Alex Brooke

（日本語）Last Friday I hung out with some cool cats including members from Spark, a Tokyo based Flash developers group. We met at Nha Viet Nam, an awesome Vietnamese restaurant in Ebisu. Good food and the Saigon beer was pretty delicious.

Mariroom and the other members has expressed an interest in studying English.

Since conflicting schedules would make it difficult to teach everyone on a regular basis I wanted to discuss how we could make an interesting online English studying project. Various ideas included English texts with hidden Japanese translations with comprehension questions. Obviously audio could be embedded into Flash files for people to practice listening and pronunciation. Other ideas included studying English lyrics from songs, internet slang, news, writing emails, cultural differences and humor.

There was a wide range of ideas and subjects people wanted to study. Therefore I think the next step is to created a framework and basic presentation template for all this information.

One idea I had was to make a bilingual site for both students of English and Japanese. So if you are Japanese, you click on a “study English” button and visa versa for students of Japanese. This way, you could greatly increase the amount of users with the same amount of content. You could also make a community with language and cultural exchanges.

I’ll have to get to the drawing board soon. A big thank you to everyone who turned up. It was good to hear you ideas and I had a great time. See you soon!

金曜日にSparkという東京にあるFlash開発のグループメンバーと一緒に飲み会した。Nha Viet Nam というすごくいいレストランに行って、食べ物がおいしくてSaigonビールもおいしかった。Mariroomやほかのメンバーが英語を勉強したがっていたので、どうやって勉強すればいいか話し合った。

皆さんのスケジュールは忙しいから普通のクラスだけじゃなくてオンライン英語講座も作ろうという話した。英文読解したり英語のMP3を聞いたり俗語を勉強したりなどのいいアイデアがでた。かなり幅広い話題だからこれから皆のアイデアを使っていい英語講座のプランを作りたい。

Flashを生かして英和ー和英勉強するためのサイトを作ろうというアイデアがある。英語も日本語も勉強できるサイトを作ると教え合うコミュニティを作ることもできるかなと思った。これから頑張るぞ！

来てくれたみなさんありがとうございました！いいアイデアもありがとう。とても楽しい時間を過ごすことができた。また今度！

Hello Geeks. Flash geeks to be precise. Today I attended Spark which is a monthly meeting for like minded flash programmers to share, learn and hang out in Tokyo. I was introduced to the group by my good friend Mariroom who is involved with Adobe  Japan and Flash.

The reason I wanted to get the word out about this group is to build some bridges between the Japanese and English speaking communities involved with flash and tech in general. Some of the members are eager to learn English and I’m sure there are plenty of people abroad wondering what some the latest Flash programmers and designers are doing in Tokyo these days.

I believe Colin Moock did a skype conference with the Spark members before I turned up. If you don’t know who he is, he’s like the Darth Vader of Flash Programming. I mean that in a nice way.

Check out their main site here: SPARK

Hopefully I’ll be hanging out with some of those guys and gals again and seeing if we can’t come up with some interesting projects perhaps involving flash and some kind of language exchange.

After the meeting, I got back on my Specialized Rockhopper and somehow cycled home without getting killed on the crazy roads and sidewalks of Tokyo…

This is the first of some very elementary Flash tutorials I will be posting here. This is an exercise in keeping all the cool flash code I have learned in one easy place for me and hopefully to help others. So here is some code I use to embed flash files in HTML pages:

<object width="275" height="200">
<param name="movie" value="yourfile.swf">
<embed src="yourfile.swf" width="275" height="200">
</embed>
</object>

And that’s pretty much it.