Nice udders!

Cow Beauty Soap (ミルク成分配合 [with a combination of milk ingredients])

Note the highly effective branding: nothing says fresh and clean like a dairy cow.

Got milkfed?

Milk seems to be a big selling point here in Japan, at least judging from the increasing number of milkfed bags I see on the train.

Tsukuba Express emergency exit sign

Reading this sign, I was struck by the disporportionate amount of Japanese relative to English.

So, what does the sign say?

The English is straightforward: “Emergency use only / By pulling the handle the door can be opened manually.”

The Japanese however is much more extensive: “非常用ドアコック・非常の場合はこの中のハンドルを手前に引けばドアは手であけられます。みだりに車外へ出ると危険です。もし出るときはほかの電車やおりる場所にもご注意下さい。なお係員の指示があった場合にはそれに従って下さい。”

One difference is the Japanese word for this particular device, ドアコック, which unfortunately is not transliterated into English, Door Cock. Perhaps this is a valid technical term, but I’m guessing that they just didn’t want the English speakers snickering too much during an emergency exit.

The rest of the Japanese text offers more specific guidance than the English: “Emergency Door Cock / In the case of an emergency, if the handle contained herein is pulled inward, the door can be opened manually. Exiting the train unnecessarily is dangerous. When exiting, please be careful of other trains and the location where you exit. Also, if an official gives instructions, please follow them.”

Of course, this is all just cover-your-ass safety jargon. During an emergency, no one will say, “Okay guys, let’s just do what the tiny sign says and we’ll all be fine!” So, not translating the full details seems reasonable.

Or maybe this is part of a sinister plot, and the Tsukaba Express’s company wants people who can’t read Japanese to be able open the door without having full knowledge of the safety protocol; then, the poor illiterates can get run down by another train after exiting!

Or maybe they put the Japanese into Google Translate, saw the results, and said, “Fuck it, there’s plenty of English.”

Google version: An emergency door cock by pulling the emergency door handle in front to be opened by hand in this. It is dangerous to go outside a car without good reason. Please note that if you go to other places by train or Oriru. In the case of staff, please follow the instructions on it.

Uniglo, a Japanese clothing store, has this strange clock up on their website. Pretty girls doing odd dancing in somewhat stylish and affordable clothes with a handy clock. What’s not to like?

My score was 258 out of 400  (240 is passing). I just barely passed, but I’ll take it.

My scores were:

Vocab/Kanji – 74/100

Listening –  56 / 200

Reading/Grammar – 128 / 200 

My overall score is about what I was expecting based on all the  practice tests I did, but the scores for the individual sections were a little different.  On all the practice tests, I would consistently get about 85% on the Vocab/Kanji, 75% on the listening, and 55% on Reading/Grammar.  However, on the actual tests I made a few careless mistakes on vocab and I also ran out of time and left a couple questions blank, and my listening score took a hit because I had trouble hearing the questions over the noise of the 300 people in the classroom turning the pages of the test booklet in unison.  But my reading score was helped out by a few lucky guesses.  

I took the test after studying Japanese for 3.5 years, although my first two years of study were not very productive.  Starting out, I didn’t really know how to study Japanese well.  If I could start again knowing what I do now, I probably could learn everything from those first two years in 6 months.  So I’d guess that I passed 2kyuu with about 2 years worth of efficient study.

Since I took the test in December, I haven’t had much motivation to study, but soon I’m going to start commuting to Tokyo for my new job, so I’ll have about 2 hours on the train each day.  If I can use that time to study, I might be able to make good progress towards 1kyuu.  I think a good goal might be to try for taking the 1kyuu in Summer of 2010.

My favorite (well…actually least favorite…) examples of wasteful construction in Japan are tetrapods, the eye sores that line every beach in Japan.  Supposedly they prevent erosion, but I’m not sure if that’s true or not.

