Shack in Japan

What's a Week in Japan?

I've gotten this question a few times from folks at home, so I figured I'd lay out what a typical week in my life looks like:

-Sunday: Catch up on the homework I didn't do over the weekend, occasionally go out for a mellow outing.

-Monday: Internship. Out to Akasaka to work at Six Apart Tokyo. I was just doing afternoons for awhile, but starting this week, I'll be going to the all-company meeting in the morning (mostly for my own edification), and running a little English conversation circle during lunch, so it will turn into an all-day thing.

-Tuesday-Thursday: Classes, classes, classes. Go to school, come home, eat my host mother's delicious cooking, and stay up too late on the Internet (actually, that last part applies any day of the week). Thursday night is absolute hell, because it's followed by a kanji (japanese pictograph characters) test at 9am the next day. Also, I telecommute into my internship Thursday morning, sitting in on a little chat meeting between the Tokyo and San Francisco IT teams and translating where they need it.

-Friday: Classes in the morning, quick trip home (or an hour trip home, rather) for a shower, and some sort of drinking event.

-Saturday: Much like Friday, with a jog and a little homework replacing the classes. Between Friday, Saturday, and the weekdays, I usually make it out about twice, with the standard event being your typical izakaya (traditional sit-down bar/restaurant place) party at Takadanobaba (高田馬場), the college-priced district a short walk from school.

This changes occasionally, depending on schoolwork and various invites, but life usually works out to about 5 days of studying and 2 of goofing off, producing a pretty stable budget, grades, and health level. I can easily tell that I could make life a lot easier by cutting back or not working on my Japanese classes, or much harder by increasing them. The English language classes are a joke; I think I could probably (and likely will) toss in another few credits next semester, as they take barely any work. If you're thinking about coming to Waseda, also be aware that how much time Japanese takes depends on your level and teacher; I've heard that the lower ones (I'm in 5A at the moment) tend to produce less work, but that it varies by teacher.

If you're trying to reach me by phone, the best times (translated into PST) would be Tuesday or Wednesday evening. These are my late mornings at the house, so I'm usually in a good space to chat. That said, feel free to email me if you want to talk, and I'll make time for ya.

Obama struggles with giving up his Blackberry.

This Barbara Walters interview with Barack Obama reminds me less of how happy I am that we elected Obama, but more of how ashamed I am of the last eight years. Obama will probably have to give up his Blackberry because of national security concerns, and Walters asks him how he feels about that. He tells her that, Blackberry or no, he needs a way to stay in touch with the outside world, unfiltered by the policy wonks and advisers surrounding him. He wants to "keep [his] finger on the pulse of the struggles that people are going through every day."

My first thought: I love this man. My second thought: This should not be an exceptional quality in a a president; our standards have really fallen. I feel like having a tech-savvy president that likes to read is way more valuable than anyone realizes, and is also far too long overdue.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving (and a consumerist Black Friday)!

Gmail Themes!

Gmail, my absolute favorite mail anything client ever, just rolled out themes! I can't decide between Terminal, which makes me feel like a hacker, and Ninja, which is, well, Ninja!

As you might expect from a Google product, the themes are all readable, easy to change, and don't affect the functionality of Gmail one bit. Also, if you're not as cool as a hacker or a ninja, there are several hip-but-subdued palettes for your mailin' pleasure:

Bonus: some themes appear to be time-zone-aware, and change based on your location and the time of day.

Really Cool Waseda / SILS Resource

I just stumbled on a very cool little website called Laura at Sodai (早大, a contraction of 早稲田大学).  She's a second-year student in SILS, the international school into which all the exchange students are placed. The site's a great, down-to-earth guide for foriegn students interested in (or already in) studying at Waseda. It's more targeted at four-year exchanges than one-years, but worth a read whomever you are. A few selections:

Q: Would you recommend living in a dorm, esp. Wakei?

All my guy friends who stayed/stay at Wakei can attest for the crazy rules and rowdy people, but I hear the food is pretty good.

It's important to mention that Senpai/kouhai relations are really important, so you definitely have to be willing to show a lot of respect to your seniors, even outside of the dorm.

oh, and there's a biiiiiig staircase you have to climb to get to it. my friend attests he lost a lot of weight because of it, haha.

Doesn't sound so appealing, I guess, but it's the dorm with the most culture/history...
If you were ever doing business with a Japanese company, and one of the Japanese businessmen went to Waseda, you would definitely get on his good side if you were to say you stayed at Wakei.

As well, Murakami Haruki stayed there, and his book Norwegian Wood partially takes place there. It's also very close to the former residence of Matsuo Basho.

All in all, it's a definite recommendation for extroverts who want a memorable experience,
but I couldn't recommend it for people who are more introverted.

Not a question, but part of a pre-summer post:

One of the most popular questions I was asked was specifically about what kind of students SILS are looking for. I've given advice about this in legnth before, but what I came to realize is that the question is really much easier than you would think. Who are they looking for? They're looking for you.

