The festive season is upon us,
relax, enjoy and eat way too much!

Happy Holidays!

Cooori has big things planned for 2013, with further developments
to our system, new features, new languages and much more.

Make sure to stay tuned in 2013!

But for now relax and enjoy the holidays!

As many language learning
students already know, one
of the golden rules in learning
a new language is repetition, repetition, repetition.

The more you are reminded of something (at the right moment) the better you will remember it.

Cooori specializes in reminding students of each word right in time, just before the student is about to forget it.

Cooori is always developing new of ways to further diversify the learning experience.
The newest feature we're proud to announce is the "the test" feature.

The test feature gives students in Cooori a chance to test their skills in Kanji, English translations & Japanese translations.

The test are all based on the themes which the student has been studying in Cooori.

To try the test feature you need to start bylogging in to Cooori. On the home screen you can click the 'Test Your Skills' button under the theme in which you'd like to be tested. You can choose to be tested on English Translations, Japanese Translations, and if applicable Kanji Reading.

Every test is a multiple choice question where the user will be prompted to select the appropriate answer.

Students can monitor their progression within each theme. Students will be given stars based on their results in these tests. Each test type is represented by a star. Once you master a test, you'll have a gold star to remind you of your accomplishment.

The test is a great way for students to validate their Japanese skills.

So log on and try out the new feature, see where you stand in your Japanese progression and then put extra emphasis on any problem areas.

Almost all of our everyday activities involve a lot of sitting, whether it's working, surfing the net for fun or studying Japanese in Cooori, the online language learning software. Sitting is one of the all time worst positions for the body to maintain.

After just about 20 minutes of sitting down hunched over in a chair, blood pools up in the legs and immense pressure builds on the spine. Now, imagine the effects of deskbound workdays long term.

This is one of the reasons why we here at Cooori suggest to our users that frequent and short sessions in Cooori are more beneficial both for the body and mind.

Ideally students should log in frequently likeLorenzo Fantini andGudrun Ragnars, Cooori "Super-Users", tend to do and do 15-20 minute sessions at a time. This way you spread out the learning progress, rest your memory, you body and your mind and ultimately get the most out of your studies.

Prolonged sitting causes discomfort, numbness and spine misalignment. Holding the body upright also increases tension in major muscles and joints. All that means stationary time at work can lead to cardiovascular disease (because of less blood flow), tightened hip flexors, shortened hamstrings, pinched nerves and many physical injuries in the long run.

For employees at startups (like Cooori is) and tech companies, our jobs are completely desk-bound. So, it’s a good thing that all expert’s tips on the matter to prevent serious injury are rather simple — take frequent breaks and stand as often as possible, if optional ask for a desk that you can alternate both stand and sit.

Why Is Sitting So Unnatural?

New York City chiropractor Dr. Jan Lefkowitz treats pinched nerves, slipped discs, carpal tunnel, back pain and stiff necks full time. "Body pain, herniated discs, nerve problems and painful joints are direct results of long office hours," says Dr. Lefkowitz. When you’re sitting, the spine is under a lot of pressure. Our bodies were made to stand, so maintaining the seated position is physically stressful.

“The weight is distributed in a standing position,” saysKelly McGonigal, Ph.D., a health psychologist at Stanford University and a leading expert in neck and back pain. That’s not the case while sitting. McGonigal explains, “When you sit, you distort the natural curve of the spine, which means your back muscles have to do something to hold your back in shape because you’re no longer using the natural curves of the spine to lift yourself up against gravity.”

Desk work is putting huge mental and physical stresses on our bodies. Bad posture makes the sitting disease even worse. Slipped discs occur as a direct result of too much sitting.

“When the posture breaks down, it causes a lot of spinal problems,” Lefkowitz says. “If you are sitting down with bad posture and you’re slouching, you can only handle 20 minutes of that before it deforms your ligaments.”

Doctor’s Orders: How to Prevent Back and Neck Injuries

Good posture when sitting maintains the three natural curves of a healthy spine. The neck is forward, the upper back has an outward curve and the lower back is inward. Elbows are at the sides of the body and shoulders are relaxed — holding shoulders upright for a long time will strain the area.

“The main point is avoid slouching, you have to sit up straight and sit all the way back in your chair,” Lefkowitz says. “The chair should be tucked in close to desk. And, you need lumbar (lower back) support.”

