Matsue Maiku

School

2011-12-11T00:25:00.000-08:00

I'm done with my first quarter of school. It was really tough. I think that the next quarter will be a bit easier though since I'm taking less credits and will have had some experience with TESOL. Going from zero to master's level courses was no small task, but I think that I have really learned a lot about linguistics. Grammar has never been my strong point, but I managed to get an 86% in my Pedagogical Grammar class. I also got an A in my co-requisite Intro to Linguistics class. I do not yet know what grade I have in Phonetics and Phonology, but my last test score was one of the highest in the class, so hopefully it's not too bad. I think that I will have to take another Pedagogical Grammar class before I graduate. I'm kind of glad because this class taught me a lot about parts of speech and why they are used the way that they are, but I am still lacking on some things like commas.

I don't think that I have ever been so close to dropping a class as I was this year with my Phonetics and Phonology class. My teacher is really smart and has been teaching for a long time, and I don't think that he realizes how hard some of this stuff is to learn. After I took the last test before the final, I was sure that I did miserably on it. I was the first one to leave the room, and it wasn't because I felt like I knew the material better than everyone else. I just didn't know what else I could write. Somehow I ended up getting a 96.5% on that test and I had to double check that the first number wasn't just a sloppy 7 or something. Anyway, things are looking good.

As far as Japanese is concerned, my Japanese has gone to crap. These TESOL classes took up all of my time and I ended up not really studying Japanese at all. I went to one Japanese language club meeting. I thought that it would be Americans and Japanese students hanging out and bullshitting, but it turned out to be more like a straight up Japanese lesson. It was pretty aggravating to know that so many things that I had a strong grasp on in Japanese had become so hazy. It's all still in my brain somewhere, I just can't access it as easily as I used to and I doubt myself a lot on the things I do say in Japanese. If I can break myself away from Skyrim during the winter break, maybe I can get some of my Japanese back.

Last piece of news. Kim and I are going to stop trying to NOT have a baby. I'm 25 and a half now and I'll be 26 by the time it's born if she gets pregnant today. I think that I'm probably as ready as I'm going to get for this. We've been together so long now that I was beginning to feel like we would never have a baby. The only real thing that has been holding us back these last few years has been money. She works at a local grocery store and I had a job as a cook for a while until I quit it for school. You can't really afford a kid on those kind of wages, well you can, but it would suck. If I don't screw things up with school, I should be able to get a real job teaching ESL in Japan or even the U.S. if I have to. It can't pay worse than retail or working at a family restaurant right? I sure as hell hope not!

My next blog post will probably be a while since I'm so busy, but I don't intend to stop posting. This blog seems to be more of a public journal than anything else, so I doubt that I'm letting anyone down by not posting regularly.

Busy busy busy

2011-09-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

Fall quarter has begun at CWU, and for me, that means graduate TESOL courses. The classes are much more difficult than I had anticipated, but I am also excited to be learning so much. I did not expect to be learning so many different things in which I have always been interested. For example, I have always loved reading and writing fiction, but I felt that my weak grammar skills held back my writing. I also like to listening to poetry, but I have had difficulties in writing it due to not being able to hear syllabic stresses. Every week I will be observing ESL classes at my University and taking notes on the teaching methods of several different professors. This should really help out my real world English teaching skills.

I feel like this major will be a big step in the right direction for me both academically and professionally. Hopefully, I can keep up with the workload!

I hate how quickly time goes by sometimes

2011-09-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

At the end of this month it will have been two full years since both Kim and I left Japan. It will be at least another full year until we get the chance to go back. I've had it on my mind to work in Japan as a teacher since I was 18 or maybe a little bit earlier, so that would mean that I've been working towards this goal for at least seven or eight years.

Today, I tried to watch some of Kim's youtube videos from back then, but they were making me feel terribly depressed. However, as Joe Dirt would say, "ya gotta to keep on keepin' on," so I will. One day I will achieve my goals. Hopefully, I'm nearer to them today than I was two years ago.

School is going to start soon!

