Silver Case

Quick update.

Luke and Ling got back from Perth this afternoon.  Don’t know whether it’s an illusion or not, but Luke looks bigger. I’ve only seen him a few hours total in the last ten days.  One thing is for certain, however, and that is he’s trying to talk much much more.  Lots of long extended babbling repeats of things we say.  Matt comes over next month and I’m guessing by then he will be making some serious noise.

Okonomiyaki is sometimes called Japanese pizza. Tonight we had both Okonomiyaki and italian pizza.  I used the end of the pizza dough from the other day (I didn’t achieve as fluffy a crust as I wanted. I think because I blind-baked the crust in the middle of the oven, not on the bottom element) and used up left over batters from a kimchi okonomiyaki and a seafood okonomiyaki.  I bought several liters of sake, some umeshu, and two cases of Japanese beer for the party sunday. Still to arrange is the sashimi and spare okonomiyaki parts.

My green coffee beans are ready for collection tomorrow. Looking forward to playing with my iRoast 2 roaster.  I used some mocha java recently and it made decent espresso, bit darker than sumatran stuff I’ve been using.

Downloaded several Bruce Sterling and William Gibson books onto my n73 today. It appears that MobiReader only will read its own books purchased from its store. Death Penalty.  QReader appears to read .txt (but not .rtf) and refuses to read .pdfs, so I need to convert the rtf and pdfs to text before copying them over.

Still bumbling along with Japanese.  I’ve been having my teacher come over and give me private lessons instead of the class. I fell behind when I was travelling, so am racing to catch up. Actually I’m not even racing. The class is a giant grammar-cram and I don’t get a chance to practice my speaking. With a tutor, I can practice and work over stuff a lot more, so I am happy with that arrangement.

And I think that is about it.

It keeps getting deeper. Now it’s obvious to me that I cannot get by in Japanese just knowing the kana.  I need to learn the kanji as well.  The baseload kanji corpus that all high-schoolers in Japan theoretically learn is called the jouyou kanji. It’s a set of 1,945 characters that they learn over the course of nine years.  Of course I am on a different schedule.

Went to Kinokuniya bookstore tonight to check out their books on learning Kanji.  I bought the most intriguing book I could find, ‘The Kanji Handbook‘ by ‘Vee David’ published by Tuttle Language Library. Sadly it is one of the few books with a really miserable Amazon product page.

The book seems to try to introduce a lot of innovative learning strategies for a non-japanese adult to learn kanji, as opposed to a Japanese child.  There is a total mismatch there, as I have complex thoughts with poor grammar/vocab, while a kid has simple thoughts to correspond with their simple grammar/vocab. Consequently they teach the words in a different grouping and order.

Some of the things they do are, frankly, weird or idiosyncratic, but I am willing to give them a shot.

The first thing he does is something called “KanjiHybrids” which is giving out words that are hybrids of kanji and english. For example, 四our, for the character for “four”.

Then he combines groupings of similar characters into a terrible little rhyming couplets formed with these KanjiHybrids, for example:

四our 匹nimals in the 西estern corrall.  (four animals in the western corrall)
There you have kanji that look quite alike. Practicing these sets of verses repeatedly is supposed to train me to recognize and remember their fine differences, as well as cement my knowledge of the characters’ meanings.
Anyway, that’s the idea and this is what I am working on.  In the meantime, chewing away with the vocab (I 95% mastered the set I was complaining about the other day). I bought a few more grammar books that seemed to have more exercises and explanations than the one I have.  At least can vary my practice a bit — they all have to cover the same stuff sooner than later.

This started out as a post about my iPod. It had a lot of zombie podcasts I couldn’t get rid of regardless of how much sync’ing I tried to do.  A surgical strike via Windows Explorer solved the problem and now my 2GB iPod Nano has a nice balance of JapanesePod101 podcasts and music.