Inexpensive remedies are available. Either roll up a thick sweater or use a small pillow behind your back to allow your lower back to curve inward. Aim to insert it in between the small of your back and the chair. Another recommendation to avoid pulling muscles or causing pain is simply standing every 20 minutes or so. It’s the most important thing desk workers can do to give the body a break from a long held position. “That will push the blood out of your legs and will prevent ligaments from getting strained,” Lefkowitz says. “It starts to stretch out your ligaments.”

Simple stretches at your desk such as twisting, turning the head from side-to-side and chin tucks upward towards the ceiling will also help. “Those movements, doing them very regularly, at least once an hour, for 60 seconds will do more to relieve chronic pain than going to a yoga class once a week,” McGonigal says.

General Tips

• Stand up at least every hour.
• Do simple stretches throughout the day such as placing your hands on your lower back and stretching backwards.
• Get moving! Make conference calls on your feet or suggest a moving meeting — walk up and down the hall.
• When seated, make sure you maintain good posture with your butt all the way back to the chair, feet flat on the floor, head straight and with lower back naturally arched inward.

How many hours do you stay seated at your desk every day on average? A lot of us here at Cooori do yoga to counteract to all the sitting and we are lucky enough to have at least one yoga teacher on our books to help us out!

We can always use more suggestions, please let us know in the comments what you’re doing to combat neck and back pains associated with long work hours.

Here at Cooori, the online language learning software, we are constantly striving to better our language learning system by searching ways to simplify the learning experience.

Our motto is "10% simpler, 50% more benefit".

We are focusing on enabling everyone to master Japanese in an efficient and convenient way.

Several improvements have been made to the system and especially the flashcards.

Some of the benefits that came out of all the changes that we made were:

• Students can now easily switch between Kanji, Kana & Romaji.
• The new cards make it easier for beginners to learn hiragana and katakana.
• Advanced students and those progressing well can now upgrade their cards from kana to kanji with one click.
• Kanji hovers & animations are accessible even when the kanji mode is turned off.
• Fast and easy access to the keyboard shortcuts.
• Below are images displaying the changes, comparing the old interface with the new one and outlining the benefits of all changes for students.

Students can now easily switch between Kanji, Kana & Romaji.

Beginners can now view words in romaji, kana and kanji at the same time.

By clicking "B" the user actives beginner mode which displays kana and romaji and then the kanji is displayed in light gray in the background.

By pressing "K" the user activates the kanji mode making the kanji prominent on the card and removing romaji.

The new cards make it easier for beginners to learn hiragana and katakana.

Now in only one easy step, beginners can view kana & romaji at the same time, whenever needed. Eliminating questions such as
"when am I ready to move from romaji into studying kana?"

Advanced students and those progressing well can now upgrade their cards from kana to kanji with one click.

The process of changing a card into kanji mode has been severely simplified.

It now only takes a click for students to view a card in kanji and they don't even have to leave the page they are on.

One click and the kana setting for that card is saved.

Kanji hovers & animations are accessible even when the kanji mode is turned off.

All users whether advanced, intermediate or beginners can access kanji animations by hovering over the kanji. No matter whether the kanji is active or not.

Fast and easy access to the keyboard shortcuts.

If you are using Cooori on your computer or laptop
the keyboard shortcuts might be a useful feature for you. Please check them out next time you are in the system.

We hope that all the changes we've done will better our system and enable our users to advance their Japanese skills even further.

Cooori recently participated inSeed Forum Iceland, held on the 26th of October in Reykjavik Iceland.

Seed Forum is an investment conference intended for investors interested in business cases of the most promising seed and early stage growth companies.

This Seed forum was held in Iceland with several young start-up companies both from Iceland and Norway. The companies that participated were especially selected by an international investor jury.

The event was successfully executed and highly interesting.

We here at Cooori were happy to be a part of such an elite group of "seeds".

Below are a few pictures form the conference.

Seed Forum International website

The presentations were packed.	Thorsteinn Gunnarsson, chairman, presenting Cooori.
Brian Singerman from Founders fund was one of the investors that participated in the forum.	The venue

Many Japanese students who are starting out sometimes find it frustrating to encounter words they know in kanji written in hiragana.

It's easy to want to try to learn everything right away when you know there's still a lot to learn.

We sometimes get requests from beginner users who would like to see everything in kanji right away, and think that hiragana words are for children.

However, it's important to remember that even for native Japanese readers and writers kanji can be a difficult thing.

It's not uncommon for some very simple words to have kanji that are actually not often used in common everyday writing. For example you will often find the word 'cute' written as かわいい instead of 可愛い which is even difficult to read for some native adults.

While it's tempting to want to read and write everything in kanji, as a beginner it's important to truly understand the word first and than learn the kanji.

