So, I have a BIG ego, and do LOTS of ego-surfing. I should make an RSS feed of my self-googling. And during my daily, no, hourly session of ego-surfing, it came to my attention that I had not quite made clear just what I meant by “fluency” after 18 months. In a word, my fluency was near-native. When I spoke on the phone, Japanese people assumed I was Japanese. In more detail, I was able to:

• Speak and understand adult Japanese-sounding Japanese. Many people assumed (and continue to assume) that I had either been raised in Japan or lived hear for 10+ years. Neither are so, at this writing.
• Conduct a job interview 100% in Japanese
• Conduct my visa processing with the Japanese Consulate in the US, 100% in Japanese
• Make convincing, logical arguments.
• Write business and personal emails.
• Understand TV and radio news 100%.
• Understand and enjoy Japanese comedy shows.
• Make intentional errors, jokes, witty comebacks and double entendres in Japanese.
• Read aloud and understand any general-purpose Japanese document (i.e. one intended for a lay audience), such as a newspaper.
• Read aloud and understand any IT/physical science/computer science expert document (manuals, software docs, academic papers, even legal documents).
• Write 4500 kanji from memory, 90% retention.
• Read aloud common Japanese personal and place names (prefectures, major cities).
• Talk my way around words I did not know or had forgotten. For example “cable splitter” was “small device for splitting a single cable TV signal such that it can be shared among multiple terminals” or something to that effect.

Here’s what was different between me and a “typical” Japanese person, i.e. what I could not or did not yet do after 18 months:

• Could not skim or scan Japanese documents. I had to read word-for-word. So, my reading was slower than native users’, but not less accurate. I skim and scan now (YAY!)
• I made infrequent, minor grammatical errors like saying “在庫ですか” instead of “在庫が有りますか”.
• In speaking, I thought I had to end every polite sentence in “-ます” and freaked out whenever I didn’t. I quickly learned ways around that, like just sticking “です” or “のです” at the ends of my sentences.
• In speaking, I didn’t have many (or any?) of those native speaker tools - words and phrases - for recovering from mis-saying something, such as “ていうか”.
• My active vocab was somewhat annoyingly behind my passive vocab. But I knew time would heal this wound.
• Using my kanji knowledge, I thought “手袋”/てぶくろ meant “hand-bag”. It actually means “gloves”. Doh!
• When I spoke, for a while I was only fully comfortable in two registers - super-keigo and Gokusen/anime. That has been taken care of. In fact it only took two weeks of hanging around with normal Japanese people (my coworkers) to fix it.
• I didn’t use Japanese bridge/filler words like “サァ” and “ていうか” a lot. With “サァ”, at the time, I just felt stupid saying it as much as Japanese people do; now I’m all over it. With “ていうか” I must have just not realized how useful it was? Or perhaps I didn’t understand how to use it, not sure.
• Since most of my reading, listening and watching (input) had been technical and abstract, my explanations of simple physical things - like how to throw a Frisbee - did not come out as smoothly as I would have wanted; they came out (with lots of demonstrative pronouns and gestures - “you kind of just go like this” - I didn’t know how to say “flick” or “twitch”) but I wanted them to be better. I still feel that I need to work on this.
• I had trouble using trains the first time not for lack of literacy but for non-intuitiveness of interface! So I put in how much money? Where? Hey, why did the machine eat my ticket?!
• I spoke somewhat slower than a Japanese person. I’m picking up speed even now. Speed generally wasn’t an issue when speaking formally, just informally.
• I made and make a point of saying words like “零”/rei instead of “ゼロ”/zero, because I think “零” sounds cooler.
• I used and use more kanji than many Japanese people.
• I used and use pre-US occupation kanji in handwriting. E.g. 會rather than会.
• I had (and, actually, still have) holes bigger than Stargate SG-1 plot inconsistencies in my knowledge when it comes to food. I don’t eat that much Japanese food, in part because I don’t frequent restaurants. Most of my food learning comes from visits to friends’ homes. My eating habits are such that this lack of knowledge is likely to continue indefinitely.
• I was a bit shaky on certain readings of common artificial food additives (those random chemical names you see on food labels). For the longest time I thought “葡萄糖” meant “grape sugar”; it actually means “glucose”.
• Names of certain fruits and vegetables, rarer personal and place names, I did not know. Apples, oranges and carrots were OK, but cucumber I did not actually know. BTW, the way I learned these was to look them up and write them down every time I made a shopping list.
• I don’t know the number of prefectures in Japan.
• Infer meanings of new, non-kanji (i.e. hiragana-only) words in text. I can do this now; it’s simply a matter of getting even more used to Japanese, once you expose yourself to enough of the language, you develop and incredible predictive ability, just like you do in English. In fact, I got so good at it so subconsciously that I sometimes shocked myself. One time I was trying on a T-shirt, and I said to the shop lady “this one’s too がさがさ/gasagasa (rough)”. Later, I asked my Japanese friend H-bomb if that was the right word and he confirmed it was completely correct. All this, yet I had never, ever, consciously learned or seen this word; it is nowhere in my SRS.
• I would forget certain alternate kanji/readings. For example, I was in the train and forget the reading of 断つ（たつ）when, say it was conjugated into 断って — I got a fellow passenger to remind me. It’s fun doing this - a great way to get talking to people and save a dictionary lookup.
• Also I actually didn’t know the readings of less-common but still general-use words like 翻る（ひるがえる）…it had just never come up in my reading. The meaning was clear from the character.
• I didn’t and don’t know many Japanese children’s games, nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
• Last, but definitely not least…I’m not that into Doraemon. At all.

