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!

Winter 2011 Anime

Taking a break from talking about my Japanese project...

Wow, the new season of anime blows. Anyone else getting the distinct feeling that everyone's shoveling the fanservice-heavy shows out the door now before the Tokyo ban goes into effect?

What I'm watching this season:
- Index II (con't) - Ah, what the hell. Yes, the plot makes no sense, but at least they try. And there's Mikoto, Kuroko, and Last Order to make it worthwhile. (TBH, another season of Railgun would be nice after this...)

- Hourou Musuko - So far, best anime this season. Takes its subject matter seriously and doesn't slip into stereotypes like EVERY western show does when dealing with sexuality. (If someone who is transgender/transsexual show up in a Western show, it's always "you're ex is now a man, baby!") Also, excellent music, excellent art, excellent animation.

- Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? - Well, it's funny. And then it slips in a bit of drama for about 20 seconds. Not quite sure what to make of it. (And good lord, isn't the tsundere loli archtype dead yet? It's a parody of a parody at this point.)

- Oniichan no Koto Nanka Zenzen blahblahlongname - I have no excuses. This is a terrible, terrible show, but I keep watching, like a slow-motion trainwreck. The mother, at least, is hilarious: "Please don't get arrested!" Otherwise, it's taking Ore no Imouto, stripping everything that made that series good, and playing up the incest to the point that KissXSis looks classy. (At least those two were upfront about it... I guess?) Oh, and the art is terrible -- someone needs to get the animators to look at some real people every now and again.


Non-airing series I'm watching:

- Planetes - Wow. Realistic SF is rare enough; realistic SF outside of novels is unheard of. Tanabe is what a female character should be; not too brash, not a doormat, perfectly capable of working physically, but not a complete badass. In other words, a realistic woman. Sooo rare in fiction. (Fee is pretty awesome too; reminds me of Zoe from Firefly. Don't get between that woman and smoking, even if you are international terrorists!)

- Kimi no Todoke - Just trying it at this point, since the new season piqued my interest. Meh. Shoujo series are okay in small doses; marathoning one leaves me twitchy.

- Darker than Black - Seems to be along the same lines as GITS:SAC. Always a good thing.

I also have the rest of Ichiban Urshiro no Daimaou sitting around, but Konoe is the only saving grace for that show.

Still waiting for KyoAni to show up again. Preferably with a Little Busters! anime or moar Haruhi.

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.

日本語 Progress Update 1

This blog has laid dormant for a few months. The reason is that I've gone ahead and begun to learn Japanese hardcore, following the general ideas presented at All Japanese All The Time (AJATT). I'm starting to feel confident about my progress, and I've begun to make a few changes to suit my needs. And I feel like writing about it.

So, currently I'm working on Heisig's Remembering the Kanji 1. (Currently sitting at 752 cards in my Anki deck; 25 of which are not yet active -- more on that later.) I've made a few attempts at changing up the card structure, but I'm finding that Keyword + Mnemonic on the front and Kanji on the back is the best for me. Keyword only tends to force me to use visual memory rather than the mnemonic -- which is fine for, say, 女, but not so much for 憂 or 愛. I am finding that even with the story on the front, I don't tend to need the mnemonic to recall mature kanji that I find in my reading. So that's good.

Regarding SRSing, I noticed (thanks to Anki's graphing feature) that I had a tendency to add a crapload of kanji all at once (generally around 40-50 in one day) and then not add any new cards for several days afterwords. This is not very efficient, and was also not very fun. But I have found a solution: I have capped my new card count to 20 per day; if I have more than that, they roll over and show up the next day. This is very useful; it gives me a concrete goal to reach each day for new cards (I want the "new total" to be at least 20 at the end of the day) and also allows me to add extra cards without the massive load of new card reviews that make me burn out and stop adding. This past week has been a solid 20 new cards a day; 140 for the week. Both my stats for cards added and new cards seen are up. So I'm calling this a success.

My immersion is less of a success story. While I listen to a great deal of J-rock, and watch a lot of (raw) anime, I still don't reach anywhere near 100% immersion on a daily basis. Not even close: generally closer to 60%. Not necessarily because I'm listening to English instead, but because I'm not listening to *anything*. I suspect some more music-hunting may be in order.

On the other hand, I do quite a bit of "reading". While it's somewhat frustrating to try to read when you only know a third of the basic kanji (and most non-manga materials use even more kanji than the that), it is still satisfying when you do actually understand something. Also, some sources are just so damn fun I don't care if I understand everything or not; currently for me this is リトルバスターズ. Visual novels are awesome -- lots of text, and you can generally get the gist of what's going on from visuals and the tone of dialogue.

