Notes from the Tigers Cave

Want to spice up your boring tweets on Twitter?? Stick a Japanese emoticon on the end! There are hundreds of these creative little character doodles and they are a lot of fun.

Here are a few to get you started:

(^_^)/ Hi!
(^0^)/ Hi there!
( ^^) smile
(^O^) glad!
(~o~) yawn
(^-^;) cold sweat
(-_^) wink
(`O`) sing a song
(@_@) What???
(~^~) I’m proud
m(__)m
(^_^)/~~ bye~~
(=^_^=) a cat
(o|o) Ultra-man

They’ll only take you so far. For more info about emoticons check out Paperdiaries.com, the site of a certain Ms. Aya, where I found the ones listed above:

http://paperdiaries.com/2008/09/guide-to-japanese-text-emoticons-and-chibi-facial-expressions/

Ms Aya’s blog is an enjoyable read in its own right (or “write”), and Ms Aya ain’t necessarily what you might suppose… but she is a cool Asian lady!

I found Ms Aya’s blog on Google when looking for a specific Japanese text icon to tag onto the end of a Valentine’s Day Tweet – see, http://twitter.com/hirohurl .

Twitter is a great little tool and every day more and more resources are appearing on the web.

Want to see how your Twitter following compares to your friends’ and rivals’ – see http://twittercounter.com/

If your graph is looking a bit “limp” you might be interested in this new free resource which will get you a whole bunch of new followers WITHOUT having to follow them first – http://tweetergetter.com/hirohurl .

You don’t even have to give up your email address, and it takes less than 30 seconds to sign up and go!

David Hurley
Internet Marketing Success Strategies

Someone called Jimmy contacted me the other day about the Japanese mahjong sets available on http://japanese-mahjong.com to ask whether I could offer any sets of a similarly high quality with… Western numerals in the top right corner…

I explained that that was a big no-no as far as my site was concerned. Only genuine Japanese mahjong sets there, I’m afraid!

Anyway, I checked out the link in Jimmy’s signature and found out that he had made an interactive sudoku game:

http://www.sparkleinteractive.co.uk/sudoku/

“Sudoku” is a compound Japanese word that combines the characters for “number” (su) and “single” (doku). The sudoku puzzle was invented by an American architect called Howard Garns and was originally called “Number Place” when it was published in an American magazine in 1979.

In 1986 it was published in a Japanese puzzle magazine under the name “Sudoku”. Subsequently, the game was reimported into America and Europe and the Japanese name stuck, doubtless giving the puzzle an air of oriental mystery.

Funnily enough, in Japan the puzzle has been renamed “Nanpure”, pronounced “nan-poo-ray”. This is a good example of the way modern Japanese takes foreign words, mashes them together to form a new “Japanese” word. In this case, the words are “number” and “play” (or perhaps “place” from the original name of the game)…

Number = “Nanbaa” = “Nan”

Play = “Pure”
“Nan” + “Pure” = Nanpure!

So you could say that “Sudoku” is the English word for Japanese “number play”, or vice versa!

Now we have sorted that out, here’s a game for you to play!

Grab this Widget

Cheers!

David Hurley
http://grasp-the-nettle.com