First, let’s discuss the different types of white meat.

White Meat: Chicken

The Other White Meat: Pork

The Other Other White Meat: My roommate R-star from freshman year at college. He was in ROTC and seriously pumped. Hunnnh!

Which brings us to the Other Other Other White Meat. This guy.

He learned Japanese using very similar methods to those you find on this site, but all before this site existed. We have so much in common, OMG! He essentially didn’t take classes (technically, he did a bit, but they sucked and he sucked); he had never been to Japan, but learned Japanese by living it, by changing his environment, all while in New Zealand (or one of those countries with weird English). Anyway, screw me telling you. Listen to his story.

言っとくけど、俺は白人がカナリ好き。白人居住区育ちの俺が、白人の幼稚園をはじめ、白人の小学校・白人の中学校・白人の高校・白人の大学に続々進学して参りました。大学時代聴いてた洋楽も白人向けであれば、妻も白人だ。尚且つプラス更に片方の猫ちゃんまで、毛の半分以上が真っ白な訳。そして友達全員一人残らず白人。昔は黒人友達も居ったが、敢えて連絡を取らなくなった。キャラが被って困る 。

だから、こう言うのを人種差別として誤解されないで欲しいが・・・

俺は白人が完全にイカれてると思う。いや、思うっていうか、事実です。お前ら（白人）サァ、正気か？ヤッパリ正気じゃないナァ。正気な人種ならこう言う映画は撮れないだろう。

『マンデラの名もなき看守』って言う映画なんだけどサァ。ええっ？ちょっと待って。マンデラの看守？・マ・ン・デ・ラ・の・看・守・？マジかよ。って、有り得ない！！冗談じゃないよ！誰、この馬鹿企画を創った馬鹿が？一発、いや、二発、いや、三発殴らせろ！

基本的に平和主義な俺は何故に暴力に訴えるか、ご説明しましょう。
①私が知っている限り、これは史上初のネルソン＝マンデラの映画化。
②上記同様
③本来敵対者ていうか、悪役である筈の連中が、白人が為に主人公兼善玉にされるのは、今回で初めてじゃない。いや～皆さん、これは蔓延してる病気だ。病気な白色人種が世界中にバラ蒔いている・・・病気・・・だ。

何で？何でマンデラを虐待した浣腸野郎が美化されなきゃいけないの？

• 「ダンス・ウィズ・ウルブズ」（白人虐殺者が先住民の言語と生活習慣をプチ勉強する・・・だから？）
• 「モガディシュの戦闘」（別にソマリア人があんたらに助けなんか頼んでないぞ～）、
• 「アラモ」（テメエ等みてえな平気で他国に侵攻する奴等が死んでも、神様も哀しみましぇ～ん）、
• 「サハラに舞う羽根」（お前らナァ、そもそもスーダンにおるのはその土地の人間を奴隷にする為だろうが！）、

と全く同様、人道を逸した事ばっかりする白人男性が何故かヒーローにされちゃう訳。同胞がやってる事をチョッピリ反省して何が偉いの？何も無いでしょう？でっしょ？だから今ここで俺はこの流れに強く反対せざるを得ない。

「でも、勝元、どんな民族でも自分達を美化しガチじゃん」、とかホザく呼び捨て野郎もいらっしゃるでしょうが、それは全然違うって。つい最近、かのニッポンが、「ベクシル － 2077日本鎖国」を創り出したんじゃない？アレは日本人が、アメリカ人を主人公／善玉にし、日本人自身を悪玉にした作品なんだ。佳作とは言えないけれど、発想が新鮮そのものだ。しかも主人公が女性。やるじゃん、ニッポン。SFでも自分達を厳しい目で見れる黄色人に、白人も是非倣うべし。特にノンフィクション（実話）を扱う時にね。って、「実話」の意味が解かるか、白人共よ・・・明らかに解からないね。漢字学べ。

ていうか、何でマンデラ役が碌に南アフリカの訛りが出来ないアメリカ人なんだよ！？演技がド下手だっつーのに。好い加減アフリカ人にしろ。「黒人だから」イイって訳じゃないってば。『24』の大統領なんて知るかっ。一回だけ黒人大統領を巧く演じてからって永遠にそれとして起用されるべしって事は無い。無い。絶対無い。