Finally, I've decided to make yet another adjustment to the AJATT system. Khatz often says (rather forcibly) that one needs to know the kanji before beginning to study sentences. On the whole, I agree with him -- kanji contain all the meaning of the Japanese language, not knowing kanji is illiteracy. His warnings seem to be framed as "don't do kanji 'on the side.'" However, I see no issue in learning sentences to which I already know the kanji, so long as the kanji remain the primary focus. (Case in point: the first sentence I added to Anki: "妹の名前は高坂桐乃。" -- from the 俺の妹 light novels. I know every kanji in this sentence.) Since I have the time available, and don't want to charge through RTK too fast (and jeopardize my retention of the kanji), I think this will be a good exercise. At the very least, seeing kanji I know in the context of sentences on a regular basis will enhance my memory of them (reducing failure rates in my kanji deck and letting me focus on the newer kanji). We shall see.

Will probably post again in the New Year. じゃね。

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?

Post-Mortem: K-On

There seems to be a popular opinion on the internet (held, apparently, by both fans and critics) that K-On is nothing but moe fanservice. This is false, but it's an understandable misconception, especially after Season Two. This isn't to say that moe doesn't play a huge part in the series. KyoAni did the smart thing from the get-go, targeting two audiences: music fans and moe otaku. This is nothing new; it just makes sense from a business standpoint to target as wide an audience as possible.

However, somewhere between the first season and the second, KyoAni's approach to this changed. S1;Ep3 - Yui's studying for her exam; glances at her guitar case, shakes head and goes back to studying. Cut to her sitting on the bed strumming away. Anyone who has ever played guitar (if they didn't give it up after fifteen minutes) knows this is 100% accurate. But the gag still works for non-musicians as "hurr, Yui's a ditz"; both music geeks and moe geeks are satisfied. Similarly, almost every episode makes sure to balance the music/band and slice-of-life antics. (The only notable exceptions are Ep7 and Ep13.)

On the other hand, Season Two focuses a lot more on the slice-of-life side of the story. (See: Kyoto trip, Azusa's acid trip in EP13.) Which is fine -- the girls are sufficiently rounded characters that this works well. But it detracts from the multiple-audience appeal. As a musician, and someone who mainly likes the series for the music, it's a bit tedious. The Kyoto trip, for example, bored me, but the follow-up episode focusing on Azusa was fine, what with the jazz club practice and Azusa, Jun, and Ui's jam session. The opposite problem's here too: I doubt many non-guitarists really understood most of the jokes in Ep6.

Why the difference? I'm pretty sure there are a few different reasons.

First, Season One has a lot more content in much fewer episodes. This makes sense; until the anime aired, K-On was way below the radar (to be fair, a manga about music will inevitably be missing something.) So, KyoAni made a short season to cover the manga storyline to that point (two years in-universe). There's absolutely no room for filler when you're compressing a series. (And KyoAni is remarkably good at this -- probably learned from adapting Key's VNs.)

When the series was a hit, this left them with a problem; the girls have only one year of high school left, but to make as much of an impact with Season Two as they can, KyoAni wanted to go with a full 26 episode season. Twice the season length, half the content, it makes sense that there would be an increased focus on the slice-of-life part of the series.

The music aspect of the series is more difficult and expensive than slice-of-life. Animating the girls playing their instruments is pretty involved. The music must be written and recorded -- regardless of whether it's a full song or someone practicing acoustically. (See: the second training camp in Season One, where Yui and Azusa practice Fude Pen Boru Pen. Some sound engineer somewhere had to deal with a recording headache there.)

Finally, with the increased popularity, KyoAni wanted to cash in. There's no point overlooking it; merchandise is massive business. And moe sells. From a business standpoint, figurines and pillows and god-knows-what-else will have a lot more return on investment than, say, releasing a signature guitar. (Granted, there are some cheapo guitars knocking off the girl's instruments but cheapo guitars are usually shit as actual guitars (which the music otaku watching the show will know.))

The final bit of evidence is the music: purely looking at insert songs (ignoring B-sides, image songs, etc.) Season One has three inserts (Fuwa Fuwa Time, Koi wa Hotchkiss, Fude Pen Boru Pen) while Season Two has four (Pure Pure Heart, LOVE, Gohan, U&I, Tenshi). Two extra insert songs despite the season being twice as long.

My point, after wandering a bit: K-On is by no means purely a moe slice-of-life series. However, parts of Season Two are; and I think this is partly responsible for the misconception. (Amplified, of course, by trolls complaining about shows they don't watch.)

It will be interesting to see which route the Movie takes.