To start with, I’d like to express my displeasure with classes. The only thing that I gained from my two years of Japanese at college is that it would take me 10+ years to get good at it if I continued on that path. The professors’ grasp of English was equally saddening, as clearly whatever methods they used to learn it were not very good. “If these people are what I’m going to sound like in Japanese, I’m in trouble,” I thought.

I picked up the pieces from my last attempt at Heisig and began searching around for the methods people used to learn Japanese to a fluent level. On a newsgroup I found a link to Khatzumoto’s website and was stunned at how quickly he was able to learn Japanese. I found out what an SRS is and if that was the only thing I found out I was already doing great, because that meant I was able to pitch 800+ cards that were already done up for Heisig’s system (pain in the butt, right there). My two months with that SRS before going into the sentences phase showed me that an SRS really can work for securing long-term memory.

At that point, I went AJATT. Goodbye friends, non-Japanese websites, all the things I used to love. “Headphones up, drown out the English,” was my motto for those last couple of months at school. I began working through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, mining sentences in concert with reading a bit from my Japanese textbooks from school (Genki I, II).

At the same time I picked up Death Note and starting mining sentences from that. Talk about repetition! 犯罪者 this, 死因 that, and some 病死 added for good measure. Amusingly for the first month I did it wrong and translated from Japanese to English. Amusing, I know. Also lead to extreme despair for the next couple of weeks as I fixed the sentences.

Anyways, I kept reading on there about “monodics” and thought “man, I’m only two months into this, can’t do it.” Instead of admit defeat however, I just started using Sanseidou for everything. It was tough, but not impossible to understand things and it did take a while. At the beginning it was perhaps 2-3 sentences per day (with maybe 3-4 hours available) with the monodic, which is hard to rationalize against the many more that I could be learning with a bilingual dictionary (bidic?), but the more I used the monodic the more it rewarded me with vocabulary seen over and over. Now on a good day spending about 8 hours working on sentences I’m able to put in 25-30 sentences using a combination of monodics (Sanseidou, Yahoo!, and Infoseek) to reliably check my understanding using different terminology.

(However, with the addition that the sentences should be the length you mentioned, this may balloon to more per day. I was doing sentences a wee bit bigger than that as an average for a while there…)

I still run into stuff over and over that I’m not able to decipher completely, sadly, but it’s just a matter of time. Using a monodic has given more perspective on how the language works and its incredible compact and condensed nature that kanji allows it to have. So… yeah. Right now I’m at 976 sentences, but I’m pretty confident that this is going to just get faster and faster the more sentences I put into my SRS. Just like how I was only able to put one sentence in per hour before and now it’s 3 or 4, pretty soon it’s going to be even more. The “back” sides of my cards are still friggin’ huge, however, what with the circular nature of definitions.

Right now I’m starting to read about the Japanese video game scene because they were a big reason for my interest in Japan (Pokemon, oh yeah! Dragon Warrior! Woo!). So, I’m picking up a lot of stuff that I already knew from one source or another about video games. Good ol’ Japanese Wikipedia has been my best source.

“Learning a language is not a linear process. The better you get, the easier it gets for you to get better. The more you know, the more you are able to learn. Knowledge, words, structure will get stickier ― but first you have to go through this sucky period, before the curve starts to shoot up.”

is also, like, such a great quote and so true.

Anyways, there’s where I’m at after three months of sentences.

以上。That’s his story. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Email it to me! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

“The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.”

Way to bring us back to reality, Oscar Wilde. You go, boyyy.

Back on topic. Everyone loves a success story. They inspire us; they drive us; they let us know that our dreams are possible because someone’s gone done already done it. So here are links to stories of people who have had success learning Japanese.