以上。皆さんのご意見も聞こう。

OK, so I’ve been collecting links for another big post of website recommmendations, but that’s just gonna have to wait. I mean, it’s just gonna-have-to-wait. Because I have found the goods that you need so badly. At least, the goods I needed when I was in the early stages of acquiring Japanese. Here they are:

Instruction manuals for the PlayStation series.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you’ll find the manuals for the original PlayStation. These come with full furigana. The same goes for PocketStation and PS one. And of course they have sweet diagrams and stuff, too. Enjoy!

Edit: While we’re at it, here are the Wii manuals. These come with furigana and in color!

So, the way I even heard about this bilingual Japanese/English career forum is that my Japanese roommate from before I had considered studying Japanese, Ko-star, went to the Boston version. It both inspired me and made me jealous when I realized that “wow, Ko-star is totally fluent in two very economically valuable languages, and here I am messing around with nothing but a good-but-not-4.0 GPA to my name”.

Where did I get the idea to finally go myself? Well, as you probably know, a lot of colleges in the US have career days and stuff. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to go through the suit-wearing, resume-writing, smiling motions. I always admired my classmates who were capable of doing that. Because, dude, we all know what college is actually like. Why, suddenly, when it’s a “career fair”, do we wear suits and act like we really learned from those classes, when, at the time, we were just trying to get them out of the way? I’m not saying this to put down education, I am putting down classes, which even professors and instructors will readily admit, are flawed. I don’t know. I sound like a whiny teenager, but, I really did feel like a complete fraud in interviews, wearing a suit, doing my adult-sounding “deep voice”, talking about my school experience like I actually gave a crap, and trying to spin every little tangentially related job I had done into “work experience” and talk about the “skills and strengths” I had built, like…I don’t freaking know!! I don’t know…it’s probably just me and I need to “grow up” or something.

Anyway, somewhere in there, I realized that I wanted to go and make cool electronics at one of the great Japanese electronics giants, especially the one responsible for CDs, MDs and even floppy disks. At some point, I figured that to do that, I would first need to go to grad school in Japan to get the necessary linguistic and technical knowledge. But then, somewhere else in there, I started this “all Japanese all the time” experiment and was rapidly acquiring Japanese proficiency all on my own. When American kids saw me speak Japanese with my Japanese friends, some would ask if I had grown up in Japan; I guess they didn’t know better, but, still, it was a sign that I was getting good. And so it dawned on me that I could skip the grad school stage and go straight to my Japanese electronics giant. The career forum would be that opportunity.

Four or five months before the career forum itself, I decided to go. As it happened they were having a technical version of the usually economics/finance-based career forum, so that was right up my alley. I reserved a room at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel – the same hotel as the career forum – in L.A., and bought the cheapest Southwest Airlines ticket I could find. My Japanese study went into overdrive; I was afraid as many people are that “Japan” would be like “what the heck do you want, bwoy!?”, so I wanted to have really, really, good Japanese. I learned about keigo/敬語, business manners and “interview talk”. By now you’re probably realizing that I was learning to do the very same “act” to which I had such objections at regular college career fairs. I guess the reason I was so against even going to the regular career fairs was that I didn’t want to live or work in America that much. Plus the career fairs always seemed to be going on when I was busiest with my schoolwork – they say a busy person is just a bad time manager, and that may well be true; I always gave my schoolwork far more time than I should have; I wish I’d known about Steve Pavlina and Brian Tracy earlier in my life (didn’t find out about them until near the very end of my undergrad). Anyway, so…

Skip to the day of the bilingual career fair. When I got there (straight off the plane from Utah, took a cab driven by the rudest man I have ever had the displeasure of meeting…don’t swear at me because it’s “inconvenient” for you to take credit cards, bee arch!), I almost turned back — I mean, 100% fear; my stomach was churning, everyone but me, it seemed, was Japanese, and I just had the biggest feeling of: “Dude, OK, game over. Who are you even kidding? You’re not Japanese! Just ’cause you’ve watched hundreds of hours of Gokusen and your friends from Japan say you’re jouzu, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna make it; this is the real world. Go home now before you embarrass yourself. Just get on the plane. Speak English like you were raised to”. And I almost did turn tail and head for LAX, but for the fact that I saw two 20-something Japanese kids in suits…who were clearly lost…and asked them if they were going to the career fair and told them I’d show them the way…in Japanese…and they were excited that I was speaking the nihongo and they were nice to me, and I thought: “maybe we’ll be fine after all”.