2011-08-30T20:32:00.000-07:00

Studying Japanese has been going alright, but it could be better. I ended up needing to go to the dentist four different times, and now I have pain in two of the teeth that got fillings, great. I also visited Seattle with my wife and her sister for three days. We went to a zoo, a mall, and an Asian grocery store called Uwajimaya.

I bought some books for my TESOL classes, and they seem difficult and boring to be honest. This year looks like it will be a tough one, but it will be all worth it if it leads to a decent job one day. I have noticed that my grammar is on the weak side, so I have added some grammatical parts of speech (parts of speech are things like correlative conjunctions and verbs and stuff) to my Anki. For the most part, I think that I can write decently, but I have forgotten the names of many of the finer parts of speech and some grammar rules seem hazy.

I was hoping that I would be able to study ahead on my own before classes started, but most of this stuff seems like it could be learned more easily with the help of a teacher. The grammar book already assumes that the reader has mastered English grammar, but I don't feel very confident about grammar specifics. The phonology book focuses on how sounds are made and has it's own writing system. It's kind of hard to explain as I don't understand it very well myself yet, but the scribbles that are supposed to be simple English sentences don't look like English at all and have strange symbols that I don't have the foggiest clue about how to type. The last book, called Teaching Pronunciation, seems more practical as far as ESL work goes.

It looks like I'm going to have my work cut out for me this year. I hope it all goes well.

Things are going fairly well

2011-07-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

Since I quit my job, I've had a lot more time to study, and I've noticed that my Japanese is getting better. I need to work on grammar and relearn some stuff that I haven't used in a long time but that shouldn't take long. On the other hand, I have been dealing with a cold that has left me feeling really weak and tired for almost a month which has made keeping up with my exercise and study routines more difficult. I went from being able to bench-press 285lbs to being able to lift 245lbs twice, which is actually an improvement over last week when I could only lift 225lbs once. I think I'm on the up-side of this cold now though, so I'll soon be glad to have more energy to work towards goals and maybe even have a little bit of fun.

On an unrelated note, I went to the Silverwood theme park in Idaho recently and had a blast! It was so much more exciting than when I went there before. I heard that the ride that the family rides in the Step-By-Step show's introduction was actually from Silverwood; however, they altered it for the show. I'm kind of afraid of heights, but I forced myself to go on all of the scariest rides. The ride called Aftershock added a few white hairs to my eyebrows I think. I have never been on a ride that has even come close to being as scary as that one was, and I hope to never ride one like that ever again.

They had a water park there too, which I don't remember them having when I was a kid. I made Kim ride two of the three water slides. The first one was completely dark on the inside and wound downwards like a corkscrew and the second one was a near vertical drop. We had a ton of fun at Silverwood, but the ride home was a different story. Kim's friend drove and was nearly dosing off at the wheel the entire ride home. I wish she would have let someone else drive.

Using psychology techniques to aid studying

2011-06-20T20:36:00.000-07:00

I've only had to take one or two psychology classes in college, but I have always had an interest in it. My wife majored in psychology and kept all of her books, so I decided to open one up and see if I could learn anything useful from it. I ended up choosing a book called "Don't Shoot the Dog!" by Karen Pryor. A lot of the methods in the book are either common sense or things that I have already learned when we went over B.F. Skinner's portion in the psychology book we were using for class.

I wouldn't say it's an exhilarating read, but it does cover a lot of really useful teaching and training methods. One thing that I have used in the past (which just so happened to be in this book) to break up procrastination was to reward myself with an energy drink for just beginning my day of studying. Karen Pryor calls this phenomenon "delayed starts", but it's basically the same thing as procrastination. There is an anecdote in the book which tells about how a chicken would be rewarded with a single piece of grain for 100 button pushes; however, the chicken would be slow to begin pushing the button as the number of button pushes increased further.

For a chicken, pushing a button 100 or more times is probably just as boring and annoying as it would be for us. This is why I believe that it is so important to try and break up studying Japanese into a bunch of little sections so that studying doesn't become a single daunting task. Even so, it can be difficult to start a day full of studying goodness when one knows that it's actually going to be a long time before everything is done. I had stopped rewarding myself before I begin studying my ANKI word lists and I have again begun to procrastinate. So in the name of learning and science, I'm going to start rewarding myself before I sit down to study again and see if it breaks up my lazy streak! If any of you are having procrastination issues, you should give this little trick a shot and see if it helps.