• His Excellency James W. Heisig, Prince of the Kanji Realms himself. A lot of people give me guff and accuse me of making up all this Japanese fluency crap. But it doesn’t compare to the guff that Heisig has been getting ever since the very inception of his method. You go, boyyy. Speaking of which, there are two quotes from Heisig in this interview that I really love: “the only languages that should be learned in school are dead languages” — although, if this is anything to go by (thanks, quendidil!), maybe not even dead languages fit that rubric; I certainly don’t think they do. And then there was his thing about going to: “live in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, where he ‘played with the children there and learned how to speak.’” Good stuff.
• Manny Sultan, an architect from Egypt. In his own words, he turned his room/apartment: “into a Japanese language camp. There were kanji cards on the ceiling, the walls, all over the floor. It was a challenge. I had put myself into a corner; I had to perform or sink. I believe in that sort of situation, the human mind has no limits.” You go, boyyy.
• Arudou Debito (formerly David Aldwinckle), a naturalized Japanese citizen and political activist. Also a published author in Japanese. I love his, to paraphrase: “get the heck fluent before coming to Japan” advice. If you’re already in Japan but not yet fluent, don’t worry — just hurry up.
• Dr. Mary Sisk Noguchi, university professor and head of KanjiClinic. She learned kanji using the Heisig method, and then learned readings by reading (duplication duplication woo!) furigana books. You go…boyyy.
• Chris Houser, the guy who told me to use SuperMemo (an SRS) for learning kanji. I pestered the poor man with emails for weeks thereafter. He doesn’t actually have his success story up there, not in full anyway. Maybe you can pester him for it.

Your Success Story

But enough about other people. Now it’s your time to shine. I want to hear your success story, partly out of curiosity for myself, but more importantly, to help those like you who will come afterward. I’m going to put them up on this site, and people will read them and feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So, if you’ve been using the methods discussed on this site, and you’ve had success and you’re willing to share (you’d better be!), email me right now! Operators are standing by! “What operators?”, you say? — Shut up and start typing!

I have misled you.

In some of my SRS item examples, I have shown some reeeeeeeearry long sentences.

Wait, hold on, Kung Fu Hustle is on, and its the final fight against the Axe Gang and the frog guy. BRB…

…I love when he kicks the guys and it makes a bell-ringing sound…

K, I’m back. Yeah, so it’s all my fault. Part of it has to do with the fact that Japanese has the structural power to handle the creation of very long sentences. Since it doesn’t require the repetition and restatement of pronouns (what one might call “subjects” in English), it can create multiple, clause-length modifiers for a single “subject”, without confusing the reader. Or something like that, I dunno — I read this in a book about Japanese (a Japanese one, of course).

So, like, at some level, I thought it would be good for me to put long sentences in the SRS. Also, I probably wanted to show off that I could handle it, you know, prove how leet I was — I don’t like doing this as much as it may seem, but this is a website about how you can get reeeeeeeearry good at Japanese, so some amount of “demonstration” is probably a necessity.

Anyway, I was wrong.

Shorter Items

SRS sentence items. Yes they should be sentences, but you must kiss. That’s right, make out more. Get the tongue in there and…NO! I mean KISS: Keep It Short and Sweet. Sentences, yes; books, no. Break up long sentences if you must, I find that commas, pronouns, and particles/prepositions generally represent a good breaking point. If there is no clean, natural breaking point, then perhaps just break by length. Either way, you may or may not want to use ellipsis marks (…, ・・・) to mark your break. You might also consider incuding the original, full-length sentence in the answer section, for reference.

Right now (June 2008), I have an absolute hard upper limit of 10 characters on my Chinese sentence items, with most items being 6-8 characters long. It’s a bit more fluid for Japanese, but a hard upper limit 30 characters (kanji-kana mix), with most items being 10-15 characters long, seems about right. Earlier in your journey, you might want to go for even shorter Japanese sentences, in the 5-10 character range.

Remember: a long sentence is nothing but a bunch of short sentences stuck together. And even if a sentence looks simple, sometimes you need to make it even simpler for yourself.

