新しい本と次の多読

こんにちは、ブライアンです。

The next round of Tadoku (an "experimental" 2-week sprint) starts this coming Sunday. And since someone upstairs has a good notion of dramatic timing, I opened the mailbox to find a (larger than usual) package this morning.

New books!

- とある科学の超電磁砲 2-5
- とらドラ！ 1&2
- 狼と香辛料
- アイアン・サンライズ (J-translation of Charles Stross' "Iron Sunrise")

アイアン・サンライズ is a monster of a novel, 650 pages (with very thin margins.) The original English book is among my favorite books ever (the temptation to start reading it when I had the translation on order was unbearable) but nonetheless it's kind of intimidating.

Silent (Tadoku's 管理者) says this round's score doesn't count on the overall total, so I'm going to concern myself less with my pages goal (set at 700, just under half of what I got in the full month of January) and more with getting through some books. I *still* have not finished a novel since January's Tadoku -- whereas if I'd kept up the pace I set there I would have another 4-5 read by this point. Not sure what I need to do to fix this... perhaps log my reading on a daily basis regardless of Tadoku.

In any case, my goals for this Tadoku:
- 700+ pages read
- 200+ pages minimum in アイアン・サンライズ
- Top 5 for novel pages read
- Stay on top of Anki reps throughout

Looks reasonable to me.

Before all that I need to finish 涼宮ハルヒの退屈, however.

そのわけで、読みます。またねぇ。

多読２０１２年１月

久しぶりです・・・本当に６ヶ月になりましたか？

Still progressing with Japanese, and participated in the 多読 contest last month. (For those who don't know, 多読 is a foreign-language reading contest.) To put some things in perspective, I finished RTK1 in February 2011; I've been reading Japanese (for various values of "reading) for almost a year now. However, it wasn't until December that I finally finished reading a complete novel in Japanese. Now, after a month of 多読, I'm a few dozen pages short of finishing my sixth novel.

I set myself what I thought was an ambitious goal -- 1500 pages. But while I only just reached it, submitting my last pages with 30 minutes to spare, I *could* have done a lot more. (Blame falls squarely on Battlefield 3 being so goddamned addicting.)

So, here's what I read this month:

Novels:
俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない。③ (Complete)
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 (Complete; already started prior to 多読)
涼宮ハルヒの溜息　(241/275 read)
あの日見た花の名前を僕達はまだ知らない（上） (Complete)
隙間女（幅広） (Complete)
ギフテッド (80/347 read)

Manga:
とある科学の超電磁砲　第１巻 (Complete)
Various 同人誌 and other assorted manga.

In the end, I landed 10th place on the overall ranking. (7th for Japanese.) Near as I can tell, I was in the top 5 for novel pages read. (Which strikes me as pretty incredible for my first time.)

More importantly, I gained a much better feel for Japanese. Large blocks of text are becoming less and less intimidating; I'm able to push on through now without looking up every word, and still grasp the overall meaning. My reading speed is ridiculously faster now -- what took me a full day of reading to do before now takes a few hours. I have not reached the point that I could increase my vocabulary simply by reading, but I haven't fallen behind on vocab despite having ignored Anki all month. Simply put, I feel far more comfortable with Japanese now.

And isn't that the goal anyway?

以上。

アップデート

久しぶりな・・・ブライアンです。

ロックバンドに入ったよ。リードギターを弾いています（ちょっと下手のに・・・本当にいいんかな？）明日・・・いいえ、今日は初めてのセッションです。今は僕と歌手だけ・・・ベースとドラムを探しています。後でライブをやります。毎日ギターを練習します。すごく楽しいですよ。

えーと・・・他には色々あったからお姉ちゃんと子供たちは僕んちに住んでいます。混んでいますよ。いっぱい家事があります。

ああ！日本語の映画を買った：ハリーポッター３－６とＢＥＣＫ。ハリーポッターは全然面白くない（ハーマイオニーの声優が好きですけど）。でもＢＥＣＫはすごく面白い。最高の映画ですよ。（もちろん、バンドの物語・・・いい音楽ですよ。）真帆は可愛いな・・・

５時ですから今すぐ寝ます。

おやすみなさ～い！

日本語 Progress Report 4

My first novels have arrived! I've gotten surprisingly far (read: 20 pages) into 俺妹１ in the past week. It's amazing how much kanji help comprehension, even if I only know a few dozen readings at this point.