The lost blog

2011-06-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

Kim and I have been busy looking for houses/ apartments for rent and have had horrible luck. The place we are living in would be fine if it had another room, but as it is now, we have to stack everything up and keep a lot of things in boxes so that we can walk around without stepping on things. We live in a rural college town so housing prices are steep and so is the competition from other college students. Our old apartments were nice, but management changed and they jacked up the rent. For the price we were paying we could have been renting a much bigger house and wouldn't have had to deal with noisy neighbors surrounding us.

Work has been getting me down more than usual lately. After I found out that I wasn't going to get into JET, I wrote my boss a letter which said that I had planned on staying with the restaurant I work at for a year and a half. They had been paying me less than my co-workers who had less experience than I because they didn't see any need to give a raise to someone who wasn't planning on working for them long term. I was also planning on working through graduate school part time. I put myself through undergraduate studies by working as a line cook before, but I feel that I could have learned a lot more if I had just studied full-time.

As I read more about graduate studies and the kind of work and publications I would have to do, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to work and go to school at the same time. My grades have always been slightly above the 3.0 range while I was working, but I really want to do better than that for my master's degree. There were many times when I wished that I had more time to work on a paper, but I had to go to work instead. This is also the first time in my life that I feel like I can afford to go to school full time. I'm sure that I will have to go into some school debt, but at least the course only lasts one year. If I am able to get a real job after I am done, I should have no problems paying off the debt and will be able to make wages above the poverty line for the first time in my life.

Anyhow, my boss who is also a friend of mine is pissed off at me now because he feels that I lied by changing my plans. I didn't intentionally lie and have offered to work for up to two full months until he can find someone to replace me. Since the time that I had written the note, I had completely forgotten about when I said that I would leave. I thought I said that I would at least work with them until school started. I think the real reason he is mad at me is that, that letter got me a significant raise and because I am one of the best employees at the restaurant. I have more experience working for this chain of restaurants than 98% of the kitchen staff and will not be so easily replaced.

Working at this job for so long feels like I have been taking the 8th grade over and over for years. I actually liked working as a line cook for quite a while, but eventually you master everything and it just feels like you are wasting your time. The job has become so mind numbing that I literally space off the majority of the time I'm there. I don't have to even think about what I am doing, and I already do better work than my co-workers.

As far as Japanese stuff goes, I have been between doing really awesome at studying and not studying at all. It's hard to get the ball rolling once you have stopped for a period of time, but I haven't given up by a long shot. Hopefully, we can find a replacement for me soon so I can study 14 hours a day if I please. That's going to be awesome. I'm going to try and surround myself in Japanese everything until I feel like I'm studying in Japan again.
If you read even a little bit of this post, thank you.

I'm still alive!

2011-04-22T01:42:00.000-07:00

I thought that I would have all of my graduate application paper work done by now, and it almost is. I'm just waiting on a couple of people to submit their references. In other news, I've started playing James Bond for the Wii. It's a lot more fun than I expected. The people who play online are really sneaky and the higher level people have the best weapons. I'm getting back into the groove of ANKI also, but in just a little over a month I ended up with 4,000 words and kanji to review. I'm going to really need to crack down.

GRE test

2011-03-30T02:20:00.000-07:00

I just took the GRE test and I am fairly certain that I did well enough to get into the Master's Program that I want. Now I just need to get recommendations from three of my previous professors and write a cover letter. I stopped studying Japanese for almost a month so that I could prepare for this test and I am really excited to get back to it. There are around 3,000 words that have piled up on my Anki program in that short amount of time.

Good stuff

2011-02-25T01:53:00.000-08:00

The more I researched English teaching jobs in Japan, the more I began to see certain trends. The game has changed a lot since I began reading up on teaching in Japan almost ten years ago. These days it seems that Japanese Companies are a lot pickier about applicant qualifications. Most companies now require a TESOL certificate and teaching experience. If an applicant is currently living in Japan, that also seems to be a big plus.