So, all in all, after 18 months, I could function as an adult. Linguistically, I was Japanese, Japanese people on the phone assumed I was until I said my name, Japanese people who met me in person assumed I had been raised here. I had Japanese technical knowledge and vocabulary, standard social skills…but also tiny pockets of inexplicable ignorance, I mean, who doesn’t know how to say “flick”? These gaps were quickly filled by further reading and immersion in the language. It’s just like many native English speakers mistakenly write “tow the line”, or say “et cetera” as “e-t-c” or otherwise mispronounce words they’ve read but never heard or heard but never read, or totally mess up place names (I imagine many Americans would have trouble correctly reading “Gloucester”) - that was me in Japanese. And just like a native English speaker, some more reading and listening to good material took care of it.

Where am I now? Well, I need to keep my saw sharp, otherwise it does go blunt. If I go without Japanese for 5 days, I can tell and so can everyone else - when it comes to speech. But…I don’t know. It’s like, Martha Stewart, right? She still learns new recipes and home improvement things but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t own. Same here. I own, but I’m still learning stuff and picking stuff up. The main thing I’m working on is speed. Also witty comebacks - which have to be fast and correct. I’m also working on “arguing” skills, which I guess is a combination of charm, logic and word choice. I also write kanji every day and I’m always looking for strange kanji to read. In short, I am always searching for holes to plug. Another thing I have noticed about myself is that I’m finally finding my own voice in non-technical Japanese writing (i.e. “writing with a personality”) - I feel confident enough to make deliberate mistakes for comic effect, and write something with no more proofreading than I need for English.

The fun continues…

Jon B at 無国籍/Mukokuseki links to this Wired Magazine article on SuperMemo.

This is really exciting stuff. In my own little way, I’ve been trying to spread the word about SRS (spaced repetition systems) as tools since a man named Chris Houser first told me about SuperMemo way back in 2004. As one quite aptly titled psychology paper put it, the fact that not every student with access to a computer uses an SRS in her learning is a massive “Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research”.

There are a lot of gems in that Wired article. Like this one:

We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.

And this one:

Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

And this one that so succinctly captures the beauty of the SRS:

provably linking the distant future — when we will know so much — to the few minutes we devote to studying today

And, finally, this one, for all you serial crammers out there. You know who you are.

He wasn’t just trying to pass his exams; he was trying to learn.

The SRS offers a way to actually remember all that stuff you learn, while doing less work than you’re now doing. Sounds like snake oil, I know, but it’s not…it’s just…a more efficient way of doing things.

So to all of you still sitting on the SRS fence — let go of your “talent” fetish/superstition and come play!