Still haven't bought any anime; Amazon sucks and does not accept PayPal (but they'd be perfectly happy to have my bank details themselves... yeah right) and of course none of the big box stores stock anything I want. (In any case, I just blew all my money on a POD HD, so I don't have the cash to buy any right now anyway.)

My sentence SRS deck is growing steadily, currently sitting at 270 cards. (All from Naoko Chino's All About Particles -- I'm going to do the whole book before moving on to other sources.) So far I've noticed a few things:

- I have to physically write out a kanji compound a few times to remember it. Reading is no problem in most cases, but being able to produce the correct kanji by hand is difficult. (Since I do all the data entry by typing (obviously) I guess I don't fully acknowledge the component characters?) Hopefully this is a short term thing and more exposure will make this easier.

- Kana are hard to write neatly. All of the odd curves are very different from the limited strokes of writing kanji. か and て give me particular trouble. (Oddly, though, み is one of the easiest for me to write...)

- Khatz (AJATT) is right about "don't bother studying grammar" -- I can already pick out the basic gist of some sentences after 3 weeks.

I've also spent time getting my immersion environment up for real. I revived my twitter account and follow a bunch of Japanese people. (NHK news, ニコニコ guitarists, character twitters, etc.) This has produced some interesting material that I plan to SRS (once I figure out the necessary readings and such -- they'll sit in a .txt file until then.) I've also started using Khatz's URL shuffler, which is all kinds of awesome -- one click and I get either a Japanese webpage or a YouTube music video. (Unfortunately, I don't see a means of separating the two so that I could chose whether I want reading material or listening material.) As an aside, Dengeki's web site is more of a time-sink than Wikipedia. Hours have been wasted...

じゃ・・・またなぁ。

日本語 Progress Report 3 - RTK1 Complete

As of 4:30 this afternoon, I am *DONE* with Volume 1 of Remembering the Kanji! 131 days after I started. Obviously, this isn't the end of kanji study. Beyond reviewing, there are the 157 kanji recently added to the General Use list that I need to learn, and I will probably go through RTK3 at some point. (I want the same level of literacy in Japanese as I have in English; that means being able to read novels, which don't abide by the General Use list all that much.)

Still, it feels pretty good to see that magic number of 2042 on my kanji SRS deck.

So where to go from here? For the next month or so I'm only going to have access to my bi-lingual sentence sources (All About Particles and two different sentence pattern dictionaries.) Not exactly the most intriguing material, but it should hopefully get me started on grammar and vocabulary.

I have nine novels on order: the first four 涼宮ハルヒ novels, and 俺の妹 1 and 3-6 (2&7 went out of stock while Paypal was doing their thing, so I'll pick those up later. 1-4 parallel the anime anyway, so I don't think I'll miss too much.) Will probably pick up the Railgun manga when I can find somewhere to buy it other than Amazon. Also looking at getting a bunch of Bandai/Funamation localized anime -- Japanese voice tracks and region 1 encoding, and a hell of a lot cheaper than importing. (Seriously. Full series of Air and Kanon for 20 bucks each? I'm there.)

And so, phase II! Begin!

日本語 Progress Update 2

According to Anki, I am exactly 3 months into my study of kanji. Some deck stats:

1230 cards
97.3% (403/414) Mature card retention
Avg Reviews (past week): 92.4/day

None of which, of course, actually means a damn thing, but I'm a whore for statistics.

I've made a few adjustments to my SRS method -- namely increasing the number of new cards per day to 25. This keeps pace better with the number of cards I add, and also means that I will finish RTK1 (plus the 157 kanji in the RTK1 Supplement) by the beginning of March. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and set myself a goal: All RTK1 kanji entered (though not necessarily reviewed) into Anki by 12:00am March 1st.

My attempt at starting sentences early has been aborted. I'm finding that the most useful kanji in RTK are coming closer to the end of the book rather than the beginning. I may know some 1200 kanji, but it's the one or two that show up *everywhere* that I don't know that will keep me from learning sentences properly. So that will have to wait, I think.

That said, I am doing more informal reading of Japanese. I've downloaded a Japanese dictionary for my iPod, and have been using that to look up words while I play リトルバスターズ. My retention of these words is pretty horrid, but that's not the point. (The point is that VNs are more fun if you actually understand the choices you're making.)

