image of the harajuku girl comes straight from zonjineko.com

Repetition works. Avoid writing romaji (transliteralized Japanese) from day one. Focus on pronounciation and annotate words with pitches and accents. Use Japanese when you can and do it with common sense and avoid people who encourage you to speak English instead. Repetition always works. These are but a few language learning tips for Japanese by Eido Inoue who runs his wonderful blog Nippon: until Death us do part. If you’ve learned a few languages in your life or at least tried to with a strong but fading amount of dedication, you’ll see the truth behind that: learning languages is actually arduous work, however gratifying and you’ll need a few extra steps with Japanese (would need to take extra steps with any Asian language, I had my fair share of battle with Tibetan and Mongolian). If you don’t want to go and live in Japan, these same rules apply just as much. Oh. And the basic rule that actually worked quite well with me all these years: if you really want to learn a language and feel like you’ve progressed a lot: two hours of learning each and every day is a must. More like three, if you can afford that. Watch movies. Real ones, not anime flics – those are just as good to get to the pronounciation right but you’ll confuse everyone with the slang you’ve learned (or just memorized, for that matter). Write your kanji a lot, otherwise they’ll just slip past your brains. Get a teacher, a tough one. You won’t actually get anywhere with a nice person who’ll forgive you your missed classes, unfinished homeworks and stuff without a slap on the wrist. If you wanna be fast and efficient and bulldog about it, do it like you mean it. Hah, sorry, got carried away. Read that article, that’s amazing. (Below, that’s Hiroko teaching you a few things about job hunting and alike.)

Pachinko operator Daiichi Shokai is really desperate inventive about enolagaying the pachinko market with their new machine Pachinko Matrix. The past week apparently was all about pachinko on Japanese pop culture sites and although bloggers agree that it’s actor Nukumizu Youichi [温水洋一] in both of the ads, opinions vary whether it’s really Carrie-Anne Moss before her pregnancy or just a lookalike (we’d go for the lookalike but Western actors actually do shoulder the occasional Japanese commercials for the paychecks). Sculpting noodle bonsai in bullettime is actually one of the best ideas I found in commercials (though it’s really been a long time since I watched them at creative agencies and even that didn’t take me anywhere), so spare a minute of your precious pre-Christmas time. (And if you need some good intel on pachinko gaming, just found that on Google Answers.)

Dante has a female counterpart to look out for. Bayonetta, an apparently 190cm+ double-akimbo battle witch with a slight fuckslutty officelady taint is out on a battle romp. I am not completely sure about the 10/10 score Famitsu gave to Bayonetta but it’s always nice to see someone putting effort into topping Lara Croft. Quite a few pics after the jump. By the way, post some more decent cosplay stuff on Bayonetta, if you manage to find them. Most of what I came through were, you know, not delicate.

That’s a good day to be an IO9 reader now. According to them, Shinya Tsukamoto revealed his newest project at the Comic Con: Tetsuo the Bullet Man will be his new sequel to one of the most authentic cyberpunk monogatari so far. The English-speaking movie (to be released in 2010) is about Anthony, a guy working in Tokyo who transforms into Tetsuo after his son is called after the encounter of the “evil driver”, a character who’s basically creating Tetsuos in the first two movies. Join the Tetsuo Project here.

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was something we’d have called a radio shack afficionado back in the days, only he did it to brains. If you ever wondered who found out the 0day vulnerability on the brain not feeling any pain directly, Penfield was surely one neurogeek to exploit that. According to what Michael Talbot wrote in The Holographic Universe,

While operating on the brains of epileptics, he would electrically stimulate various areas of their brain cells. To his amazement he found that when he stimulated the temporal lobes (the region of the brain behind the temples) of one of his fully conscious patients, they reexperienced memories of past episodes from their lives in vivid detail. One man suddenly relived a conversation he had had with friends in South Africa; a boy heard his mother talking on the telephone and after several touches from Penfield’s electrode was able to repeat her entire conversation; a woman found herself in her kitchen and could hear her son playing outside.

This will serve as a gorgeous intro to YouTube user brainmove’s “Repressed adolescent web-series in da house… “, PENFIELD’S ELECTRODE. Smooth Japanese narrative with low angle shots, heavy dose of after-effects and some shots of a mutating mental patient that reminds me of Metalosis Maligna. Tune in when we manage to find out more about this small jewel!