うっす.　So, it’s been a while since I posted one of these, but anyway here we are all the way at #10. I’m going to try to keep this one short (I’m not just saying that!) because these suuuuuuuuuuuck to edit afterwards. Actually, they’re a lot better since I started using Microsoft Word a word processor from a certain major software manufacturer. But still, I’m tired of ending up with sentences like “you nee’ a use SRS-lah. I’s so simpo!” in long posts. OK, here we go!

A lot has changed. A lot. And I haven’t been telling you jack. Not because I’m a bad person, but because I don’t like to talk about things I’m not sure about. Because, generally, one of two things happens when you do this:

a. People get too excited, try it, but if it doesn’t work (since it wasn’t fully tested), then they feel bad, and maybe they tell you that you suck.

or:

b. People shoot you down before you’ve even tried it, and (if you’re delicate like me) it kills your will to try, and we all know that not trying is the source of all failure. But I digress.

This “not talking until the doing has been done” thing is one of the main reasons why I didn’t put up AllJapaneseAllTheTime.Com at the start of my Japanese journey. I left it till the end, when I had nothing left to prove as such, and any barbs directed at my person, real or imagined, would be functionally useless, since they cannot negate the simple fact that I have near-native Japanese ability now. You know, kind of like how only people who don’t have money are hurt by people thinking they don’t have money? Or something to that effect…I’m sure you understand what it’s like - the Internet is full of the most negative, demoralizing, borderline-to-overtly racist crap when it comes to East Asian languages, and normal, sensitive (see Fig. 1) people are easily harmed by it.

By the way, the other main reason is that making a website used to be annoying. Blogs have been around for a while, but I honestly thought that blogs were just for keeping diaries for a limited audience because that’s all that people used to do with them. That is, until I saw someone using a web log other than for logging, with articles actually written to be read by non-insiders, and that changed the game for me. Speaking of logging, Momoko encouraged me to keep a log of my Cantonese progress, even if I don’t actually post on it for a while. I am more or less doing that.

But you didn’t come here to hear that kind of beanbag philosophy (”dewd, like, isn’t it amazing how..”), back to the article.

Crap…what was I gonna say. OK, first stop is Anki and Text-to-Speech (TTS).

Text-to-Speech (and Anki)

In Chinese Project Notes # 8, I discussed changes I had made to my SRS entry format. Based on the effects of those changes, I have made even more alterations. Some I will discuss in this article, some may have to wait for later; there’s seriously that much going on.

First, why did I make these alterations? Well, I discovered that while the Chinese Project Notes # 8 changes were definitely a step forward for my handwriting - I can produce hanzi/kanji from memory with great speed and accuracy and exactly when I want them - the changes have not (yet?) given me the aural benefits that I had expected. My Chinese writing advanced to pwnage level, but my listening comprehension was not being all that it could be.

To the chase I am cutting. My calculations indicate that at this time it would not be economical to add free sound support for everyone on KhatzuMemo. Plus, Anki is a really good SRS, so why not try it out, right? That’s what I did. After tons of pride-swallowing, trial, and error, my Cantonese (and some Mandarin) SRS items essentially consist of:

• Question:

[Audio of sentence]

• Answer:

[Text of sentence: this is what you have to write out, given the audio]

[Dictionary definitions, as necessary]

[Translation of sentence, if necessary]

[Phonetic reading for clarification, if necessary]

Here’s an example:

• Question:

[Audio of sentence]

• Answer:

你去邊? [Text of sentence: this is what you have to write out, given the audio]

你去哪裡? [Translation of sentence, if necessary]

Néih heui bīn[Phonetic reading for clarification, if necessary]

The process is basically that I am both chorusing (or parroting, or whatever) and taking dictation at the same time. I think dictation is one of the best language-learning exercises out there in that you are connecting the verbal and written parts of a language, something that a lot of people fail to do. It’s a hybrid input-output affair that puts almost all the skills that matter on the line - you have to understand what’s being said, and you have to know how to write it out exactly correctly. Chorusing, or what I am calling chorusing, is really good, too — listening to (native) speech and imitating it. Step-by-step it goes like this:

