Alex Brooke

In Japanese “忘年会” – bōnenkai -  literally means “forget the year gathering”. While we’re about it could we forget the last ten years too? Seriously, the naughties were pretty naughty. Sometimes I forget to forget. Here’s what’s been going on over here in Tokyo.

Learn Japanese Pod Year End Party

A huge thank you to all of you who came out to the Pink Cow to experience the Japanese Lounge Event and the Learn Japanese Pod Year End Party. I had a great time and it was great to catch up with you all. We will be holding more of these meet ups every month from now on. I was also happy that we had more Japanese people participate as this is of course Learn Japanese Pod. お疲れさまでした。Stay tuned for dates for the next one. Thanks to  Jim, Yoko, Keiko, Arden, Akaki, @tamegoeswild, @sandrajapandra, @kimiecat, @tomoakiyama and @AdySan. And here are some photos from Ady.

Tokyo Weekender 40th Anniversary Party

Lordy, lordy, looks who’s 40! Tokyo Weekender Magazine will be holding its 40th Anniversary party to celebrate its long legacy and the people who made it possible.It’s going to be a great party including food, drinks,  live music, prize draws and Guy Perryman spinning the vinyl for us.

Location: 57, Roppongi

Date: Jan 15th 2010

Time: 8pm onwards

Entrance: 4000 yen (in advance) 5000 yen (on the door)

DJ & MC: Guy Perryman

Other: Free gift bags for all participants

They will also be announcing the winner of the Tokyo Photo Contest who will receive a free return ticket to the UK.

Not bad eh?

Brain Machine Workshop A Success

According to Karamoon, the Brain Machine workshop at the Tokyo Hacker Space was a success. Check out  some amazing pictures here. You can also see some pictures of Brain Machine workshop I went to at the make fair earlier this year here. The Tokyo Hacker Space run courses for anyone interested in tech, software, hardware and just about anything else they can think of. I’ll be going down there to check out what’s going on and perhaps make a video about it for Learn Japanese Pod.

Learn Japanese Pod

We’ve been getting back into the Learn Japanese Pod saddle after a long summer break. I was getting a few emails asking me what the hell was going on. Fear not, Waka sensei is back to teach you some new and useful Japanese phrases. We just put Fun Friday up and lesson #96 is almost ready to go up.

I’ve also installed moodle onto the Learn Japanese Pod server with a view to developing some Japanese language learning courses. Apparently it is quite a powerful system although I still need to study the documentation into how to use it. I started a thread on this topic for people to discuss and contribute to this project.

Tokyo Guitar Guild

The Tokyo Guitar Guild was a group I set up for guitarists in Tokyo to network, play together and teach each other a few tricks with their axes. The good news is I have managed to find a space in 青山一丁目 Aoyamaichoume where we could meet. If you are interested in coming, please send me an email @ mail(at)alexbrooke(dot)com or contact me here. The location is fantastic and I am thinking of using it on Saturdays.

I’m also thinking of doing some guitar tutorial videos. If you have any suggestions or requests please contact me.

Poster Competition

If you want to get your hands on a cool “Do it at home” poster from Japan Rail go to Japandra to find out more details. A big thanks to Sandra who appeared on last week’s Fun Friday.]

That’s all for now folks.

I read a great one today on twitface (oh you kow what I mean). “The king of pop is not dead, Mark King of Level 42 is alive and well”. But that hasn’t got much to do with todays post.

Recently I have been wondering about what direction to take my Learn Japanese podcast. At least I know crappy, semi pornographic anime isn’t my thing.I started my Learn Japanese podcast to be a resource for those wanting to study the language and learn about Japan and it’s culture. However, I get the feeling that most people are more into the podcast for the entertainment value. And that’s fine with me because it means I can turn up the goofing around and turn down the overly serious gramar lessons. Plus, I never really learned to speak Japanese from text books, more from falling off bar stools in izakayas across Tokyo. So one way we depart from the normal language podcast is the Fun Friday episodes we (try to) put out every week. They feature, news, views, Japanese bands and general banter related to life in Japan. We just put up the latest episode which features music from Natccu and Yugo Sato two awesome acts from Japan. Incidentally I was introduced to Yugo by a good friend and general music know-it-all who runs the Tokyo Werewolf website which covers the underground music scene in Japan. Ethan is a talented guy, someone, give him a job, please!

In the future I’d like to concentrate more on the music scene here and interview artists and play their music on Fun Fridays. You never know, we might even learn some Japanese accidentally during the process.

Another project I am working on is a new website called Blow Your Speakers. I am doing this with a good friend, DJ, master brewer and all round talented fellow called Stone. We dig around dusty records, make mix tapes and stick them on the site. This site is dedicated to Stone’s talent for finding awesome music and me pretending to be a DJ when really I am an HDJ, hard disk jockey.

So check out Blow Your Speakers and our latest mix tape.

The picture above is of my trusty iPod digital recorder and a Ramune flavored Kit Kat. If you want to find out more you’ll just have to listen to the latest Fun Friday.

Here is a little tutorial I did with the aid of Coffeebot, Olly and a few 500 milliliter cans of Kirin beer. People had had trouble posting videos on the Learn Japanese Pod forums so I thought this would help some people out. We use Simple Machines Forums for our forums so this tutorial should help you out if you are using the same one. I should also mention this is not necessarily an endorsement for SMF, we installed it, people joined and it’s the one we got stuck with. It’s not the worst but you might want to try the alternatives before eventually giving up and intalling this one anyway…