Many words in the Cooori system are classified with two JLPT levels, one level for the hiragana, and another for the kanji. For example, the word かわいい is classified as N5 for hiragana, and N1 for kanji.

For words with such a wide spread between levels it's much more important to learn the word and worry about the kanji later.

Some upper beginner students who have some experience with kanji get frustrated with words with narrow JLPT differences. For example a word like
魚（さかな）is classified as N5 for hiragana, but N4 for the kanji.

But if the student is still studying exclusively N5, they get frustrated that the system shows the word in hiragana instead of the kanji they learned elsewhere.

Students who find themselves in this position should consider adding N4 to their study so words like さかな start appearing in kanji.

Remember, when the system shows you something in hiragana it's because in many cases the hiragana version is actually the more common usage in Japanese.

It's also important to remember not to rush your studies and to establish a solid foundation before advancing your studies.

We must all learn to walk before we run.

Happy learning!

Not only can you learn Japanese online with Cooori, the online language learning software, you can also download Cooori's Japanese-English Dictionary app.

Cooori's Japanese-English Dictionary enables users to search phrases, in English and Japanese using kanji, kana and romaji. In fact it's not only a dictionary, it also teaches its users kanji, with detailed animations that display each stroke order for each kanji. With these features and so many more the dictionary is available for all iOS and Android devices.

Cooori's Japanese-English dictionary; already with over 100,000 downloads and many 5 star reviews, is available from iTunes App Store,
Google Play and Amazon.

Cooori helps you master Japanese in an engaging fun and fast way.

• Use phrases such as "to make progress" to search over 140,000 entries.

• Search as you type both English and Japanese (iOS 4.0 & up).
• JLPT classified words and relevant example sentences.
• Detailed kanji stroke animations depicting stroke order.
• Full content with small memory print.
• Download via 3G.
• Available offline (iOS).

Download the Cooori Japanese-English Dictionary app from App Store here

Download the Cooori Japanese-English Dictionary app from Google Play here

Download the Cooori Japanese-English Dictionary app from Amazon here

Cooori, the online language learning system, is lucky enough to have several students of Japanese that log into the system almost daily to learn Japanese. We call these Japanese students our "Super-Users" one of these "super-users" is Gudrun Ragnars.

Gudrun, a pediatric nurse in her late fifties who lives in Iceland, decided to start learning Japanese since her son has been living in Japan for the past 10 years or so.

She started using Cooori to study Japanese online since January 2012.
"It started off just for fun. I wanted to familiarize myself with the language and to learn a few Japanese words and phrases. But then I experienced such a fast progression and I really enjoyed using the system, the interface is so user-friendly and simple."

To further enforce that Cooori is appropriate for all ages and ability levels, we decided to interview this hardworking and ambitious Japanese language student.

Gudrun was a beginner in Japanese when she started using Cooori in January of this year. We asked her to give us insight into her usage and experience of the language learning software.

Dora: How often do you sign on to Cooori?
Gudrun: I sign on to Cooori about 5-6 times a week.

Dora: How much time do you spend on the Cooori system on average for each Japanese session?
Gudrun: My Japanese study sessions last about 30-40 minutes each time.

When I started using Cooori I was a total beginner, now, after 7 months I'm reaching an intermediate level!

Dora: What level was your Japanese skill level before you started using Cooori?
Gudrun: I was a total beginner. I didn't speak a word in Japanese.

Dora: What would you consider your Japanese skill level to be now?
Gudrun: I'm reaching an intermediate level.

I've never learned anything as fast!

Dora: How long have you been using Cooori now?
Gudrun: Since January 19th 2012, so for about 7 months now.

Dora: How do you feel about your Japanese skill level advancement with Cooori
Gudrun: I've never learned anything as fast! In 7 months, I've managed to master just about 500 words now.

I love how the system perfectly times word reminders to place it further into my memory.

Dora: What do you think you makes Cooori so unique?
Gudrun: The way that its been able to generate such an extensive vocabulary in such a short period of time. I think the Cooori system is a great and ingenious concept, that encourages hard work.

Dora: What is the most helpful thing about Cooori?
Gudrun:

• How the system perfectly times word reminders to place it further into your memory. (i.e. the artificial intelligence of the system).
• The way that the system encourages you to continue your development.
• The simplicity of the concept.

Dora: What would you say is lacking in the system?
Gudrun: I would like to be able to schedule live lessons within the Cooori system. Where you have a teacher that goes through the curriculum with you.

These images show the romaji mode of the Cooori system. Gudrun has been
using romaji mode to study Japanese which is preferred by some beginner students.