And I'm not trying to sound like a tool here at all... it's true. People don't apply to Waseda as a safety school, an afterthought, or because their friends are applying, too (at least I'd hope not). More often than not (Putting my friend Michael aside, haha), provided you're the kind of person that wants to go to school in Japan, you're already a great candidate. If you're applying to SILS, you're the kind of person SILS is looking for. It's up to you to stand out in an increasingly large stack of manila folders. Just show them your an interesting person, with a true desire to study in Japan. My only suggestion would have been to give them passion. Passion is a hard thing to fake, so I don't mind suggesting it. It's a boring answer, but it's just like applying for any other college.

Here's a great longer-form piece, "Climbing the Ladder." I'd truncate and link to the full post, but there aren't any div markers on the site, so here it is in its entirety.

There are many many overused statements about Japanese culture.

My personal favorite (and frequently abused) is "Japan is notable for it's four distinct seasons."
For studiers of Japan and its culture, there is a certain ledge that one reaches--on what I like to call the "Japanese Aficionado Unanonymous" bookshelf--at which point previously insightful phrases like this one are reflexively scoffed at.

"Oh please" you snob, "are you here to tell me that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, too?"

This is nature of the pathetically eclectic social order I belong to... With each successive step up the ladder, admittance to the next level becomes harder and harder.

Greenhorns don't count on this scale, but I suppose it's worth mentioning that most people start out their journeys by loving ramen, and memorizing catch phrases from their favorite anime... striking the peace sign in family photos.

But truly, the first rung of the ladder is much above this. In the earlier stages of development you have very simple tasks, such as denouncing your love of Japanese animation, saying you prefer Dramas, feigning love for acquired tastes such as umeboushi, prefering miso or tonkotsu ramen over cha-shu.

From there things get a little more tricky. Membership requires you to naturally blush red with embarassment when foreigners sprawl themselves out in the reserved seat section of the trains, learning to wash your hands before entering a shrine... you eat nigiri sushi (not that silly maki business) with your hands...

Then you get into all these aformentioned concepts about Japanese culture... "I know about Honne and Tatemae, about Aimai, about Shuudan Ishiki and Giri and Oku." "I know what Japan is really like."

Somewhere along the line you head off to Japan and then it just gets tougher and tougher. You must first declare all those cultural observational statements as plebian knowledge. You must look down on those below you on the ladder. You must reflect on your actions: do you go all the way to the Family Mart across the street to get the particular brand of tea you like, do you only listen to summer songs in the summer and winter songs in the winter, do you have a teiki on your PASMO, and did you get the PASMO because at one time it was more convenient than Suica and you knew it? Have you walked all the way home after missing the last train? Do you really like umeboushi?

What's interesting is that once you get past most of this standard qualifier stuff, moving onto the next level of Japanese snobbery requires you to renounce statements and beliefs that got you to where you were: You eat tekka maki after all, liking Anime is okay and necessary in the case of Sazae-san and Chibi Maruko-chan, Anpanman and Doraemon; you have to have cried when you saw The Dog of Flanders, you have to like Laputa best. You embrace the four seasons, you get excited by Japanese Royal Family gossip... You get above it all only to slowly sink in and flow along.

I can't quite fathom how many more shelves I need to climb in order to be able to see how high up Dave Spector is, but I do know I'll need to start liking natto before then (not to mention bleaching my hair blonde) so I'll have to stay content for the time being at the level I am at now, somewhere between reconciling my past love of anime and being able to separate newly burnable from unburnable plastics. Let me tell you, I'm pretty well up here.

So back to this statement, "Japan has four distinct seasons," I admit to it, knowing how stale the phrase has gotten, but agreeing like the good wa-protector I am. October first, I swear by the Chuo line being delayed at this very moment, the Japanese government flipped the season switch and it became Autumn. An instantaneous, almost 30degree faerenheit drop, and now it's 60 every day and cloudy. The short sleeved tshirts are away in storage, the trench coats are out, chestnut candies are back in stock, and school is back in session. (風敗かないように） don't catch a cold, as they say, because new TV announcers are in the studio and we all need to get on with fall.

Finally, the gem of the site for prospective four-years, the Sils Setsumei. It may not be a peer-reviewed piece of academic excellence, but it rings true to me, mostly corroborates with what I've learned from talking to SILS graduates and upperclassmen, and is a great place for people thinking about doing college in Japan to start.

If you have heard this, then I applaud the student who graciously drew a distinction between SILS being a drag, and first semester being a drag. I will admit without refrain, my first semester at SILS was very very easy. In nearly all of my classes, I had the best English out of everyone, including the teachers. I was forced to take compulsory English writing, wherein I had to write three measly 800-word-peaking essays on prompts, me being fresh off of a Senior Year 25-page research paper. Compulsory Mathematical Statistics was like pouring onion powder in my eyes. Yes, first semester is pretty disconcerting....

...I know after graduating SILS I'll be able to pass the JLPT (Japanese language proficiency test) level 1, which means I will be able to work in major Japanese companies after graduation. But do you want to be a doctor? Wrong school. Translator? Perfect match. International Relations or International Business? Most definitely. Culture studies? You'll have a very unique resume.