Although these jobs are requiring more qualifications than previously, the pay is not really that great. That is, unless you have a Master's Degree in Linguistics or TESOL. With the way things are now, if I spend the time and money to get a certificate rather than a degree, I will still be at the bottom of the barrel. So I have decided to switch from an intended Japanese Literature Major to a TESOL Major, which my University just so happens to offer. The program only takes a year to complete too!

I'm almost glad now that things have worked out the way they have. If I had gotten accepted into the JET Program, I would have teaching experience, but I would not have ended up furthering my education nearly so soon. My future should be more secure with a Master's Degree and it is one step closer to a PHD if I decide to go that route down the road.

That being said, Kim is still pretty depressed that we will be stuck in our small town doing jobs as unskilled labor. She worked really hard throughout her entire educational career from elementary school through to college and has only a piece of paper to show for it. A Bachelor's Degree today is like a High School Diploma was 20 years ago, basically useless.

Full of Fail!

2011-02-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

So after much waiting, my wife and I found out that we are not even going to get interviews for the J.E.T. Program. We are both pretty down in the dumps about it, because it was something we had both planned on doing for years. I don't know about her, but I have been planning on doing the J.E.T. thing since my junior year of high school and I'm almost 25 now. Applying was so stressful and I had spent a decent amount of time on my Statement of Purpose paper. I felt really good about it too.

I have looked online at some other J.E.T. participants Statement of Purpose papers and some of them are chock-full of errors, yet they had no problem getting accepted. It makes me wonder what could have gone wrong with my paperwork. But really, all of the wondering in the world isn't going to change the fact that I'm not going to get into the program this year. All I can do now is apply to a different company with a worse reputation or possibly move to the west-side and get into a Japanese language school.

My real goal right now is to become fluent in Japanese. I don't necessarily need to be in Japan to do that, but it sure wouldn't hurt. I don't know how we are going to afford to live on the west-side without jobs in hand and a cheap place to live. Kim is thinking about going to school there and earning a Master's Degree in Psychology. That would be awesome, but I don't see how we are going to pull that off when we're poor.

It also looks like my hopes of having children soon have gone out the window. It's looking like it might be five years before we are in any kind of position to afford them. Kim's parents are really old too, and I'm afraid that if we wait much longer they may die before they can see any grandchildren.

Please excuse my ramblings for today. I've got a lot on my mind and nothing seems very clear right now. Thanks for reading.

Frosty Update

2010-12-21T00:14:00.000-08:00

Hello all. So I have been pretty busy this month. I had to replace the radiator on Kim's car (Toyota Celica). I have replaced one on an 80's model Chevy before and it seemed like it was five times easier to do than the Celica. Now it is having battery issues and it is a relatively new battery so that is annoying. It is also leaking oil around the spark plugs and I have already replaced the tube seals twice and the valve cover gasket once in order to fix it. I hope that little car will keep on keepin' on just a little longer.

I just purchased an Alienware m15x laptop for a little over two thousand dollars. I am still having a hard time believing that I dropped so much money on a laptop that will probably become obsolete within a few years, but then again, I went with what I thought was a decent yet cheap computer last time and it only lasted 2 years and gave me nothing but problems. Some people have looked at me like I am stupid for spending that kind of money on a laptop when I could have just bought or made a much better desktop for less money, but the problem with that is, I am not planning on staying in America indefinitely. I would have to go through a big hassle and much expense to ship a desktop computer all the way to Japan and perhaps back.

Of course, since I bought an expensive new laptop I had to buy a newer game to test it out right? Well, that is what I am telling myself anyway. I bought Age of Conan. It seems like a pretty good game so far. It is a lot like Diablo in some respects, but the graphics are much better. The new computer can play it on decent settings with between upper 40FPS and 112 FPS, so that is pretty sweet! I did not realize it was one of those games that you necessarily had to play online though. I thought it was just online capable. Maybe this will be a good thing though and it will keep me from wasting too much time playing games when I could be studying Japanese.