Japan has many chronically underfunded needs and problems.  For example, their is not enough affordable day care for working mothers.  This is one of serveral reasons why Japan has such a low birth rate, and as a result, women are choosing to have fewer children and having them later in life.  If Japan spent more money on day care,  it would provide direct economic stimulus by employing  more people in the child-care industry while providing further benefits from the  increased productivity of women in the workforce and helping to ease Japan’s demographic problems.

Unfortunately, Japan’s unelected, unaccountable, and very powerful bureaucrats, along with their political benefactors decided to throw money at a $250 million dollar airports that now has two flights a day and bridges that no one uses.

The style was very direct, crisp, and matter-of-fact, which made for a brisk read. The story is about a woman that hadn’t slept in 17 days. I’m not sure if this is actually physically possible (the character in the story wonders the same thing.) Although not a lot happens in the story, it builds up nicely. When she first describes her dissatisfaction with domestic life, she seems unhappy, but as the story progresses, you can sense her desperation growing, and the tone becomes more menacing.

The ending, however, did leave me a little confused.  (spoilers!) At the very end she is trapped, crying in the car and says that the two guys are going to flip the car over.  What I got out of it, was that even as she was “expanding her life” by staying up all night, she was becoming increasingly isolated, her discontent was swallowing her, the walls were closing in.  So it made sense that she ends up trapped alone in her tiny car, which was being assaulted from the outside, rocked back and forth by forces beyond her control.  So I think I understood the feeling he was invoking, but when I think about it logically, I wonder what was going to happen.  Were they going to kill or rape her? Were they just going to flip the car over as a prank? I guess no matter what happens, her secret night life is over since something terrible was about to happen.

Anyways, that my rambling on the story.  If you read this and wonder “what story was he reading?”, then maybe I understood the Japanese less than I thought!

Of course, maybe it isn’t so bad if elderly people are swiping food and medicine…it’s probably much more efficient than raising taxes and having a government program that gives them out!  (The libertarian in me is raging, with all the bailouts and incompetence these days.)  But it is interesting how people react:

Despite the arrest numbers, prosecutions of the elderly in a culture that holds them in high regard are rare. Stores often don’t even report the crime to police, according to security experts.

The 80-year-old man who stole the stomach medicine was eventually led to his bicycle by store security. The security officer helped the man with his groceries and bowed in respect, hoping the elderly man had learned his lesson and would return as a good customer.

I have a feeling that in America they would get thrown in the slammer,or at least have the cop take them to the station or interview them before letting them go.  And at the end I doubt there would be bowing (or American-equivalent of showing repect).

For me I started studying Japanese at UT, taking the basic Japanese courses. One hour a day, Monday to Friday. These were done in the typical language course style, but with obvious additions to make Kanji a part of the curriculum. We would have our usual lessons with some silly situation, a conversation with new vocabulary to learn, an important grammar point, some role plays to try out, etc. The main focus was on grammar and vocabulary. It was about learning everyday Japanese, and of course the very basic kanji. The kanji we learned was the most simplistic at first, as well as leaning the most necessary kanji for our needs. We would learn the radicals early on too, but the most important thing was to learn how to write it, the vocabulary with it, and their readings. But the big problem was that since time was short, we would have a limited amount of kanji to study each week. I never fully grasped the importance of the radicals or their meanings, because it was always about learning the vocabulary. This is a major hinderance in learning Japanese I feel as gaining a quick understanding of it will help out greatly later on. And yet years later I would admit that I didn’t fully grasp a lot of the concepts of some parts of the language at that time, kanji particularly. However for college level classes, I thought they were good, and thankfully avoid of romanji, which I simply can’t read at all. For basic Japanese speaking skills, this type of class is OK I think. You learn what you need to survive, and get by to get that “あなたの日本語は上手ですね！” However this was not what I wanted, I wanted to really speak and understand the language. After talking with my teachers and other people, I was told that really the only thing that could do that was total immersion. It’s something I agree with as well. Sure you can learn the language on your own even, but without the immersion or the chance to practice the language in a real environment, you can never really achieve full fluency I feel. At UT I had  very limited chances to use my Japanese. In class it was hard with so many people crammed in there, each trying to get a chance to speak. And our vocal tests were more script memorization than anything. In fact I probably used it more at anime club than outside it. I realized that it was time to take a chance and go learn the language in Japan. 