1. Play audio (as many times as necessary).

2. Say audio.

3. Write down text, based on audio (audio may be repeated).

4. Compare my text to the correct answer.

Where do you get the audio? I use text-to-speech (TTS) software. It set me back a bit, but I like to think of it as an educational expense. The TTS software I got comes in two parts - a reader, and voices. As far as I know, you need both. My reader and voices are:

• TextAloud - the reader. It does cool things like managing text and converting it to MP3. I believe it comes with a basic, default English voice, but good voices and voices in other languages need to be purchased separately. There is a free trial version of TextAloud available here.
• Voices. I use Lily for Mandarin, Sin-Ji for Cantonese and Misaki for Japanese. I chose female voices because I found them easier to understand. Maybe it’s a high-frequency thing? Or maybe it’s just my imagination - I don’t actually know for sure. Currently, I only use the Japanese one for reading me long articles, like the ones from this site.

TTS has been around a relatively long time. Why am I only now getting into it? Well, it used to suck; it was a running joke. TTS is much better now than it was 5 years ago, and while the voices are not yet perfectly human, if you’re a beginner, they’re almost certainly much closer to perfection (accurate pronunciation) than your voice is in your target language, which is what counts. The Japanese voices are especially blowing me away [audio sample of the first paragraph of this article].

There is also something special about the nature of Chinese that drove me to TTS. Other than Bopomofo/注音符號, there are no satisfactory phonetic systems for representing Chinese. By “satisfactory”, I mean “consistent, easy-to-understand, and will lead to native-like pronunciation if followed”. Pinyin sucks. Jyutping sucks even harder. Yale Mandarin is decent. Yale Cantonese is an improvement over Jyutping but still not all the way there. I needed to know how to pronounce Cantonese without, like, balancing an equation every two seconds (because that’s what tone numbers turn life into). The tone markers had no meaning to me - I could not differentiate them - until I actually heard a lot of Cantonese. I needed to focus on what Cantonese sounds like, because that’s what matters, not some trainwreck of a Romanization system. This is what led me in the direction of TTS. The results are good so far - one Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong on Skype accused me of lying about not being Chinese, despite my insistence that “it’s not that good…yet”, so I had to borrow a friend’s webcam (see Fig. 2), and then the Skype guy made me undress. It just goes to show that watching and/or listening to Cantonese dubs of American cartoons 18 hours a day doesn’t not have an effect. And, yes, I do randomly find Cantonese speakers on Skype to talk to. I learn a lot from them if I shut up. Skype chat records are automatically saved, so you can go back later and sentence-pick, and also to absorb the corrections you no doubt asked for.

One annoying problem with the Chinese TTS voices I use is that they cannot pronounce certain characters correctly or at all, especially ones used in written colloquial Cantonese, even some commonly used ones. Not only that, but they have no “learning” ability - you can’t “teach” (customize) them to pronounce certain things correctly. Misaki does have such ability; she can even be “taught” intonation…I look forward to a customizable Cantonese voice. At any rate, TTS is still a great tool, and I imagine many people could benefit from using it.

Note - you could try just cutting sound samples by yourself instead of using TTS. I have tried this; it’s good but it has its limitations - it takes time to do and it obviously won’t have the same vocabulary range as TTS. I primarily use TTS, but a mix of TTS and manual sound-clipping seems like it would be a great combination.

Cantonese: What’s Up With That?

As you may be aware, Cantonese has been “on my radar” for quite some time. When I made the decision to learn it, I was already focusing on learning Mandarin. The reasonable thing to do, and what I initially chose to do, was to continue doing Mandarin until my Mandarin got really, really good.

So I started building a Mandarin immersion environment. That involved getting Mandarin dubs of my favorite American cartoons — stuff like 蝙蝠俠/Batman, 飛天少女驚/Powerpuff Girls, almost all the Disney/Pixar movies. As it turns out, almost all of these DVDs had a Cantonese track as well. Occasionally I would switch to the Cantonese track for laughs — it sounded so funny!

Anyway, this “funny-sounding” language or dialect started to grow on me. The Bruce Lee effect and the fact that (until recently) the Chinese that most non-Chinese people heard was in fact Cantonese, certainly played a part. Cantonese is even more “magical”, more BS-ed about, more Orientalized, more feared, more hyped than Japanese; this, I am sure, tickles my reverse-BS glands.

