Did you know that Sony products in Japan don’t offer multiple languages? An employee at Bic Camera told me the menus and instructions are only in Japanese… AH HA! Maybe that’s why a lot of Sony products are cheaper than what I am used to in America!

I just bought a Sony DSC-T70. Mainly because it’s small, it’s fast, it has internal zoom, and I’m satisfied with the image quality. The menu is pretty slick. There are nice icons, lots of Katakana, and I also downloaded the English manual form Sony’s website. All it took to get used to it was going through the settings, reading the Katakana, and memorizing a little of the manual. Now I’m golden and I’ve saved about $50. I mean… um… ¥5000…

If you’re interested in this camera:
You can download the English manual and get specs here.
You can read a review here.

And here’s a nice hands on review.

I posted back on April 11th about learning Japanese and starting with Hiragana. The following day I went to a Japanese conversational lesson and I had no freaking clue what was going on. The sensei  spoke very little English and the other students were Chinese and were reading Kanji. After class the sensei suggested in a very straight forward way – Learn Hiragana before you come back. That made me smile because she said something that sounds kind of rude while having a very polite tone. The class is weekly so hell yeah I’ll learn Hiragana before next time! So I went home and started learning.

I studied about 2 hours every day and learned almost everything in a week. The next class was way easier to understand and I wrote about half in English, half in Hiragana and it was pretty sweet to be able to read Japanese. It’s like reading some cryptic language… and I feel cool… and now I totally sound like a foreigner by saying that. But it’s all good because now I can read things like “udon” and “karaage” and that’s a step in the right direction in my book.

The next week I focused on kya, gya, and characters like that, so it took about 2 weeks to learn everything. Am I a pro? No. I’m pretty slow when reading words and sometimes I have to think about what the character is but it’s a start! I decided to stop studying and dedicate time to work and our wedding that’s coming up. I still look at my flash cards I made every day and have read things every day so it’s still staying fresh, I’m just not studying every day. That should change on June 1st through!

One of the interesting things I’ve seen in Japan has to be how manual labor works. There are always two or more people to complete a task and most of the time it looks very efficient compared to the U.S. Let’s take construction for example… construction workers tend to get busy using everything from cranes to their bare hands and they’re rarely talking from what I can tell.

Something that I find interesting is even though construction can be happening downtown in multiple locations, I don’t seem to notice it. That’s because they usually block off the construction site wtih some type of wall or gate that surrounds the entire area. I’ve seen some cheap plastic walls, some expensive plastic walls with windows, and some wooden walls. I snapped some pics on a Sunday, so no workers were harmed in the photographing.

Here’s a picture of some type of portable wall

Ooo! This is the heavy duty wall with VIP windows!

I’m VIP, here’s proof, I’m looking through the window.

And here’s another construction location. It looks like they’re escavating dinosaurs.

Problem: Can not write in Japanese and English using WordPress. Characters display as ? ?? ???

I was trying to figure out how to write in Japanese on my WordPress blog. All Japanese characters were coming up as question marks, appearing like “????? ? ?? ???” instead of characters. I searched for a solution to this and found a few plugins that did a ton of unnecessary things, and some didn’t work. I tried out Gengo but I didn’t like it very much. However if you’re reading this for a solution on how to write Japanese and English or translate your page it might work well for you! Here’s the link to Gengo.

If you’re running WordPress 2.2 or higher, then the Collation should be set correctly. Here’s a link to their documentation, and here’s an excerpt.

As of WordPress Version 2.2, DB_COLLATE was made available to allow designation of the database collation (i.e. the sort order of the character set). In most cases, this value should be left blank (null) so the database collation will be automatically assigned by MySQL based on the database character set (i.e. DB_CHARSET). Set DB_COLLATE to one of the UTF-8 values defined in Unicode character sets (utf8 section) (see dev.mysql.com) for most Western European languages.

Now if you are running an older version, or you upgraded from an older version, or for some reason things aren’t working out I’ll post my solution below. Read the rest of this entry »