I continue to study Japanese.  My attendance at class has been fine except for one night I had to skip in order to collect a prescription for Luke’s …ummmm … foreskin infection (ouch!).  I learned katakana myself because I got annoyed having to refer to the teacher’s legend. For some reason the syllabus doesn’t require us to learn katakana, however lots of vocabulary is in katakana.  Anyway, that was comparatively trivial.   Where am I now?

I haven’t mastered all the vocabulary in the chapters we’ve covered.

Trying to memorize the words off the long lists we have doesn’t work well for me.  I transcribed the vocabulary onto blank business cards used as flashcards. That seems to be a lot more effective. I probably have a hundred cards right now.  Something I’ve just realized is that I master words much more quickly if I cover them in dosages of 10-15 cards at a time, preferably in clusters of words that have something to do with each other.  I was trying to chew through chunks of fifty words at a time and found it terribly inefficient.

Given the stack of non-mastered words I have left, I should be able to knock it off by tomorrow evening.

One note is that presently I am not learning the Kanji, only the kana for each word. Kanji will be a separate effort.

I need/want more practice writing and speaking sentences using the grammar we’ve been taught. 

The class offers little time for much practice speaking and the assignments we’re given are relatively brief and don’t punish me with enough of the rote practice I feel I need.  I’ve been trying to “run laps” myself and write lots of sentences using the vocabulary and sentence constructs I know, but it doesn’t feel as exhaustive, exhuasting, or as thorough as I desire.  I think the solution will be to get a personal/private tutor to come by and work me over once or twice a week.

I was annoyed by my inability to competently operate my Canon G90 Wordtank

But now I see that the key is to learn kanji stroke order, so that will be a little side-project for  when I get tired from the more important vocabularly memorization and grammar practice points.  There are so many japanese language resources on the web that it seems almost sinful to pay money for a book on writing kanji.

I haven’t done much with my alternative learning tools lately

I’ve been too busy to have the time for other textbooks like my Manga-based tutorial and I haven’t spent much time listening to JapanesePod101 lately.  I’ve been running to work a few times each week, but I find listening to Glenn Gould play Bach has been the most comfortable companion, moreso than rock or Japanese lessons at any rate.  But now that I have my ipod de-constipated, I will fill it with a better range of practice material and so should steal an extra 15-20 minutes per day for study.

I guess that’s it for now. I have a stack of green flashcards howling for my attention.

I was very excited when I bought my Canon Wordtank G90. It has a stylus that lets you write kanji on the screen and then it deciphers it for you.

Theoretically.

I struggled to use it while I was in Japan. I had high hopes that when I returned to Singapore I would figure it out, write a nice little guide, and then translate away. It’s been much more of a slog than that. I have enormous difficulties writing kanji that it recognizes.

Tonight I was trying to practice with it, using some of the simpler kanji from lessons from JapanesePod101. I was trying to write, for instance,　せんのう　’Emperor of Japan’. (*) 　The first character I could write relatively easily, it’s simple. The second I struggled for fifteen minutes. In vain. I could never get it to work. I’d either run out of time or it would just misread whatever I was writing.

I know the wordtank kanji recognition is sensitive to stroke order. I looked at some quick stroke order primers and my brain had a buffer overload.

In distress, I called on Ling to come show me how she’d write it. She took one glance and dashed out a (I thought) shabby-looking copy of what I saw on the original kanji. I tried several time to replicate that order on my wordtank and failed. Ling grabbed the pen, scribbled her kanji scrawl, and the computer recognized it instantly and accurately. ugh.

So I guess I really will have learn how to write these stroke orders. Any good primers on this? Ugh.

(*) For some reason the Microsoft japanese keyboard system doesn’t know or recongize the kanjii for せんのう。 Dunno why. Maybe I’m using it wrong, but none of the options work, whether I try to browse the options individually on せん　and のう　　　or together as せんのう. I tried to cut-and-paste that kanji from adobe, but when I pasted it, all it showed was “??”.

---

So the answer really does seem to be “learn stroke orders.” I found a few sites that illustrate the stroke order for basic kanji. The Wordtank quite dependably recognizes these when I follow the correct order.