So it got to the point that I was just trying to “get through” Mandarin in order to get to what I really wanted to do - Cantonese…After much, much, much, deliberation and gnashing of teeth, I decided to go all Cantonese all the time; Momoko had gotten fed up of hearing me whine and worry compare and contrast. I continue to learn token amounts of Mandarin out of a feeling of necessity, no, duty, even. But I do Cantonese out of love and therefore Cantonese gets all my time now. If Mandarin and Cantonese are in danger of drowning, and I can only save one, Cantonese gets saved every time. There is so much Cantonese playing in my house that Momoko sometimes randomly says things like “開開心心”/heppy, whether or not she understands them. Repetition will do that.

Victory Calendar

Everyone who reads this site is incredibly good-looking and positive. And that helps. In fact, most of my fears and doubts are self-induced. But anyway, to keep me from sinking into fear, doubt and I-can’t-do-this-ism, I have made myself what I call a “Victory Calendar”. Wait, before I tell you about the calendar, let me just say this. I finally understand the sheer disbelief that I sometimes read from people who read this site. Because the method explained on these pages is so simpo. Just DO it. It’s THERE. You CAN. It’s so simpo that it would seem that anyone could do it, right? And anyone can. But if it’s so simple, why isn’t everyone doing it? Why are there people who have been living in Japan for 20 years and can’t even read hearmegana? Can’t even write one kanji?

Because, it’s just like Jim “the Rohnster” Rohn said - “the things that are easy to do, are easy not to do”. It is just as easy to eat fruit as to eat a candy bar. Just as easy to watch Powerpuff Girls in Cantonese as to…not watch Powerpuff Girls in Cantonese. What the Rohnster is saying is that the results, the achievements (or lack thereof) of our lives are the sum total of tiny, “insignificant” decisions. “Surely it couldn’t hurt just this once”, they say. “Even Jesus drank alcohol”, they say. “You need to let your hair down a little bit once in a while; it’s just not healthy to be so healthy”, they say. We kid ourselves with these little lies that seem to make sense, that seem so reasonable, and then someone comes who has been making the right little decisions for a long time, and we call them “talented”, we say they were “lucky”, it was “in their blood”, or maybe we outright accuse them of lying. Expletives cannot describe how angry that makes me - so angry that I can’t even get angry at it…because arguing with people who refuse to see sense only makes you stupider.

Anyway, back to the calendar, it’s basically a list of 18 months of days (540 days in total), dating from when I started Cantonese. Every day has a space for me to evaluate my SRSing, listening and reading, respectively. My task is merely to honestly evaluate and record whether or not I did my SRS reps, added SRS items, read some Cantonese/Chinese material and listened to Cantonese for the greater part of my waking (and maybe even sleeping) hours. X is “did nothing”, circle is “did it fully” and triangle is “half-done”. Doing SRS reps and additions takes 90 minutes or so, listening counts as “full” when it amounts to 10-12 waking hours or more, reading is 60-90 minutes. Listening can overlap with everything else, but for my purposes I consider SRSing and reading to be separate, if related.

I’m noticing that whether or not I do/live/play Cantonese has nothing to do with how busy I actually am, and far more to do with how organized I am that day. In fact, on my “perfect” Cantonese days (all circles), I have been berry, berry busy with other commitments and projects. Also, keeping Cantonese on while I sleep really helps. For one thing, it ensures that there’s no “morning warm-up”, whereby I forget to start doing my Cantonese immersion until, like, midday. It also gets me listening during my half-awake states (like just before falling asleep and just before waking up).

The last day on the calendar is fluency. Giving my fluency a date really makes a difference; it brings it from the realm of dream to the level of an actual calendar event. Maybe you can try making your own Victory Calendar .

Indeed, one thing that drove me to go all the way with Japanese was that I had to be ready to go to a technical career fair at the 18-month mark, where I would have job interviews in Japanese. Money had been paid, air tickets bought and a hotel room reserved, months in advance. Cash and face were on the line. Through the Victory Calendar, I am trying to bring some of that “encouragement”, and concreteness, to my Cantonese process.

