Sons of Loki

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.)

It’s getting near midnight, which means the dorm network is slowing to a halt thanks to relentless torrenters downloading the latest episodes of Miracle Train and cutting us off from the internet like it’s Apollo and we’re passing over the Pacific Ocean.

Reader, I bought it. A PlayStation 3, plus a Japanese copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. I was just going to get a PS2 and grab anything that took my fancy, but Sofmap had a secondhand PS3 for 20,000, and I looked at my budget, and my budget said “well I guess this will work”, and I got it in the end. It is for learning Japanese, you see.

No, seriously, hear me out. I have plonked serious money (a month’s worth of food shopping) on this and I don’t intend to have wasted it. Metal Gear Solid 4 is possibly the most complex game I could have purchased, and I am determined to understand it. Which means I am determined to improve my Japanese to the level where I understand it. A game of this magnitude deserves it. (In the first two minutes it did one of those classic MGS fourth-wall breaking mindfuck things with the TV channels (you’ll know if you’ve play it). I have to respect a game that can do that to me.)

Anyway, new year, new term, new start. And not one of those phony new year resolution starts where I put up post-it notes and spend an hour designing an elaborate timetable in Excel and then fall into the same old habits. No, this is a radical restructuring of my entire life. I have quite simply decided to drop all the stuff in my life I don’t need to do. Writing, for one. There will definitely be a place in my life in a few years where I will dedicate myself to writing, but right now it is not where I need to be. Working for magazines, too. It’s good for a future career, but it’s stuff I shouldn’t be worrying about now. Doing stuff that doesn’t really connect itself to learning Japanese. All these must stop.

This is the year where I learn Japanese.

And now for some late-night, soothing video; the Yurikamome monorail, only … mirrored. It took me a while to work out what was going on in this, but doesn’t it just sum up the Gibsonean neo-noir coolness of Tokyo?