For those not in the know, Spotify is an amazing service which allows you to stream music through the net for free, in exchange for listening to a 30 second advert every 30 mins or so. It’s a fantastic program which is pretty much flawless, and it’s allowed me to discover and enjoy new music a lot quicker than navigating horrible band Myspace pages to listen to a grainy 30 second sample. But why is there no Japanese music on it?

Not only that, but the program has a huge database of music – in it’s most recent update at time of writing,
nearly 69,000 tracks were added. I keep testing it with more obscure bands, and so far it hasn’t failed to impress me. Ok, you’re going to be disappointed if you’re looking for electro-death-hip-trance-core from the Bermuda Triangle.

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After months of planning, many thousands of pounds being spent, a few mental breakdowns and a two hour incident involving 40 Aikido mats, Japan Day finally happened on May 10th at Sheffield University. As I was pretty involved in the day I didn’t take photos, but luckily we had photographer Adam Harley on hand to take some photos. Enjoy!

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Alright, I’m writing this post because I am a *huge* fan of jisho.org – since I started second year at university I’ve used it countless times. Today rather than run through it’s features and so on, I’m going to explain what I’ve found it most useful for, and hope you guys might get some of the same results out of it that I did. If you know of any other funky things it can do, feel free to comment them and I’ll try them out!

Some really quick facts: jisho.org is free. There’s a forum if you get stuck. It’s updated pretty frequently and has more example sentences than you can even begin to imagine. Every single Jouyou Kanji, plus a whole load more, are on it. It’s also green.

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