So in 2001 I went to Sophia University in Tokyo. In reality I had no idea what classes I would be taking when I got there, but I knew that being immersed in the language would help me a lot. When I spoke to the counselor there, she asked me if I had planned on taking the JLI courses. I, not knowing what JLI was, inquired about it. Sophia had developed a program that taught Japanese at a very intensive level, called the Japanese Language Institute (JLI). It was a two year program that, if you passed and completed it, you would be at the 1 kyuu level of the JLPT test. Even though I would only be at Sophia a year, I could take the program and truly improve my Japanese they told me, and they highly recommended it to me since I had recently switched my major to Japanese and it was the focus of my coming to Japan. It was a difficult program, but they were proud of their successes and they felt I could do it. It would involve taking 18 hours of Japanese classes a week.  1 and a half hours of grammar a day, 1 and a half hours of kanji a day, and two days with a hour and a half of conversation practice. The classes would be taught in Japanese only, and would require a heavy commitment from me both in class and outside it. I decided this was the challenge I was looking for, and I felt that with 4 years of study, including some intermediate Japanese classes under my belt from UT, I could eaisly test out of the first semester of JLI and move into the second.

I was wrong. But what ended up happening did more to improve my Japanese than anything before or since. 

Next time, I will talk about how I truly started to fully understand Japanese and really learn the language by discussing my time at Sophia.

The relative difficulty of the grammar, pronunciation, politeness, and vocabulary of Japanese compared to other languages is often debated, but ultimately these are among the common elements shared by most all languages, and no matter what language you learn, you have to deal with them. Kanji, on the other hand, requires a massive amount of work in addition to the effort you would usually put into learning a language.

Not learning kanji leaves you at a huge disadvantage when it comes to aquiring new Japanese. If you go to the store and you see 牛乳 written on a milk carton or 砂糖 written on a bag of sugar, you have no way to learn the new words. You either have to hear the words or encounter them in hiragana: ぎゅうにゅう…さとう. Learning kanji requires a lot of work to become competent in what is normally a very basic step in most other languages — being able to read and write.

After about a year and a half, I hadn’t made a lot of progress.  I would estimate I knew around 300-400 kanji to varying degrees of mastery, depending on whether I could read, write and/or recognize the characters.

In early spring 2007, I started studying using the book Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig  (There is a free sample of RTK online that you can check out).  This book breaks with many of the traditional methods for learning kanji.  The typical way to study kanji — the way I had been studying up to that point — involves learning kanji in roughly the same order that Japanese children are taught.　Typically, one learns kanji based on how useful they would be to know.  Learning in order of usefulness might seem like common sense, but Heisig takes a different approach that I found to be much more effective.  In the book, kanji are arranged not by their usefulness, but by how efficiently they can be learned.  As a result, the ordering of the kanji in RTK can seem a little odd. For example,  “gall bladder” 胆 is taught very early, while more useful characters like “go” 行 or “horse” 馬 are not taught until much later.

However, this makes sense because 一 ・ 月・日 are taught very early in the book.  Once those are known, it is very easy to put them together to get 胆.  In my first post, I mentioned my difficulty with 歳, but I had a much easier time learning it in RTK.  Once I had learned the pieces making up the character, 一・小・戊 ・止,  the kanji was no longer a meaningless squiggle of lines to cram into my head via repitition, but something I could actually remember.

When your doing RTK, it is important to practice writing the kanji and to test yourself to see how well you are retaining them.  RTK can’t just be read; it has to be studied with a pen in hand.  For reviewing I recommend either the excellent site Reviewing the Kanji or the spaced repitition program Anki.

Another key feature of RTK is learning how to write the 2000 daily use kanji before attempting to learn vocabulary and readings.  This turns off a lot of people new to RTK, but I found the approach to be very helpful.  Instead of getting bogged down worrying about the many readings of the characters,  I could  keep moving forward learning how to write new kanji.  