On the topic of Japanese, I recently just found out that I have mastered all of the JLPT level 2 vocabulary! I did not notice it at first; but apparently, the JLPT Anki program that I am using teaches the level 2 vocabulary first and then moves on to the others. Right now I am studying level 4 stuff and it is super easy. I am also studying Kanji on their own from the Kyouiku Kanji list on Wikipedia and that has been pretty helpful. I have to be very diligent about studying this way though. If I stop for even a couple of days I can end up reviewing around 300 or so words and Kanji 0_0.

If you have managed to read this far, thanks. I hope you have a nice Christmas and or other winter holiday(s)!

J.E.T. application done!

2010-11-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

I'm so glad all of this paperwork is done! Filling out applications and running around town in order to get all of this stuff done was no fun. I'm very happy I started on all of this as soon as I could have. Luckily enough for me, both of my references had recently been to a CLAIR meeting and had a good idea about what they had to do and also understood that there was really very little time to get all of this done. It would have been nice if JET allowed applicants a bit more time, so that references wouldn't feel so rushed. My wife still has not gotten her last reference back and time is running out. Hopefully, her teacher gets it finished up by today.

On a side note, I feel like my writing stills have depreciated a decent amount since high school, so writing the Statement of Purpose was a lot more time consuming than I had expected. I also feel like putting commas EVERYWHERE. I'm going to have to go back to studying my grammar book for a bit to make sure that I'm ready for anything the interviewers may have in store for me.

Now that I'm done working on this application and I have my ANKI back, I'm going to go into crazy study mode. I need to get that snowball rolling! I'm beginning to notice that my Japanese abilities are slipping and it takes me a lot longer to figure things out when it seemed almost instantaneous before. I'm not worried though. I'm sure that if I work hard it will come back fairly soon. I also have an advantage now that it is winter time and everyone's hours at work have been cut down. Sure, I will not be making very much money for the time being, but to be honest, I'm really burnt out on working at my job. I have been working at Perkins Restaurants since 2003 and I have never really liked cooking to begin with. Most of the people I work with are agreeable enough and it pays above minimum wage, so it has been a good job for me in the past, but I think it is time to move on to different things.

If anyone reading this is going through the process of applying to JET, I sincerely wish you the best of luck!

J.E.T. application etc.

2010-10-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

So the time has finally come for all of those whom would like to become new J.E.T.s I have to admit, I'm a bit nervous. I have been looking forward to teaching in Japan with a program like J.E.T. for around six years now. I will be really let down if I don't make it. My wife is going to apply too, so hopefully at least one of us can get in and the other can come along and apply to a different job within Japan.

On an unrelated note, I have been really sick for the last two or so weeks and it has really screwed up my studying. Firstly because I had almost no energy and secondly because I was so tired recently that I absentmindedly deleted my 1-4 J.L.P.T. Anki stack that I thought had been backed up but was not. I'm trying to not let it get me down. On the bright side, I did learn nearly 3,000 words by using the program.

My plan from now on is to go back and study with Anki like I used to while I was in Japan. What I used to do was to take words I didn't know from what I was studying or other sources and enter them into Anki. This is a really good way to find a lot of vocab you may actually use in daily life. It also requires you to do a bit of reading in Japanese so that you can keep filling up your Anki.

Halloween

2010-10-07T15:27:00.000-07:00

Yay for Halloween! My favorite holiday of the year has finally come. I think I'm going to try and throw a pumpkin carving party. Alcohol and sharp knives have never hurt anyone in the past right? I really missed Halloween when I was in Japan, but now that I'm back I want to make this one good. If I'm lucky and get accepted into JET this may be my last chance to have a real Halloween party.