All in all, I'm satisfied with my progress so far. Kanji are no longer a slog, and I'm able to enjoy some basic reading amidst my audio immersion. The notion of visiting Japan in a year with full fluency is not as far-fetched as I once thought.

What's the Fascination with Japanese?

A few days ago I stumbled across (via AnimeYume) AJATT [All Japanese, All The Time]. I've been trying unsuccessfully to teach myself Japanese for a while now, and have no results to show. (Sure, I can read kana; I even know some grammar! Doesn't mean a damn thing for actually using the language to do more than fill in blanks.) AJATT -- and Khatz's fun-based methodology -- looks like a much better approach. Not just to learning Japanese, but to learning in general. (And job-hunting. And guitar practice...)

So, naturally, I started to implement it; I already listen to almost exclusively Japanese music -- not because it's Japanese, but because it's good. I watch anime (subbed and raw.) I don't actively watch English TV. My main exposure to the English language is written; and I'm waiting on Japanizing my reading until I'm done with at least most of RTK1.

I decided to share this discovery with my parents. "So, I found this really cool blog..."

Quoth my father: "What's with the fascination with Japanese?"

I couldn't give a good answer; settling with "I dunno, it's just... interesting." Which is bullshit, there are very good reasons that I know very well. Maybe it was the way the question was phrased, maybe it's my lingering doubts that I should even bother when I have other stuff to be doing. (What's some white dude in Virginia without a drop of Asian blood doing learning this anyway? Do you think you're Japanese or something? Pfft, weeaboo. [FWIW, Khatz-sempai suggests the second answer should be a resounding "yes."]) Or maybe I'm just spineless in social situations that do not involve a modem.

Screw. That.

So I'm going to list my reasons -- both as a post to point people towards and to confirm for myself that, yes, I do have business learning this language.

- Media/Pop Culture
This is the big one; the primary reasoning. I love Japanese rock music; J-rock is far more complex than your average American rock song. Lots of jazz changes, hell, lots of changes that are advanced for jazz -- they love the I-III-vi-IV-V progression. Some English bands do this: see Radiohead, Porcupine Tree, Rush, etc... but generally American pop music struggles to rise above the I-IV-V. (This could just be selection bias -- the best music leaves the country. What J-pop I've heard on FujiTV supports this. (Japan's currently at the mid-90's music-wise -- boy bands and girl-pop groups, eww.) Dunno, don't really care.)

I like anime. Mostly this is a genre thing -- show me an American TV show that relates to a beginning guitarist as well as BECK or K-On does. (No, seriously. If it exists I want to watch it.) Or a really well done slice-of-life mindscrew like Haruhi. Or Angel Beats, or... you get the picture.

There's more: Japanese comedy skits are pretty funny. Visual Novels are awesome (honestly, I want to learn to read so that I can get through all of Key's VNs. Clannad was amazing.) Manga... (I haven't read Negima since OneManga got C&D'd... all I can find are raws.) My best friend currently lives in Okinawa. I fully intend to visit her when I have work and can afford to. I'd rather the culture shock be a gentle buzz rather than complete alienation when I can't read anything.

- Kanji
A universal writing system for three languages? Completely eliminating the (written) barriers of technical jargon? Yeah, once you look past the whole (incorrect) notion of "Complex = Hard", kanji make a hell of a lot of sense. I want to learn a language that is this awesome. English has it's merits; logic is not one of them.

- Aesthetics
Japanese is a beautiful language. Seriously. Not just in writing, but it sounds pretty. I think it's the vowels. It's very rhythmic and bright. (On the other hand, spoken Chinese grates on me. Hard.)


Are any of these reason to learn Japanese, specifically? Not really, no. There's almost certainly good pop culture media to find in any language. There are plenty of interesting writing systems -- Cyrillic, Arabic. Other languages are pretty in their own way -- Russian, for example, is basically the diametric opposite of Japanese, very dark and moody-sounding.

Fact is, I could choose to learn any language (or not to, as it were.) But I've been exposed to Japanese the most. I'm a geek who spends time on the Internet; Japan is very prolific at exporting media -- whether they want to or not. It was inevitable I'd stumble across it. I've already picked up words and pieces of phrases by raw exposure. I enjoy it. It has potential to be useful to me in a variety of ways. Why wouldn't I learn the rest?