Sons of Loki

I’m finally getting the hang of this Japanese thing! (How many times have I said that?) I’ve pretty much decided that I’m never gonna be an accomplished conversationalist in either Japanese or English, but that if I honestly do have a knack for the skills of reading, I might as well concentrate on that. I’ve started reading the news (almost) daily in Japanese, and it feels rather remarkable to be taking in a Japanese newspaper, getting most of the kanji to some extent, even if the overall meaning of each sentence remains murky and uncertain. Fiction, too – I finished the first story in Read Real Japanese and I ought to make a good start on the next.

You know, learning Japanese – it’s all about scrambling up the mountain using every means at your disposal. People will tell you “It’s better to do it with one hand behind your back,” or “You ought to use hiking boots”. Some advice you should listen to. Some of it you should ignore. The one true way to climb the mountain of Japanese is to do it whatever way works. For me, that’s making up stupid mnemonics and reading newspaper articles about minor party officials in funding scandals. I guess I’ll be alright.

I need to stop counting down my days left in Japan… though it be 72 days right now. Yeah, after a tense phone call with the JAL office in Tokyo (why do I find phone calls with strangers such an unmitigated terror?) I went ahead and changed my return date to the 2nd of August, so I’ll be with everybody else coming back on the 3rd of August at 4:35pm. (It’s cost me 15,000 yen to change, but then I would have had to pay 17,000 yen rent to stay here until the 10th (plus food and stuff) so it’s worked out fine.)

This is day 235, or thereabouts. It feels like a marathon, and part of me is glad that I didn’t go back at Christmas because the longer I stick it out here, the more insane it will be when I get home. Yeah, it will be insane.   I remember when I came back last time, after a paltry ten weeks, being blown away by the ticket machine on the London Underground. When I get back on the 3rd, it will be a whopping 308 days since I left. I’ll be a stranger in my own country.

Been listening to a couple of new good albums recently: Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s unlikely musical/song cycle collaboration on the even unlikelier topic of Philippines dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos, has an all-star cast of female singers (including Florence “+ The Machine” Welch, Cyndi Lauper, and …er, Steve Earle) and some surprisingly catchy tunes on the subject of Imelda’s rags to riches to unparalleled embezzler and shoe collector story, some of the best being the title track, “How Are You”, “Please Don’t”, and “Never So Big”. Also, LCD Soundsystem’s new album This Is Happening, with a stompingly awesome first track “Dance Yrself Clean”. James Murphy has this really interesting half-spoken, half-singing style on tracks like “Pow Pow” that puts me in mind of the old Jonathan Richman. A good album for the summer, methinks.

Finally, interesting thing of the day: The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover, a insightful look into one of the very first internet chat communities with a male psychiatrist undercover as a woman.

I’ve been feeling pretty good lately. As if everything’s going alright. Like I’m on top of the world. This sort of thing could come from a number of factors:

#1 Undiagnosed manic depression
#2 Undiagnosed love (see #1)
#3 Springtime (it is unseasonably warm (well, not cold) and sunny for late January)
#4 A dramatic paradigm shift in the study of Japanese

Which is to say: I’m starting to get it. It’s rare that one website could make me turn my entire life around, but I came across All Japanese All The Time a few days ago and it was like everything I read rang many, many bells.

The site’s owner is a guy who taught himself Japanese in the US over about a year or two (and soon after was hired by a Japanese software company as a programmer) without classes or textbooks or drills or any of the stuff I hate, but simply by loving the language and filling his entire life with it. 24/7. Japanese music, Japanese TV, games, books, manga. Even when sleeping he had his earphones in. Like any good diet, he simply replaced anything in English with the Japanese equivalent; so,  if he felt like watching Independence Day, he watched the Japanese dub. If he found himself wasting time on Wikipedia, he wasted it on the Japanese version.

And he kept his brain open, picking up interesting sentences and picking them apart to learn grammar and words, rather than using textbooks or vocab lists. Coupled with an SRS and Heisig, he proceeded to become fluent in a year or two.

Impressive.

And it explains so much. Why I can’t be bothered in class, why I find textbooks so dry. Because they are dry. I always live my life by a tenet from David Byrne:

If your work isn’t what you love
Then something isn’t right

and the key to doing anything is working out what you love about it, and doing it. Why do I do Japanese? Because I enjoy tests, flashcards, and filling in blanks? No! I do it because I want to partake in Japan. People, films, books, games, everything. I’d forgotten that.

So I started again. I complained before about not being good enough to enjoy games or manga in Japanese, but I’d got it the wrong way round. I should use my enjoyment of games and manga as a spur to encourage me to want to study, and as a tool to teach me. I opened my brain and played Metal Gear Solid 4 and sure, I only got 10% of the wordy verbosity, but that 10% was valuable stuff. (反政府勢力 – anti-government forces.) I opened my brain and read One Piece and stuff went in. (海賊 – pirate (lit. sea burglar).) I watched Hatoyama in the Diet on NHK. (政治家 – politician.) I studied the lyrics of those ancient and learned Japanese poets, the Teriyaki Boys – rap is so good for learning because the rhymes make words pop out.

やるだけやってあとは交代
じゃ、そろそろみな集めて乾杯!

I’ll do it only what I can do and after that change
Well, we’ll gradually get everybody together and – cheers!

Just concentrating on what I understand rather than what I don’t is such a boost, too. Last night I watched one of MGS4′s famously lengthy cutscenes and though most of the highly complicated technical speak washed over me, I understood most of the opening scene and the ending one, and to the point where I didn’t even realise I was understanding it, I was just enjoying it. That’s the goal. That’s the reason I study.

Also, I should be hopefully published in an upcoming issue of Metropolis with an article on Rikugien in Tokyo and hopefully another one after that, so keep eyes peeled! (If you’re in Japan. Obviously if you’re in Mexico or Sri Lanka, not much point looking out for it.)