Here are some examples, mostly from Momoko (source sentence and resultant sentence only shown):

• Source Sentence: 「マハティールとアブドラの対立は激しさを増し、マハティールは５月１９日、自分が３０年かけて作ってきたＵＭＮＯを脱退し「アブドラが辞めないかぎり復党しない」と捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Resultant Sentence:「捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Quoted From: Tanaka News, 国父の深謀

• Source Sentence: 「中村によると、我々の現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」
• Resultant Sentence:「現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 『「もう、今を犠牲にするのはやめよう」という彼らの感覚は、必ずしも「今さえ良ければそれでイイ」という投げ槍な刹那主義と同じではない筈だ』
• Resultant Sentence:「必ずしも・・・投げ槍な刹那主義と同じではない」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 「 21世紀初期，先進機械人的發展步伐越來越快，其中日本更是機械人科技的領導者。」
• Resultant Sentence:「先進機械人的發展步伐・・・」
• Resultant Sentence:「發展步伐越來越快」
• Resultant Sentence:「其中日本更是・・・領導者。」
• Quoted From: 2077日本鎖國

• Source Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見ると、岩の割れ目の中から泣き声が聞こえて来ます」
• Resultant Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見る」
• Resultant Sentence:「泣き声が聞こえて来ます」
• Quoted From: アンパンマンとあおばひめ

Delete (or Edit)

Sucky sentence items. They’re different for everyone. But everyone has them. You’ll know them when you see them. You’ll feel it. The dread. I see you looking at that sentence item. Yeah, you struggled to find it. Yeah, you entered it. Yeah, it seems important to know. But you know what? You’ve gone your entire life up to now not knowing that sentence; if it really matters, it’ll come up again. Right now, all it’s doing is sucking up your time and energy. Remember, you want to get QUANTITY of repetitions here. An item that’s sucky is a weed — feeding off the nutrients intended for all the other sentences. Delete it. Edit it if you really feel like it. But if editing feels like a waste of time, and for me it often does, then deletion is definitely the way to go.

Think of deletion as pruning or weeding — cleaning out a minority of overly burdensome items so that the majority can flourish. With sentence items, utilitarianism really works: the greatest good for the greatest number.

Length is not the only reason to delete a sentence item. Sentence items you just don’t quite “get”, or that you’re afraid might be wrong or awkward, also make good candidates for deletion.

This is Supposed to be Fun

Remember, sentences is not S&M. If it hurts, then it’s bad. No means no. Doing sentences should be like…popping bubblewrap. Requiring conscious effort, while being relatively easy and SUPER satisfying. Not to mention begging for repetition in an almost addictive way (addiction’s not the problem — it’s the object of addiction that matters). Doing sentences should make you feel like doing other sentences. If it doesn’t, then be aware that the fault probably lies neither with you nor with the language in question, but in individual items causing you dread. Get rid of them like you did your ’80s clothes.

Do you like how I’ve been overusing tricky, catchy titles lately?

Anyway, it lives here. You can also get to it by clicking on “Newcomers Start Here”. It’s basically just a table of contents for the site, with an extra diagram and a rant. It doesn’t quite touch every article, but it touches the important ones. I will keep updating it for almost 100% coverage (time-sensitive announcements won’t count).

Enjoy . Oh yeah — please share any ideas or comments or point out any mistakes on it if you see any.

• Original Google Search
• M1: probably my favorite collection of player specs and info
• DVD.co.jp: nice players
• Region-Free.jp: the product I saw sucked, but I haven’t looked at everything yet…anyway, it’s still good for reading
• Kakaku.com: helps you find some of the lowest prices in Japan

But back on topic. So, there’s this store called YesAsia, and they’ve been around for a while, but I never really took them seriously back then. Maybe it was because, unlike Amazon, product reviews by users were so few and far between, and when they did have them, they were sort of ungrammatical, or at least nonstandard, like: “Gilian Lweung is teh ossum!” [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [SICK!]

Also, their shopping cart system just used to feel clunky.