Anyway, so there I was in my $100 suit (still own it) with my $20 business satchel (still own that, too). I had interviews with all these companies whose electronics I had used as a kid:

• Matsushita (now Panasonic)
• Toshiba (did you know that this company dates back to the Meiji era?!)
• Sony
• Fujitsu (I even owned a Fujitsu laptop at the time, which I later sold to a soldier on eBay…I wonder if it runs military programs now, LoL)

Plus a couple of smaller or less-well-known operators:

• Tata (from India, and not really that small at all) and
• Fullcast (the shaaaaaaaaaaaadiest company ever; I thought the interviewer was going to take my resume, use the address to find my house and try to molest my cat; he was just that greeazy; as it turns out, my instincts were right, Fullcast are guilty of all kinds of legal violations. I don’t usually make statements this strong, but, Fullcast as an organization is the scum of the scum on the socklint of the scum of the earth).

Tata were nice. Fullcast were evil and a little scary. Fujitsu didn’t go so well because I sucked. The Toshiba people were kind of…condescending jerks who called me “君”/kimi; I don’t think that reflects on the organization as a whole, though, just those two guys. Panasonic were super-nice, but when they found out I knew some Chinese, they wanted me to do parts procurement in China, but I wanted to actually make stuff so that didn’t work out.

The very last company I interviewed with, the one for which every other interview was actually just a practice run, the one company I really wanted to go to, and the one where the interview was less like an interview and more a relaxed chat with a group of my closest 40-something engineer friends, was Sony. Funny story – the lady from personnel/international HR used keigo that I had never read in any of the keigo websites I had studied. It’s kind of a “new keigo” and actually very common in Japan right now, to the point that it’s getting recognized as legit. The keigo in question is: “-させて頂きます”/sasete itadakimasu. When I first heard it, I was always like “wait, so are YOU doing this action or am I”? From my reading, I was expecting her to use “致します”/itashimasu or just “-ます”/masu. I seriously had to confirm what the HR lady was saying by repeating it back to her, whenever she went and させて頂くed on me. She also talked at like 500 words per second even when she was sleepy (trying to save on international phone bills?), but all the rap music I had listened to had prepared me for that.

Long story short, I owned the Sony interview. I was all warmed up from the previous 5 interviews, and I genuinely loved Sony. I even owned a Sony MD player at the time, and I proudly busted it out to show the interviewers/40-something engineer buddies. This is what Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People/人を動かす called using drama and display to win the audience. It’s one thing to say you like Sony goods, it’s another to fish one out of your butt-pocket, put it on the desk and then discuss and analyze it, all in Japanese.

So all this is happening in LA. Two weeks later Sony call (ring-ring!), and it’s the rapping HR lady, whom I am by now quite used to listening to. She させて頂くed a follow-up interview for me in Japan. And so my first trip to Japan (October 2005) was very kindly paid for. It was also my first trip out of the US in almost five years. In order to line up my visa, I called the Japanese Consulate-General for my region and always spoke in Japanese. This had a HUGE effect. When you call the Japanese Consulate, they first speak in English, in a “we’ll be polite, but keep it quick, OK?” voice. But if you speak Japanese, it’s suddenly “You just done entered the root password, what is your will, okyakusama? The cherries are blossoming beautifully, please allow me to be allowed to be of service to you.” Even though I clearly was not Japanese by blood or nationality (I’m applying for a visa, right?), just by speaking Japanese I got the “citizen treatment”; the visa desk guy treated me like a long-lost son. Whenever there was a stupid rule (like the one about how college students must have TONS of money – hello! That’s why I’m looking for a job!), he waived it.