I'm very happy with the system and would gladly recommend it to anyone whether you are a beginner or more advanced.

Dora: Which device do you use for Cooori? Your laptop? Your smartphone or your tablet?
Gudrun: I mainly use my laptop. I also use the Cooori Japanese-English Dictionary on my iPhone.

Dora: Would you recommend Cooori to a friend?
Gudrun: Absolutely, I'm very happy with the system and would gladly recommend it to anyone whether you are a beginner or more advanced.

Dora: Any final thoughts or suggestions for the Cooori team?
Gudrun: I'm very excited about Cooori plans to grow into other languages and I will gladly sign up to learn more languages with Cooori. The convenience of the system make it the ideal travel partner.

We want to thank Gudrun and wish her good luck with her continuing studies, and we hope that soon enough we'll be able to introduce more languages for this diligent student to learn.

On behalf of the Cooori team,
Dora Birna

When learning a language the language experts at Cooori, the online language learning software, state that "it's vital to keep your brain sharp.

The key to keeping your brain sharp is, among other things, to make sure to exercise your brain on a regular basis (like with study sessions in Cooori), sleep well and eat the right type of foods i.e. brain food."

If you want to keep your mind sharp and nourished? Then follow these 10 suggestions for highly effective brain foods that improve memory, mood, concentration, and overall clarity. It's just what every Japanese student needs to focus and excel.

Below you'll find a list of some examples of ideal "brain food".

Blueberries — Blueberries serve a wide range of functions for improving mental function. Most notably, regular blueberry consumption has been shown to improve memory function. Furthermore, blueberries are rich in antioxidants, helping to prevent free radical damage. Still not convinced? Research has found that blueberries can also reverse age related declines in motor function, balance, and coordination.
More about the amazing benefits of blueberries.

Salmon — Rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, salmon helps your brain develop tissue for increasing your brain power. Furthermore, salmon also plays a key role in fighting Alzheimer’s and other age-related cognitive disorders.
More about the benefits of salmon.

Flax seeds — Flax seeds are crammed with ALA- a healthy fat that aids the cerebral cortex in functioning better. This is the portion of the brain responsible for processing sensory information. Keeping it sharp is vital.
More benefits of flax seeds.

Coffee — Regular coffee drinking has been shown to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and other mental disorders (read in more detail on the Alzheimer Journal). That’s because caffeine is good for the brain (in moderation), and it contains antioxidants. The important thing to note is that you shouldn’t add in all the other junk to your coffee (the ridiculous coffee shop drinks crammed with sweeteners and fatty products).
More facts about the health benefits of coffee.

Mixed nuts — Peanuts, walnuts, pecans, and other nuts contain properties that help with everything from fighting insomnia to promoting mental clarity and strong memory. Walnuts are also rich in Omega-3 fatty acids while almonds contain natural mood-enhancing neurotransmitters.
Health facts about nuts.

Avocados — Don’t let the avocado’s fat content fool you. It’s a healthy fat that promotes blood flow, keeping your mind functioning at its peak. That’s not all: Avocados have also been shown to reduce blood pressure.
Read more about why Avocados are good for you.

Eggs — Egg yolks are rich in choline, an essential nutrient to improving memory function.
The health benefits of eggs.

Whole grains — From oatmeal to whole grain bread, whole grains are excellent brain foods as they improve circulation and contain essential fibers, vitamins, and even some Omega-3. Just make your sandwiches from whole grain breads to enjoy the benefits.
Eat whole-grain, live longer.

Chocolate — For me, this is the yummiest brain food of all. Dark chocolate is antioxidant-rich, and it also improves focus and concentration. Milk chocolate, on the other hand, improves memory and reaction time.
Chocolate has health benefits.

Broccoli — Broccoli has been shown to improve memory function as well as slow the aging process. This means a broccoli-rich diet will keep you young and sharp.
10 health benefits of Broccoli.

Go shopping, stock up on brain foods and then start working away and you'll be able to advance your Japanese skill level in no time.

Share with us which brain foods you enjoy the most and let us know if there are any that we've forgotten to mention?

Cooori, the online language learning software is offering students of Japanese a great fall special of 35% off its subscriptions.

Those who purchase this great offer will only pay $11 per month until January 2013.

Cooori offers several different themes catered to Japanese studies at every level. From beginners, to those preparing for the JLPT or students of Genki & Minna No Nihongo, whatever your level is Cooori has just the curriculum that you need.

Don’t miss out on this great offer. Purchase your Cooori subscription now with 35% off, only $11 until 2013!