So, my “suppliers” were primarily Amazon.co.jp and books.com.tw. Books.com.tw has been acting up for a couple of months now - the site often won’t load properly if at all, and so it’s become a very hit-and-miss thing as to whether I can go there and actually order some cartoons, I mean, learning materials, for myself. Meanwhile, Amazon.co.jp has admittedly pretty durn high international shipping (what I used to do was ship it to my Japanese friend’s house, and then have him ship to me).

Which brings us to…(why are my posts so long!) YesAsia. While they certainly don’t have the selection of regular books that Amazon does, they do still have quite a bit, especially in the manga department. And I’d say they’re basically even with Amazon in terms of videos; they even have the Hollywood dubs. Also, they supply Japanese, Chinese and Korean stuff, fully covering the northeast Asian spectrum. As my kindergarten teacher used to call it: “full spectrum dominance”, as in: “Khatzumoto, get inside at once, or I shall use my full spectrum dominance on you!!“.

But what really got my attention focused on YesAsia was their current free worldwide shipping offer. That means, folks, that the price you see on the item is all you pay. No more waiting to “batch up” your items to minimize shipping cost. You can make a purchase as small as you want, and make more frequent purchases.

You can also use their truly multilingual interface (one of the few on the internets), to navigate in Japanese, Chinese, Korean or English.

Finally, I really like the option to pay by PayPal; I’m not particularly inclined to baramaku (scatter) credit card numbers to the four corners of the interwebs, so that some enterprising youngling, feeling his oats, can come hack into a server and take them away to sell it on IRC…

TMI?

Anyway, I’m going to go feed my cats their precious raw bird flesh now before they mutiny. Do give YesAsia a try if they have what you’re looking for. As long as the free shipping thing is going on, it should be worth it. When buying DVDs and stuff, be sure to double-check the language.

(P.S.: If you’re in Japan looking for Japanese stuff, then buying used on Amazon.jp would probably be best. But if in Japan looking for Chinese/Korean stuff, or outside of Japan looking for Chinese/Japanese/Korean materials, then, yeah, try YesAsiaing it).

Explosions, action, fast-paced hip music.

Save that for other movies. This one just has me in it. And that, friends…is enough.

Khatzumoto: The Movie. Presented in ultra high-definition flash video and shot using the latest two-year-old Japanese cellphone technology. This summer, prepare to be shocked and awed.

久々に笑わせてくれるていうか、観るに値する番組が世に出たって感じ。実はホンマにずーっと悩んでた。「せっかく日本語学んじゃったのに、結局オモロいモノ（本・番組）無いもん」って。この「金卵」に救われて感謝、感謝。「サウスパーク」並みの極上馬鹿喜劇なので、超勉強になるかと思いますぅ。独学者の皆様に是非お薦めしもす。

Well folks, if in doubt, give your SRS items to someone who’s never had any exposure to kanji and see how they hold up. Play your Chinese/Japanese audio-picture question to an untrained person and see if they can produce the text (assuming you don’t give away the text in the picture… ). I think you’ll find that they’ll be quite unable to write “dementia” just from being clued in about sicknesses and dodginess, or write down “港股暴跌逾千點” stroke-for-perfect-stroke just from seeing a picture of a number and an arrow.

Adding pictures for sentences, and stories for individual kanji items, I think, is completely non-detrimental. Remember, just because it’s not painful, that doesn’t mean you’re not learning (or perhaps more accurately, “acquiring”).

I’m reminded of my own recent experiences with Cantonese. I’ve watched the movie The Incredibles, in Cantonese, dozens of times. The most recent time (yesterday…2-3 times) one of the things I picked up was “即刻/immediately/right now”, as in “過嚟呢度，即刻/Come here this INSTANT”, in the scene where Mr. Incredible gets yelled at by his boss, and his boss is being really condescending and pointing down at the ground (”here”), telling Mr. Incredible to get away from the door. The next day (today), I was watching a different Cantonese show that I’ve also seen a lot of (a news magazine program called “事必關己”/Infolink), and for the first time, I understood what the presenter had been saying at the beginning of the show, each time he does the voiceover intro. He says: “即刻,事必關己/(translation: Coming up on Infolink/Next — Infolink/And now, it’s Infolink)”. Before it was just a sound to me; now it is a word.