That was seriously me keeping it short.

Big thanks to Mark for that Disney phone directory!

So, I called the dubbing department, the Disney Department of Dubbing, and spoke to a lady named D-star (not kidding…all D’s). D-star was really nice but said she had no clue about exact transcripts, since they are handled locally (French in France, Chinese in China, etc). But she did say to try “Character Voices”. Character voices were looking for actors…No dice.

Went back to the Disney main switchboard, spoke to a really nice operator named J-star. Asked for the phone number for Disney Hong Kong. He only had the number for Hong Kong Disneyland. Snap. Plus it’s the ungodly-dead-of-night in Hong Kong just like here in Japan. Double snap.

Down but far from out, I called Pixar. The Pixar operator was like “dude, what the Dreamworks are you talking about?”, but she very kindly directed me to Pixar PR. A-star, the lady at Pixar PR, was super-kind, and directed me back to Disney, not just to the switchboard, folks, but to an actual person, name (L-star) and everything.

I have called L-star and reached her answering machine, where I left a message in my best English…I are been learning. Now waiting for her reply. But not passively - I’ve googled (and googled) translation companies in Hong Kong that appear to have done work for Disney. These guys may have those magic Word files of dialog for which we so thirst…thirst…thirst…Durst (dude, German just sounds thirstier). They will be hearing my resonant baritone in the very near future.

Will let you know more as the situation develops. Hey, it’s like this is one of those blogs where things talked about are actual current events! Haha…weird. OK, lates.

OK, I’ve had it! There’s got to be a way of getting a copy of exactly what was said in a movie. I could go through some movies myself, painstakingly copy down every word of dialog, and then post it here, but who wants to do that, when:

1) There may or may not be copyright issues, and
2) Someone, somewhere, already has an actual copy of that script anyway; because something had to be written down to give those (voice) actors. So in the overall scheme of human work, I am doing unnecessary duplication unnecessary duplication..

So, today, I’ve decided to call Pixar and find out who has the scripts for the Cantonese dubs of all those Disney/Pixar movies, and how I can get my hands on them. I already tried the Disney corporate websites for both Hong Kong and the US, but no phone numbers were to be found, anywhere…it’s almost as if they don’t want to talk on the phone (!) . I love Disney and they are very nice people. And kind. And good-looking. And forgiving of snide remarks. And good-looking. Anyway, I’ll let you know what happens as it happens.

いつも通りのネットサーフィン（おググり）がてらに、「まったり冗長」っていうブログにてこの記事を。ブログ全体は文体も内容も個性的で面黒いから、是非ご覧あれ。

漢字ヲタでもある拙者に刺激を与えて呉れる内容ばかり。特にこれ：

『むしろＮ○Ｋが「洪水」をテロップで
「こう水」と表記したりしてる方がよっぽど問題かと。全然難しくねぇだろ。』

ドカーーーーーン！大同感！！

阿呆かっ、NHK？！（然様、俺は堂々と名前を申すゾ！）やっぱ阿呆だナァ。なんか、「昆虫」を「こん虫」、「寡夫」を「か夫」、「改竄」を「改ざん」、「哺乳類」を「ほ乳類」などと表記しやがて、「っざっけんなよ！」と申させる場面が多い。NHKって、イイ所（例を挙げれば：「サラリーマンNEO」）もあれば、とんでもなく阿呆らしい所も無きにしも非ず。まあ、NHKというより文部科学省かも知れんが。おっと、政府批判しちゃった。

「でも『改竄』が難しいよ！」とかホザく方もいらっしゃるでしょうが、拙者が存じるに、いわゆる「難しさ」は、使用を忌避する結果ではなく、寧ろその原因なんだ。使ったら人に覚えられる。使わないと死語（死字）になる。だからGHQみたいに日本国民を蔑まずドンドン漢字使えっつーの！ってか、ホンマに字が難しいと判断したら振り仮名でも振ったら、振り仮名？

それじゃ、短い内容でスイマシェン（ていうか、済むけど（笑））。また今度ね！