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In
the last issue we showed you how to set up Japanese and read
Japanese websites on your computer, and introduced some useful
internet tools. In this issue we build on this and show how
to search the web for information in Japanese.
We will work on the assumption that your computer is now set
up to read and write Japanese. If not, please refer to the last
issue. |
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Some
of you might think that you don’t need to look at Japanese websites
at all because there are many websites about Japan written in
English. But as we mentioned in the last issue, most of the
Japanese websites are in Japanese only, so if you can use Japanese
websites, you will get far more information about Japan.
For example, when you want to know about Japanese “kagamimochi”
(rice cake displayed at New Year), only 429 hits come up by
searching with the roomaji keyword “kagamimochi” in Google (search
engine; see below), but when you use the Japanese keyword 鏡餅,
you get 21,000 hits. Searching with Japanese keywords enables
you to access a wide variety of Japanese resources.
If you find it too difficult to read authentic Japanese pages,
you can use the dictionary web tools introduced in the last
issue. |
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To search for information on the web, you use search engines.
In Japan, as in other countries, of all the search engines on
the Internet the most famous and frequently used sites are “Google”
and “Yahoo!” In order to find information efficiently, it is
necessary to know about the features of each search engine. |
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Google
(http://www.google.co.jp/)
Yahoo! JAPAN (http://www.yahoo.co.jp/) |
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To
see the difference, enter the keyword 「日本語」
and search in both search engines. You will find that the results
are quite different. In Google you will get 6,650,000 websites
containing the keyword, while Yahoo! will give you 33 categories
and 1,352 sites.
Google data is automatically gathered by a
robot, referred to as a spider, which ‘crawls’ huge numbers
of websites from around the world every day. So if you search
in Google, you will find a large number of pages that include
the keyword, regardless of its context. This means that Google
is the best choice when you want to find concrete and specific
information, using a specific keyword, multiple keywords, phrases
and/or sentences.
In the case of Yahoo! however, in order to
be registered in its directory creators of each web site have
to send the information themselves, and technicians at Yahoo!
put the data onto the site manually. Because this data is thus
refined and well sorted out, it is convenient when you are searching
for a general concept, a famous organisation etc. |
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Goo
(http://kids.goo.ne.jp/)
This is a useful search engine for non-native speakers キッズGoo,
which was originally designed for Japanese kids, enables you
to add furigana to the search result, and even to the web pages
linked to it.
Put keywords into the text box at 「キッズGooサーチ」
, and click on the 「けんさく」 button.
In the search result page, go to 「ふりがなの設定」,
tick 「ふりがなあり」,
and then click on the 「ひょうじ」
button. The list of items will have furigana. Furthermore, if
you go from this furigana added list to the linked websites,
the target pages also automatically appear with furigana. |
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In
order to become skilled at searching for information, here are
some tasks you can try. As it will soon be New Year, the theme
of the tasks is . Suppose that you are teaching the topic of お正月
to your class! |
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Task
1 |
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You
are not very familiar with Japanese New Year’s customs. Get
general information about them from the web.
To get general information it is better to use Yahoo!. If you
use Google, you will get a large number of hits, and it will
be difficult for you to choose the site that will be most useful
to you. With Yahoo! you will get information related specifically
and only to New Year, and categorised according to various subtopics
such as New Year food, New Year greeting cards and so on. |
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Task
2 |
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You
are asked by your student why 「お正月」is
written with the kanji for
「正しい」.
Search
the web and find the reason.
For this kind of specific search, you should use Google. The
more keywords you use (divided by spaces), the more refined
and specific a result you will get. When you use Google, at
least two or three keywords, a phrase and/or a sentence are
recommended. For this task, you should use keywords like 「お正月 正しい月 なぜ」,
and you will find websites that include an explanation.
Similarly, if you are looking for an explanation of what each
おせち料理means,
you could use a phrase like 「おせち料理の意味」
. If you want to know how to get a ticket for Tokyo Disneyland’s
countdown event this year, the keywords would be 「東京ディズニーランド カウントダウン 2004 申し込み」
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Task
3 |
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You
are making a handout to introduce Japanese New Year. Find pictures
of 「鏡餅」
and 「門松」
.
Google has a function
「イメージ検索 (image
search)」 ,
with which you can look for pictures from the web. When you
look for an image of kagamimochi, click first on the 「イメージ」tab
and input the keyword 「鏡餅」into
the text field, then click on the 「Google 検索」button.
You will get thumbnails of kagamimochi images. For image search
you don’t have to put in multiple keywords, because there is
not so much image data. It is not a good idea to use two keywords
「鏡餅」
and 「門松」
for one search. Rather, you should put in the keyword 「門松」
separately and search again for kadomatsu pictures.
You can copy these pictures and paste them into your handout
(Word document etc.), but be aware that each image on the web
has a copyright, so there are restrictions on using them (for
example, school teachers can only use the images for their classrooms
etc.). |
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Task
4 |
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You
are planning to sing the song in your classroom, but don’t remember
the whole melody. Search for a web page which enables you to
listen to the song.
The important point here is that to find a specific type of
file (audio, movie, image, document etc.), it is best to put
in a file type as a keyword. In order to play music on a website,
a file type called MIDI is usually used. So in this task you
could use as keywords 「お正月
midi」 to search in Google. You will find several pages on which
the お正月
melody is played as MIDI data. If you want an actual recording
of the song, or want to burn it on CD-R to play to your class,
your keywords would be 「お正月
wav」 (for a
further explanation for the difference between MIDI and WAV,
search in Google with the keywords midi wav what’s the difference
).
Similarly,
to get a video showing 餅つき,
put 「餅つき wmv」
(mov, mpg, avi are
also OK: these are all names of a movie file type). If you want
to play the 福笑い
game, search with 「福笑い
pdf」 get a
printable board and parts for the game (PDF is a file format
used to distribute printed documents on the web). |
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Task
5 |
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You
are writing explanations in Japanese, and not sure which is
correct, 「お正月には」
or 「お正月では」
for “at New Year”. Use the Internet to find out.
With Google you can see the context in which a certain expression
is actually used. If you look up the phrase in Google, you will
get a large number of sentences like which refer to events at
New Year. For the phrase , you will see far fewer pages, and
most of the sentences will contain . As a result, you can tell
that is the right phrase for “at New Year”.
With this method you can also check, for example, which of the
following, or , is correct for “ozoni” (New Year soup with rice
cake) or which kanji is correct, or . Be aware that expressions
found on the Internet are not always correct. A writer may use
the language incorrectly, for example a number of hits come
up when you search in English for “Sydny” or “Quensland”.
We hope the above information will serve as a reference to you
and help you become a professional surfer of the Japanese web!
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Section
co-ordinated by Kazuhiro Isomura
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& Copyright © The Japan Foundation, Sydney |
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