What I’m trying to say here is a lot knowledge can be transferable (duh). Stuff learned in “easier” contexts — more obvious contexts — transfers itself to contexts with less “supporting information”: less obvious contexts. In a sense that’s why the sentences method and much of learning itself works — those simple i+1 sentences you learn will enable you to read entire books that are new to you; they will even enable you to infer both the reading and meaning of completely new words, and even the meaning of kanjiless words. This is analogous to how many people start their reading with manga before moving on to straight text — I don’t think anyone could reasonably contend that: “you’ll never learn to read Japanese if you look at manga, because the pictures will be too strong for your feeble Terran mind”. So don’t worry. Enjoy that it seems easier. Frankly, I think this relative effortlessness is a step in the right direction. The relative ease with which you learned language as a child (very little *conscious* effort, but tons of *actual* effort in terms of amount of exposure) should be within your reach as an adult; I think this puts it there. Let go of your addiction to struggling (lol…too melodramatic?), and focus on acquiring rather than learning.

Let me reiterate: you do not need to be told or be aware of what is happening for it to be happening. You don’t need to measure and “feel” yourself growing taller: just focus on eating healthy food. People seem to forget that they are not computers; you do not need to be explicitly told rules like a compiler; humans don’t need XML — we know bold type and list elements and surnames when we see them. When we look at something, we know where shapes begin and end: we don’t need to count pixels and color levels.

It could be said that your brain is a computer, but it is one of a thoroughly different sort from the current artificial kind. It is the most powerful fuzzy inference engine out there. It figures stuff out, it matches patterns, without a word of explanation. In fact, quite often when people try to explain something, those explanations are totally incompatible with the brain’s internal data representation formats and so they just end up creating confusion. Generally, all your brain needs to do to get it is to observe the data — any data. No one needs to tell you a rule; you’ll put it all together on your own, often unconsciously. To acquire a language then, all you need do is show yourself the data. Your brain will do the rest. Trust it.

Anyway, screw theorizing — I certainly don’t know enough about this stuff to theorize. Just do it. Results pwn everything.

And remember, dude, I am still talking about writing kanji by ear, which Noam Chomsky is said to have called: “phreaking hardcore l33t haX0rN355″.

One thing that writing this blog has made me aware of is that I always seem to be hustling for new and better ways to do things. And, you can take that a bunch of ways, but I take it to mean that I have massive room for improvement. When I was just writing ex post facto about how I had learned Japanese it was easy for you good-looking, well-proportioned, intelligent people reading this, and even for me as the writer, to silently fall into the trap of thinking that the method had just dropped into my lap after maybe a tiny little bit of thinking, and that I spent the rest of the time simply cranking out this already-perfect method. This idea is so easy to fall into, that a reader named reineke made this comment on this post:

Is it still the old proven method? Are you watering down things a bit too much? I know you can do it, but is it wise?

Wow, like, I had no idea that I was already “established”, hehe. But, like I said in my response to that comment, there is no “proven old method”, at least as far as I’m concerned. There are just related iterations; you stay at one iteration as long as you know it to be the best choice for the scenario at hand, but once the scenario changes, or you find better choices, then you tweak or change things appropriately. So, it is still a 99% perspiration to 1% inspiration deal, only that some of the inspiration comes in at the beginning, and some comes during the perspiration.

Remember, also, that one of the stated aims of this site, in addition to providing an account of how I acquired Japanese, is to share: “new cool tools that I did not have, and that would have made things much faster and easier for me”. New methods fit that description.

