Game Recomendation: Demon's Souls for PS3

A cheesy game, with a cheesy title. But a hell of a game: Demon's Soul it is.

Recently I got this game and at first it was a pain because althought it is a Japanese game, it is completely dubbed in English. It has no Japanese audio.

But the game is really interesting and really, really hard and it really got my attention completely during the last 2 weeks. Half because the game itself and half for reading these strategy guides from the internet. In Japanese, of course.

For Demon's Souls, this is the best:
http://www.geocities.jp/kouryakubo/ds/index.html

The sad thing is that I beat the game today =/
Now I need something else.

Btw, anyone knows what is the equivalent of gamefaqs for Japan?

Human Rights Declaration in 100 languages

Awesome page from librivox:

http://librivox.org/the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights-by-the-united-nations/

Quick Guide to learn any language effectively, enjoyably.

1) For 3 months, listen to the target language.  Audio books, Movies, Music.
- All you have to do is pick up one word here and there.
- Don't use the written target language in this phase.
- Translations are OK.

2) Learn the basics of the writing system.
- Memorize the alphabet/hanzi/hangul/whatever.
- Alphabets and syllabaries should not take more than 2 weeks to learn.

3) For a few months, try to learn as many new words/day as possible.
- You need about ~2000 words families.
- The faster you do it, the better.
- Mine these words from real, authentic, native targeted material.
- Prefer transcriptions of audio you have already listened.
- Also use Books, Comics, Articles, etc.
- Use Flashcards to memorize words within sentences.
- Translations are OK.

4) Forever, listen and read to the target language.
- Now on, translations are evil.
- Use only monolingual dictionary definitions in the new Flashcards you make.

How much words someone needs no know?

"Native speakers' vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker's education. A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 17,000 word families, and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 12,000."

Source: wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary

"満年齢で6歳になる子どもの場合、理解語彙の総量は、およそ5000～6000語ほど。13歳では3万語前後。20歳ではおよそ4万5000～50000語ほどという調査結果が出ている"

Source: Japanese wikipedia http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%AA%9E%E5%BD%99

My translation:
"When completing  6 years of age, children have a vocabulary size of around 5.000 to 6.000 words. At 13 years old it is 30.000+. At 20 years old, it is around 45.000 to 50.000 words, according to the result of the research."

I'd say these numbers are pretty consistent with what I read before.
For some reason, Japanese vocabulary is larger than English's. Maybe because it is easier to learn new words in Japanese, after you know the language well enough?

Japanese vocabulary size

Well, I made this test:
http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/mtg/goitokusei/goi-test.html

And got these results:


あなたの語彙数は27000語です。
The size of your vocabulary is 27000 words.

中学生レベル： ２万～４万語。
Mid schooler level: 20000~40000 words.

Yes, yes. I like to believe in everything that says good of me.
If you know another japanese vocabulary test, please send me!

French project progress (2)

I listened to a bit more French this week. Basically I started to watch Ange et Demon twice.
I now know how "danger" sounds more exactly. =D

Btw, the title of the movie is quite intriguing. In the English dub, it is Angels and Demons.
Why in French it is not Anges et Demons, like it would be in Portuguese or Spanish:
"Anjos e Demônios" and "Ángeles y Demonios", respectively?
It is funny. I kinda understand it, the pluralized version sounds icky. I just don't know it exactly.

French project progress

Answer to the last comment: My French is going slow! Same for Mandarim.

I recently noticed that my last post was misleading.
The trick sentence is "Ok, after French I'm now going for Mandarin". This could give the impression that I actually learned French, but that is not the case. I'm just taking it slow. Once a week I listen to 1 hour or 2 of French. Maybe a bit more. 


For instance, yesterday I watched the move "Decalage Horaire" with Jean Reno and Juliette Binoche. Btw, I strongly recommend it. It was a very nice movie. 


I watched it half with subtitles, half without. I could understand a few complete sentences already hearing for the first time, but its not something substantial. 


I'm more around the "catch a few words" phase. I still simply can't process half of what I hear. I still can't identify some sounds as words. French sounds are still not natural for me.


For instance, the word "danger" meaning danger =D. Right now I can't remember if it is more like "donger" or "danger" or "denger".


Ah, I started making sense of some things, like when verbs end with "i" its the past form. But I'll worry more about this later, I'm still not ready for it.