I can't decide whether the site is abandoned or just oddly put together, but it feels very late-90's to me. That said, the content's quality, so it's well worth a look.

Also, this strikes me as just the sort of site begging for a little sprucing up, advertising, and interactivity. To be the #4 Google Result for "Waseda SILS," but have no way to connect to or profit off the people accessing your page, seems a little wasteful to me. Even if you don't go to the advertisers, you could make a dandy little profit using your popularity to blackmail the SILS administration ;-)

Hacking Japanese Part 2: Anki

This is part two of my series on how to use technology to make learning Japanese easier. You can find part one here; it covers cool programs and gizmos for quick, easy computer translation.

The quick summary: Anki is a very cool computer program that helps you learn things, and retain what you've learned.I'm going to talk about it mainly with regard to memorizing Japanese kanji, but it can be used with any sort of memorizable fact.

The history: Way back in the 70's, some smart Northern Europeans were sitting around thinking about the forgetting curve, the decline of memory retention over time.Basically, this is the law that says that if you don't review something, you'll probably forget it. While one can delay the forgetting is through mnemonic techniques (stories, memory caves, associative devices, etc.), it can also be prevented through repeated review of the material. The more you review something, the longer it sticks in your head. This is pretty intuitive; I know the multiplication tables by heart because I've seen them so many times.

From Anki's website:

Anki is based on a theory called spaced repetition. In simple terms, it means that each time you review some material, you should wait longer than last time before reviewing it again. This maximizes the time spent studying difficult material and minimizes the time spent reviewing things you already know. The concept is simple, but the vast majority of memory trainers and flashcard programs out there either avoid the concept all together, or implement inflexible and suboptimal methods that were originally designed for pen and paper.

While Anki can be used for studying anything, it also ships with special features designed to make studying Japanese and English easier: integrated dictionary lookups, missing kanji reports, and more. Sample decks are also provided for Russian.

Anki's scheduling algorithm is based on the proven SM2 SuperMemo algorithm. It improves upon the basic SM2 algorithm by adding features like priorities and a revision queue sorted in order of priority.

There are other programs out there that do the same thing; Mnemosyne is probably the most popular. Here are the reasons I like Anki better (the author also has a very nicely written "Why Anki?" page):

-The interface is very zen. Here is how you use Anki to review flashcards:

1) Open program

2) Look at expression/question/prompt

3) Do you know the meaning/answer? Hit the spacebar and check.

4) Rate how well you remembered it from 0-5. Zero indicates that you've never seen it before, 1 represents a mistake, and 2-4 are for rating how easy you remembered it.

5) There is no 5.

It takes care of everything for you. If you keep rating cards zero, they'll keep popping up. Rate a card highly more than once, and the interval will get longer and longer. Make a single mistake on a card you know pretty well, and it won't reset all your progress; you'll see it again in a little bit, and depending on how hard it is then, it could come back in a day, a week, or a month for reinforcement. The system is smart, easy, and effective- I'm scoring about 80-90% across 700 vocabulary cards covering two months of classes. -It auto-generates Kanji readings, making creating Japanese vocabulary decks very simple. It can also look up meanings for you (though you need to be online to do this; I just use Apple's dictionary).

-My flashcard deck, and all the review work I've done with it, syncs between a desktop client, a mobile (and regular) website, and my iPod. This means that no matter where I am, or what gadget I'm carrying, I can review material.

-The community around it is innovative, helpful, and fun. When I started using it two months ago, the iPod client required hacking into your ipod, and compiling a local webserver inside itthat pretended to be the Anki site. Now, you can do it with a simple one-click-install plugin for the desktop client (no jailbreaking required). I found a bug in the latest release that was making it impossible to sync decks correctly, and the author of the plug-in had it fixed within a few days.

Where do you get it? Here. If you use it and like it, please consider donating to the author; he's put together an amazing study tool, and could easily have charged a nice sum of money for it.

Note for people currently in a Japanese class:

Pro-tip #1:

In terms of learning for learning's sake, the only Kanji abilities that really matter are Kanji->Reading/English, and English->Kanji. In the real world, you will never come across a situation in which you need to turn kana into kanji for the achievement of some greater goal. That said, many Japanese classes have tests with this format (a sentance with an underlined hiragana word we are expected to kanji-ize), and Anki is not set up for this out of the box.

You're going to want to grab this file, and use it to start building your deck; I've modified the basic Japanese model with two more card models. One goes from the reading to the meaning and kanji, and another goes from the reading and meaning together to the kanji. While the first might seem more like your tests, as you learn more kanji with the same reading, it will become pretty useless.

Note that there is no current way to modify the models of a deck in progress. You'll need to import all your cards to this deck, which will unfortunately void the reviews you've done up to this point. Don't sweat it, though- just keep rating cards you know highly, and it will sort itself out.

Pro-tip #2:

Use the "active tags" menu to control which models you're reviewing, so that you don't have to study production cards for Kanji you'll never need to write.

 

 

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