I scrambled yesterday and for several hours studied the Japanese katakana alphabet, used to phonetically spell foreign words. This morning I did the last few letters and found that on long series of electronic flashcards I score about 95% and usually half the errors are typos from answering too fast.

This compares to a few weeks for me to properly memorize all the hiragana. Why the difference? I’m not sure. The katakana doesn’t look naturally easier to remember than the hiragana.

The obvious answer is that I just didn’t push learning the hiragana fast enough, or once having learned the hiragana, I had the confidence to master the katakana, so I wasn’t sheepish about moving briskly. Alternatively I was wondering if I started to expand some dormant chunk of my brain muscle, so I truly could memorize the katakana faster.

One other point is that when mastering the hiragana, I also forced myself to master writing it, rather than simply recognizing it. I’ll bet that my writing isn’t as sharp or fast on the katakana. However, even if it’s only 85%, I am sure that within two hours I can have that to the same %95+ mastery level.

Anyway, now this liberates me substantially to move on to reading a lot more stuff. I have a book ‘Writing Katakana’ by Jim Gleeson that has a lot of phonetic word translation exercises, so it will be useful to go through that. *Note to anyone that buys that book… do the exercises in pencil, not pen like me, so that the exercises are reusable.

Still working at it. My trip to Tokyo meant I missed the first two classes, but that was ok, as they started teaching them hiragana, which I had already been teaching myself. I am pleased to say that I know all the hiragana now

あいうえおかきくけこさしすせそたちつてとなにぬねのはひふへほまみむめもやゆよらりるれろわをんわを

(there iare more than these, but they’re either just accent mark variations that sound different ふぶぷ　or short combinations to make a sound きょきゅきゃ）

Anyway, I’ve got this class twice a week for two hours starting at 720pm. It’s always a race to get there on time but I’ve managed. This was a particuarly tiring week, and on wednesday night I was vvvvvery close to flaking, but at the last minute I decided to do the right thing and went. Glad I did as the teacher, young japanese girl, adds new stuff every week, so falling behind would be bad.

The instruction seems ok, but am glad i am sticking with my plan to keep my training hetergenous. The grammar instruction is good but the examples in the textbook are dry as dirt. Really lifeless dialogs and vocabulary. This is where japanesepod101 is so much more interesting. I also don’t get much practice getting to speak. I’m thinking about finding a tutor to once a week go through speaking exercises so that I can actually do the stuff out loud, rather than only write things out on paper. There seems to be a huge difference between properly writing a sentence on paper and saying it out-loud on the fly.
My biggest suprise has become my biggest annoyance. She says we do not have to learn katakana (phonetic alphabet for foreign words  ex:カキコクコ　サシスセソ　etc ). But the textbook is full of foreign names and other katakana, so I have to use her legend to check the words. It’s really irritating. I have decided tol quickly learn katakana  to solve the problem.  I want to know it anyway so I can read more signs and labels.

I wish i could report as much success in my running and diet. The first part of this week was largely grueling and I was going to bed three hours later than normal. I’m taking a three-day weekend (Ling’s birthday on monday) so I should be able to catch up on all this.

I bought a Canon Wordtank G90 Electronic Dictionary at Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku today. I chose the G90 instead of the V90 because the V90, although it will pronounce words for you, only does it for the Chinese dictionary. I have no interest in Chinese, so there’s no reason to pay the extra money.
The G90 has an English ‘quick reference’ but I don’t think it’s complete, or at least not thorough. The ‘quick reference’ is perhaps 15% of the entire manual, the balance being in Japanese. For example, it is mentioned that you can turn the menuing to English from the setup menu. It’s up to you to figure out where the setup is. Ha. Also didn’t explain how to get to the “draw some kanji/kana on the screen”. (There is a small icon you need to click) Perhaps some day I’ll write a proper manual with screen shots for the thing and stick it online.