Making Snowmen

2010-10-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

I think studying Japanese is like making a snowman in a way. I'm not sure if this analogy will be appropriate, but I'm going to give it a shot. I've noticed that studying is much harder when one is out of practice. For example, when I am very busy with work or something that leaves me little time for Japanese study, actually getting started seems to take a lot of effort. If I'm doing nothing but Anki everyday, even keeping up with my drills becomes difficult and I have noticed that I tend to make more errors. I guess it makes sense when you think about it though. I used to play guitar very often and the more I played the easier it got. Eventually I played so regularly that it was horrible to go for a couple days or more without playing and when I did stop my fingers felt sluggish or my mind seemed slow to find the next note. These days I have really cut down my guitar playing. It has gotten so bad that everything I play sounds like crap to me and I feel like it would be a real challenge to re-dedicate myself to practicing often.

I think that studying something like music or a language can be similar to rolling the body parts of a snowman. When you start with just a little snowball the ball begins to roll easily, but it is small so you have to bend down really far to roll it and it doesn't really carry on by its own momentum. As the ball increases in size you don't have to bend down so low and the ball begins to roll more smoothly. When you finally get to having a near completed snowball for your snowman you barely need to bend at all and the weight is definitely adding to the momentum of the ball, but if you slow your pace or tire out easily it will become harder to roll. If you stop altogether you not only have to deal with the weight, but now you have lost your momentum as well. Rolling this thing has become much harder now.

The good thing is, if you haven't given up and let the the sun have time to melt your snowball you don't really have to start over, you just need to push yourself and get some momentum going then you're back in the game! The more things you have learned the more things you can possibly forget, but if you are quick to get back to your studying and don't give up you can get back on track easier than you might think. Studying will become fun again if you just put in the time and get that snowball rolling again! Good luck!

Sad news

2010-10-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

My gecko of the last 7 years died. He was fully grown when I bought him and only had half of a tail. I noticed that he had been having problems getting his shedded skin off and that he seemed to have difficulties catching crickets and meal worms. I'm kinda more bummed out by it than I expected. Ever since my cat and dog died when I was younger I've stopped caring about most pets. My gopher snake that I had as a kid was given away when I moved out at 16, but I at least found out through the grapevine that he was bigger than ever and being well taken care of. I still have my leopard gecko, Pocchi, but I have only had him for a little while. I think I'm going to be done with pets after he is gone.

P.S. There is another regular blog that will be posted soon waiting on my desktop. I had internet problems the last time I tried to post it, so it has been waiting to be put up for quite a while now.

Everything helping everything

2010-08-18T22:24:00.000-07:00

I'm going to make this one short because I'm trying to get other stuff done at the moment. One thing I have found to be helpful is to not focus on a single part of Japanese studying. What I mean is that studying multiple parts of Japanese such as Kanji and speaking and listening is more effective than just studying a ton of Kanji and then figuring that once you get to a certain level you can then move on to reading or something. This is probably commonsense for a lot of people, but everyone is different. I've noticed that if I'm studying Kanji and then I later read a Japanese magazine for example, I will retain the Kanji I had just gone over better than if I had just studied Kanji alone. I think the reason for this is because your brain has more ways to connect to the Kanji you have just learned. It also reinforces that your Kanji studying has a practical use outside of your Anki or whatever you use as a flashcard system.

Getting off track

2010-07-01T14:17:00.000-07:00

It's easy to get off track and lose your momentum. Life has a way of throwing up all kinds of obstacles that can make it hard to maintain a good study regimen. While it is important to make sure that you are studying everyday so that you do not regress in your studies, it is also important to be able to forgive yourself now and then when it is just impossible to do everything on your study list. If you get down on yourself it will just promote a cycle which can lead to you feeling like you can not accomplish your goal to learn Japanese.
Lately, I have been dealing with a lot of stress at work coupled with depression and sickness. I managed to keep up with my Anki for the most part, but I neglected a lot of my other Japanese studying methods. I'm starting to get back into the swing of things again and I'm coming back 100%! In the past I have let it get me down or I have tried to make up for the days I missed by studying until I burnt myself out. I have learned from these mistakes and now I know that all one can really do is get right back on that horse. People are not machines and even if they were, even machines break down from time to time. I guess the main thing I want to say is, it's okay if you slip-up.

Quick study tip

2010-05-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

If you're a procrastinator like me, you might have trouble actually getting around to studying. One way I get around this is by making a study schedule that is not so daunting that I can't stick with it yet not so simple that it is not taken seriously.

