea about eromanga though, Eromanga is really a town in South West Queensland. Follow me on twitter. Who knows, I may be able to trade my twitter follower count in for a discount on ramen next time I'm in Japan.

Thanks for following, I mean that!

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