Anyway was just playing with it to see how it worked. Of course the first thing I did was enter “fuck” into the English-to-Japanese dictionary. It does auto-complete. Wow. A lot of results:

1. fuck
2. fuckable
3. fuck-all
4. fucked-
5. fucked-up
6. fucker
7. fuckface
8. fuckhead
9. fucking
10. fucking A
11. fucking hell
12. fuck-in-law (even I don’t know what this one means)
13. fuck me
14. fuckoff
15. fuckpig (this wins the ‘Total Completeness Award’ — don’t think I’ve heard this term since university)
16. fuck-up
17. fuckwit

Anyway, I’ve only had the thing for a few hours, and don’t have much more to say about it yet.

I’ve always been disgusted with myself for being mono-lingual. It’s especially noticeable in Singapore where nearly everyone speaks a second (or third) language to some degree. It’s especially frustrating when I’m in Japan, because I could get more out of my trips if I could communicate better at restaurants, stores, and on the street.

I have new responsibilities in my job that justify frequent trips to Tokyo.

These factors precipitated in me deciding to learn Japanese. It sounds plausible. I have the motivation to learn it as well as the means. Now the trick is to avoid mistakes of my past.

Spanish in high school. Well, this was simple, I didn’t have any motivation to learn it, except to meet absolute minimum foreign language requirements for university admittance. No loss anyway, I had no interest in Latin America and I am sure the quality of the instruction was lamentable.

Russian in university. I took a year’s Russian in university and by the end of the second semester had lost interest in it. It became increasingly clear I wasn’t going to Russia, the hot young teacher from the first semester was replaced with an old hag in the second, and the classes were quite rote, from a textbook. Most of the class was written.

Chinese with tutor and language programs. This soon went nowhere. My wooden ear and iron tongue do very poorly with the tones. I did have a (flaky) tutor but it wasn’t a very engaging education. Boring repetitive dialogues from old textbooks. I also tried some of these expensive Pimsleur-style cassette-based programs. They’re even more useless — boring as hell and with no one giving any feedback to what you’re saying.

Remembering these lessons, my approach to learning Japanese is:

• Hetergenuous study material. Not sticking with a single course, book, or program, otherwise it gets stale and frustrating.
• Speaking practice. Speaking practice seems essential to internalizing this
• Daily practice. Need to do something every day.
• Observable progress. I need to be able to see results.

So my current training regime is:

1. Signed up for the popular Singapore Japanese Cultural Society beginner Japanese program. I took the ‘intensive’ course, which is two hours twice a week and finishes in six months rather than one year. It will prepare me to take the Japanese Language Proficiency level four exam (the lowest level. Levels 2 and 1 reflect good fluency in Japanese).
2. Bootstrapping myself in learning the kana (hiragana, katakana) characters so that I can read the texts. I originally thought I could get away without bothering to learn how to read and write Japanese, but I soon realized that was folly. Anyway, learning the characters does give a nice feeling of progress. In just a week or so I’ve learned all the hiragana (あいえおう　。。。　らりろるれ）　so that has been a rewarding program
3. Bought a couple different textbooks with audio practice to mix up the normally boring introductory lessons. I bought the AJALT “Japanese For Busy People” program, as I saw that the Singapore Japanese Association uses that as their textbook.
4. Bought some unusual books for when I’m tired of the standard texts, including “Japanese in MangaLand” which is a pratical guide for people trying to learn Japanese to read Manga comics. I’m not especially interested in Manga, but the material comes in from a different angle and mixes things up a bit. It’s also got some practical elements the other books are missing.
5. Subscribed to JapanesePod101.com. RogerWarez pointed me to this site. It’s absolutely phenomenal. They have dozens of short 8-15minute long mp3 podcasts I can listen to on my PC or iPod that give short lessons in beginner Japanese. Lots of good word practice. Their program is marvelous because the material and examples they use are actually alive, contemporary, and interesting. The site is free, but I bought a subscription to have access to their ‘Learning Center’ which has supplementary texts and support information, as well as some flash-based flashcard systems. I used that extensively in learning the hiragana.
6. Then of course, I go to Tokyo as frequently as possible.