SRS Image Hack

Anyway, back on topic, thanks to a couple of readers (like Saleem/Kid Ethnic), I’ve had the opportunity to rediscover some information to which I had actually been previously exposed, but on which I had never acted extensively. Specifically, this piece about using multiple senses when learning, and this article about how children learn (the latter originally from Slashdot).

And, it led me to make yet another tweak to how I do my SRS items. First my report on the tweak — it works really well for my active recall, much faster than ever before. Why? Because it all comes down to associating a specific image — one or more actual cartoons or photographs — with each SRS item. This is what it looks like (the format is exactly the same as that explained here, except with pictures added).

Example 1: Learning a proper noun without sentence/phrase context (name of a famous actor)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of XinhuaNet
[Audio]
ANSWER:
劉德華
[Actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
Lau Dak-wa
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 2: A sentence/phrase (newspaper headline about Hong Kong stocks tanking over 1000 points — the image is pretty close the audio/text content, but to the extent that it doesn’t actually give it away, it’s still good)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of Epoch Times
[Audio]
ANSWER:
港股暴跌逾千點
[Actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
gong gu bou dit yu chin dim
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 3: Sentence/phrase (article headline about whether or not microwaving food causes cancer)
QUESTION:

Image Courtesy of ENorth
[Audio]
ANSWER:
微波爐加熱食物致癌？
[actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio; this text is on the long side; you generally want to keep things shortish, even as you get better]
mei bo lou ga yit sik mat ji ngaam？
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

Example 4: Sentence/phrase (”Shut up! I’m talking!”)
QUESTION:

Images Courtesy of 510q and Scott Hong
[Audio]
ANSWER:
你收聲! 我話事!
[actual text; my task is to write this out correctly from hearing the audio]
nei sau seng! ngo wa si!
[phonetic reading for confirmation of audio…I do not put this in the answer due to not wishing to depend on it as a visual cue that does not exist in actual Chinese]

So, anyway, like I said, it’s really helping me with actively remembering all this stuff, because the audio I’m hearing is being directly associated with actual concrete images. Now, when I think of Andy Lau/劉德華’s face, I can say his name; I would have been able to do that eventually, but this makes it all happen much sooner.

This sort of thing, I think (not my own all-original idea, by the way) is one part of what’s so effective about the methods children unknowingly use — when a kid learns something like “the glass broke” in her so-called native language, she almost always gets to hear something breaking (like glass), and see that cracked glass and feel the shock and have shards strewn all over the floor. When a kid learns about bee stings, cuts, “that smarts”, “pain” and “ow!” in a “native” language, she may be right in the middle of it. This is powerful stuff. And kids get this with everything — they don’t just get random words in a list, they get sentences, and not just sentences, but sentences with visuals and sounds and emotion. And these are the kind of things that are bound up strongly in memory.

Like one of my teachers once said, most Americans can remember where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001 because that was my sister’s birthday and the news was carrying it like crazy, everywhere you looked: “Khatzumoto’s Sister Turns 31″, “The Big 3-1 for ‘Moto Sibling”, “Over 30 for the First Time: Khatzumoto’s Sister Moves On”, “Nine Years to 40: Khatzumoto’s Sister Ripens”; and then the appointed President of the US was like “Well, we’ve got to celebrate! You only turn 31 once!”; it was a huge deal. The shock of realizing my sister was turning 31 helped bind what people were doing at the time, to their memory. Now you don’t always have to use shock — humor, grossness, and even just a good, decent, appropriate image (like a picture of a wireless router with a sentence about wireless internet), will also do. But don’t take my word for it — read that biologist’s stuff.

So, anyway, lots of words to explain a little tweak, but there you go…such are the inefficiencies of human communication/my writing.

Anyway, go ahead and give it a try…it may sound counter-intuitive, but you might be pleasantly surprised. And feel free to share your results with it.

By the way, the pictures are just googled. They’re for personal study so, you know, whatever, just download them.

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.

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。

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!

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…

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.

• 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…

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!

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).