Haruki Murakami and the Eternal Chord

12Sep09

I may have mentioned previously that my favourite author is 村上春樹 (Haruki Murakami), the extremely popular Japanese author.  I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, but I seemed to spend forever looking for a writer that writes exactly what I want to read. Murakami seems to have struck a chord that will last a lifetime.

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Confessions of a lazy learner

12Sep09

ごめんなさい。。。

I must be honest, I’ve been getting lazy. LAZY! Possibly the worse habit one can pick up when dealing with language.

I’ve been watching too many English language shows, playing too many English language games and reading too many English language books. They offer an instant pleasure, that isn’t there at the moment with Japanese material.

The Japanese fire is still ‘there’, but it’s a campfire right now, not the forest blaze it should be.. I’ve been doing my Anki reps, but barely adding new sentences. And the less said about my kanji reps, the better.

I feel like I’ve hit a platform. I can understand fairly little, but not enough. From now on, I need to go back to immersing myself completely, as I felt that was when I was making the most progress.

But, there’s no use in saying that I’ll improve. I have to actually ‘do’ it. So this post is basically my call to arms (to myself). I will immerse, I will improve and I will become the fluent Japanese master I’ve always wanted to be!

Now, where’s that Murakami book…

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Post-RTK Progress

24Jul09

Thought I’d give a little update as to the whats and hows of my progress after finishing Remembering The Kanji 1.

My first priority was having a nice week off in the company of my girlfriend, which was a welcome break after the last few days of adding kanji.

This Monday I started on SRSing sentences. I’ve been going through Tae Kim’s grammar guide, and adding the example sentences to Anki.

So far, so good! I’m on about 150 sentences, and review are going well. Well, until today when I had a little meltdown with my new cards. I understood the grammar, but new vocab words threw me off a bit. The kind of mistakes that only time and exposure can improve on.

I’ve also started RTK3, but I’m working through this slowly. I haven’t managed more than 10 a day. I want to finish this as soon as possible, but I know that won’t happen. I’m happy just knowing the RTK1 kanji right now, but the more the better obviously!

Back to my reviews now :)

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…and DONE!

10Jul09

Approximately 10 weeks after starting, I have put my last kanji into my notebook, and finishing Heisig’s Remembering The Kanji 1. And I feel amazing.

I’ve basically filled a thick notebook from Muji with my kanji stories and reviews, as well as some of my Doraemon lined notebook. I can’t imagine how many hours of effort I’ve put into this task. I’ve never done anything of this scale in formal education, and this feels many times more rewarding than any exam I’ve ever done. And it was fun along the way too.

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Slackers rejoice!

09Jul09

If you’re like me, you probably spend a lot of time procrastinaing on English language websites, when you’d be much better served getting some Japanese practice and reading Japanese sites. Unfortunately, there’s not a quick fire way to make reading L2 sites easier.

However! There is a way to let some Japanese bleed into your L1 websites. Firefox extension Kanji-lish, acts as a compromise between English and Japanese sites. When activated, it will replace the first letter of certain words with the kanji represeting that word. The example given by the creators is ‘read’ showing up ‘読ead’. You can also set it to replace the entire word, but I like the training wheel feel that replacing only 1 letter provides.

Kanji-lish helps in several ways:

1. Practice going from kanji-keyword, as opposted to the keyword->kanji system typically used.
2. Makes reading English language sites somewhat beneficial to your Japanese learning.
3. Makes you feel like a kanji badass when you know them straightaway.

If you’ve not downloaded it yet, why not? Go go go!

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Dubbed TV Shows

28Jun09

Despite what you might think, Japanese Simpsons doesn’t look like this.

I’ve spent today watching popular American TV shows dubbed into Japanese. Just about every big name show can be found (somewhere) in Japanese, and they’re a very useful resource.

I’ve got episodes of The Simpsons, 24, Heroes and Prison Break. I found them in various places on the internet, but the best place is Nico Nico Douga, the Japanese version of Youtube. It has a lot of videos. It’s going to be a very valuable resource for me.

The Simpsons is pretty much my favourite show ever, so I can watch and rewatch the episodes endlessly. This also applies to the Japanese version. I understand enough to make it funny (mainly because I know the original episodes so well). The voice actors are spot on, though Homer’s voice is a bit deep.

The other shows don’t fare quite as well. I think because dubbed actors are less immersive than dubbed animation.

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RTK Progress #12123

27Jun09

I didn’t realise until a moment ago, but yesterday I hit two milestones with Remembering The Kanji. June 26th marked two months of working on the book, and kanji #1531 marked 3/4’s complete.

My self imposed deadline for finishing the book was the end of August, and barring any major incidents, I’ll have eclipsed that goal. With less than 500 to study, I think I’ll be finishing in around 2 weeks.

I’m feeling really motivated to finish now. I’ll be glad to get the basic kanji out of the way, and started digging in to the fun stuff.

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The Big OS Jump

16Jun09

I made a big jump in my learning earlier, by switching my operating system to Japanese. It’s very easy with OSX, all it took was one click in an option menu. I haven’t restarted yet, so open applications haven’t changed, but when I open applications, they’re in Japanese.

I’ve already switched my iPhone to Japanese, so changing the computer was the next logical step. They’re two things I used a lot, so it makes sense.

It’s another way of immersing myself in the language, as I don’t need to know Japanese to use it, but it will help expose myself to new words. Skype, for example, has easy to figure out katakana words such as ファイル (File), コンタクト (Contacts), チャット (Chat) and ヘルプ (Help).

And if it’s too much of a pain, it’s easy to change back! So everybody wins, but as the old saying goes, no pain, no gain.

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Tags: immersion, osx

Half Way!

09Jun09

Mere minutes ago, I hit the 1026th character in Remembering The Kanji. That means that I’m over half way through the book. It’s been a tough journey so far, but I think I’m making good progress.

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Tags: kanji, motivation, progress, rtk

Writing Beautiful Kanji

08Jun09

I picked this Doraemon notebook up on my recent trip to London. I’m hoping that using squared paper will mean my kanji writing will improve.

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Tags: kanji, writing