It's important to remember that for each day on the schedule, you have at least one fun thing to do Japanese. That thing can be anything you like to do in Japanese, but make sure you don't go overboard and burn yourself on your fun things either. Here is a short example of my study guide: Everyday I study vocab with Anki because I have found this to be one of my biggest weak points as well as one of the most beneficial of my study methods. If nothing else, I have to at least get my Anki done. I study my vocabulary in the writing style it is most commonly written in, whether that be kanji, hiragana, or katakana. On Monday I study with Anki、 then 速読の日本語、then 日本語能力試験文法, then I watch an episode or so of Anime. This is one of my heavy study days. On Sunday for example, I only study with my Anki, read a manga or a magazine, and read a bit of a Japanese blog I like.

Always remember that there will never be a perfect time to practice your Japanese. You will need to keep trying and be willing to fail at times without getting discouraged. If you embarrass yourself by making a mistake in Japanese, take that as an opportunity to improve. It's often after you've made a mistake once that you never again forget it.

A Little Side Note About Fluency

2010-05-16T00:14:00.000-07:00

I hate this idea of fluency that many people seem to have. After living in Japan for a year and getting my degree in Japanese I have often been asked, "are you fluent now?" It makes me go a little bit more crazy each time. Firstly, what is fluency to you may not be fluency to me. In my opinion, no one is fluent in any language. I know of a lot of people who have taken some Spanish classes in high school and they can order from restaurants in Spanish. Some would say this makes them fluent. Now if we took those same students and put them in some small town in Mexico were the residents only knew Spanish and said "you're fluent, you'll get by", those same students wouldn't be feeling so fluent anymore I think. Could they find a job, a place to live and do everything they need to in order to survive as the other local Mexicans? Furthermore, if they could do all of those things would that make them fluent?

My English grammar sucks. My vocabulary is moderate. My spelling is atrocious. I am not fluent in English by my own standards, but that is okay and I can work to improve it.

I think people need to drop this whole idea about fluency and think more in terms of what one can accomplish in any given situation. Can you book a hotel in Japanese? How about figuring out and paying your　国民健康保険 (National health insurance)? Learning something like a foreign language should be something you keep working on without some grand idea that you will become fluent and will not have to study anymore. This is a reason why one must remember to make studying fun. There is always something new to learn out there!

The next time you think to ask someone if they are fluent in a foreign language ask yourself this, "Would I ask a Math Major if they knew everything there was to know in math?" I don't think you would expect them to be fluent in math would you?

P.S. The highlighting is because I would like to add this word to my never use again list.

Okay I lied a little...

2010-05-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

Consistency and Pace

How about we start off by figuring out some of the pit falls that often come with learning a new language. I think the two biggest problems for new (and perhaps old) learners are one's studying pace and consistency. Something I often used to do was to cram a ton of studying for as long as possible and then I would finally burn myself out and stop studying for a period of time. This is a very ineffective habit that often comes from good intentions but only leads to problems. You might think that you are doing yourself a favor by putting your nose to the grindstone and it may even seem effective for a time, but if you burn yourself out you're not going to learn efficiently.

Have Fun

Have you ever noticed how the classes that you have fun in are those you seem to get the best grades in and learn the most from? That's because people learn much better when they're having fun. If one is to become proficient in Japanese it is important to remember to have some fun with it!
I've seen some people take this the wrong way and assume that they can just watch anime all day and that they will magically become fluent, but that rarely works out. Life and learning are both one big balancing act. It's important to have fun, but it's also important to study some of the more tedious stuff like grammar and kanji. If you keep up with both of them you'll find that they compliment each other quite well.

First blog post Evaarrrr!

2010-05-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'd like to start by first telling others who may be studying Japanese some good studying techniques. After my first couple of years at University I learned that 50 minutes a day of Japanese in class was not going to get me anywhere close to fluency. It is absolutely necessary to study outside of class if one is to make any meaningful improvements; however, planning useful independent study methods is no simple task. In my next blog post I plan to show my methods of study which have really helped to improve my Japanese abilities and they can help you too!