Learn Japanese @ Japancast.net

Thank you everyone for all of your support.  2010 is going to be a great year!

A message from Japancast

Amazing animated music video by director Sugimoto Kousuke!

Found this via Motionographer. Check out all the production storyboards here:

http://f.hatena.ne.jp/Tete/14.フミコ/

For an independent production – this is some amazing work.

Character animator, designer and illustrator Yoshii brings us Meat or Die.   Below you can watch a video of exactly how he creates one of  his characters.

You can view an entire gallery of his characters on his Picasa site HERE.

Or you can visit his website:  http://www.yoshii.com/

Recently he was profiled by Luxology on his use of their software called Modo in creating 3D characters.  You can read the interview on the Luxology site:  http://www.luxology.com/community/profiles/hiroshi_yoshii/

Honestly, I’m not that impressed with what I’m seeing so far.  It really seems to have lost a LOT of the Japanese feel, and looks much more like a PIXAR-wannabe film than anything else.  I think they would have been smarter to hire an actual Japanese company to do the animation on this project, but I guess we’ll see.

http://www.astroboy-themovie.com/

For quite a while now I’ve been working with a developer on the Japancast iPhone app.  We just finished the alpha testing phase and are preparing to move into beta testing.

Here’s a little info to get you excited.

It will teach you to write hiragana, katakana and kanji using the proper stroke order.

You will learn to write by writing directly on the screen.

The free version will teach you ALL* hiragana and katakana – and will include some kanji.

The paid version will be VERY inexpensive.  I was tired of seeing great apps that cost a fortune.  We know most of our listeners are students living on a budget.  It will include a “pay as you go” model, so you only will buy what you want to learn and if you only want to learn hiragana and katakana, then you’ll pay nothing!

*note: the app is still in beta – we may decide not to include characters like ひゃ, ちゃ, みゅ, etc., since you’ll already be learning や, ゆ, etc., as full characters.

I think Daniel Radcliff is a great sport for doing things like this.  You hear so often about the egos and personalities of celebrities, so it’s great to see someone being a really good sport.

“In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates.”