Japan was just like I expected it to be. Technology 15 years ahead of the rest of the world (ohhhhh the toilets, my boy, the toilets…even the toilets させて頂く your hiney all nice and clean). LCDs on everything. Small-but-comfortable hotel room (Shinagawa Prince, baby)! To this day, Shinagawa Prince is my “実家”/ancestral home in Japan. It’s where it all started for me. Whenever I’m lost, I’m like “if I can just get to the Shinagawa Prince everything will be OK”. The other day, I had this meeting for some IT consulting I do, and I needed an adapter to make my 3-pin laptop power thingy plug in to a 2-pin Japanese outlet, and I was like “how far is the Shinagawa Prince? They have this shop in the lobby…”, and the other IT guy was like “dude, I have a converter downstairs”, and I was like “yeah, but the Prince…”

One thing that struck me as weird was how busy Shinagawa station was even at 10pm. I was like “do these people ever sleep?” The answer is “no”. But more on that later.

Coming back to the US sucked because the immigration lady was caught between her irresistible attraction for me (see the photo on the About page for details), and her apparent duty to screw over foreigners, which only made her act more mean to hide her real feelings. I waited in line for-ever.

A couple of weeks later Sony called and made me an offer. I was super happy and I (rather foolishly) thought that being at a brand-name company meant “success”. No one among my peers, teachers or family disabused me of the notion, not that that’s their job, but…hmmm…I don’t know; it’s complex. But like I said, more on that later…

OK, so I decided to write an extension of this explanation, which you might want to read first, if you’re not already familiar with it.

Here’s the deal. What’s the usual way you try to remember, say a Chinese character (kanji, hanzi, whatever)? Write it out a kajillion times, right? Brutal, medieval, ineffective. That may have worked for Frances Xavier with oodles of time and church money, but it won’t work for the kid like you or me who wants to actually learn something to a high level in a practical amount of time. By practical I mean “only a fraction of the number of years you have been alive”.

By now you’re asking: “what snake oil are you selling, Khatzumoto?”. Shut up and listen.

That kanji that you’re trying to break your arm with by writing over and over again? You’re probably going to forget it tomorrow. By next week, that sucker will be gone. Not because of some wicked, intentional long-term social engineering project to make kanji difficult and keep the masses illiterate (a load of bull, by the way, especially since some of the most literate societies in the world were and are kanji-using societies), but because of the nature of human memory. Besides, you don’t truly need to remember that kanji tomorrow, but in 6 days, and 6 months and 6 years.

Why do you remember your own name? Because your mother sat you down one day and said it to you a thousand times until it had been indelibly etched into your little toddler memory? Because your name is special and powerful and beautiful and unique? No, and, no.

You have heard, read, written and said your name many times, not all at once but spread out over time. That’s the key to remembering something. Not cramming–not concentrating repetitions, but spacing them. Basically, if you hear or read something at the right spacing over time, you will remember it better and better. And the cool thing is that this spacing grows over a time. After a while, this space of time can grow so long as to go beyond the duration of your natural life. Put simply, even if you stopped writing, saying and hearing your own name today, and didn’t hear it again until the day before you died, you would probably still remember it.

How do you get something repeated to you over time until it’s as natural to you as your name? Well, you can do all the time and spacing management/calculations by yourself, or you can get a program to do it for you. That kind of program is called an SRS (spaced repetition system). It will choose when to show you (test you on) information.

If you want to remember that kanji, you need to review it today…tomorrow…in a week…in 2 weeks…in a month, and so on. You need to practice gradually over time, not binge on it. Writing out kanji hundreds of times is good for practicing your form and stroke order, it will help you get nice-looking kanji (it helped me), but it’s l-o-u-s-y for memorization.

Which SRS should you use? It doesn’t matter. They all basically do the same thing. Just use one.

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 that it was OK to not -ます everything — just sticking “です” or “のです” at the ends of things can be fine in terms of politeness. So this is less an issue of knowing the words, and more an issue of knowing what was or wasn’t OK etiquette-wise. It was like: “Oh, snap, I’m allowed to do that?”…[Edit: in fact, this correction may have happened before 18 months were up (but after interviewing), so...]
• In speaking, I didn’t have many (or any?) of those native speaker tools – words and phrases – for very quickly 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…