Once I learned how to write all 2000 of the daily use kanji, acquiring new vocabulary became much simpler.  Before RTK, kanji was an obstacle to learning new vocabulary since new words often contained unfamiliar kanji.  It was like studying English words before learning the alphabet, hoping to pick it as you go along.  ”cat”….”c – a – t”… three letters down, 23 to go!  After learning “cat”, you could easily learn “act”, but when you see “car” or “cab”, you would have to shift gears from learning vocabulary to learning the letters “r” and “b”.  In English, this problem would work itself out fairly quickly since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet; however, there are thousands of kanji.

For anyone starting to study Japanese this is what I would recommend:

1. Learn hiragana and katakana
2. Learn some basic grammar and vocab to get a feel for the language.
3. Do Remembering the Kanji.  While doing RTK, it should be your main focus, but it’s ok to multitask a little — continue learning some grammar or listen to Pimsleur Japanese to work on speaking and listening.
4.  Go crazy learning vocab and grammar.  
5. ???
6. Profit!

I’ll write more about points 4, 5, and 6 in a later post dicussing my post-RTK studies.

I first came to Japan a little more than 3 years ago. When I arrived, I knew next to no Japanese. My knowledge was limited to a few greetings and a vague familiarity with the two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Now I am approximately at the level of the JLPT 2kyuu. I took the test earlier this month and either barely passed or barely failed, but however the test turns out, my level is in the ballpark.

When I started studying Japanese, I didn’t really know how to study. Looking back now, I think my first two years here were a wasted opportunity. My studying was inefficient and largely ineffective, so this first post isn’t a place to look for good advice, but rather a cautionary tale of what not to do.

One of the first mistakes I made was to buy the romaji version of the textbook Minna no Nihongo. One of the teachers at the free Japanese class in town recommended it because I could barely read the hiragana version. However, as anyone who seriously studies Japanese will tell you, romaji is nothing but a hindrance to learning Japanese. It took me only a week to realize I had bought a totally useless book. Although I wasted 2000 yen, I learned a good lesson — you just have to tough it out with real Japanese. Hiragana will take care of itself. For most people, katakana takes a while longer since the script appears relatively infrequently, but that too will come in time.

Which brings me to the next obstacle in learning Japanese — kanji. Once I got my hands on a proper version of Minna no Nihongo, I began the exercise in frustration that is learning kanji.

Simple kanji can be learned easily enough.

口　mouth (Hey it looks like a mouth!)

山　mountain (Hey, it looks like a mountain!)

However, one very quickly bumps up against two major problems: 1) Simple kanji with multiple readings. 2) Basic words with difficult kanji.

The first point can be illustrated by the character 下 which has a general meaning of “down”. If you were learning English, the word would take very little time and effort — only 4 letters. fairly easy pronunciation, and a simple meaning. In Japanese, 下 confronts you with a multitude of readings: した　げ　さがる　しも　さげる, among others. Now, I think this is all very basic, but at the time it was overwhelming. Almost every character, no matter how simple, seemed to come with with a multitude of readings. For example, consider “up, down, left, right” 上・下・左・右, words a beginning student would surely want to learn. I can think of 15 readings for these characters off the top of my head うえ・じょう・かみ・あげる・あがる・のぼる・した・しも・さがる・さげる・おりる・みぎ・ゆう・ひだり・さ. For a beginning student, I think it is very difficult to sort through all this to figure out what is important.

A second problem is that simple concepts often have difficult kanji. The first chapter of Minna no Nihongo teaches “How old are you?” 何歳ですか. It is easy to learn how to say it なんさいですか/nan sai desu ka, but the character 歳　is pretty daunting for a first chapter also covering such topics as “This is a pen” and “The dog is brown”. I can’t count how many times I wrote 歳 trying to remember it. Eventually, I got to where I could recognize the character, but I could never remember how to write it for very long. That modest progress for only one character came as the result of an unreasonably large amount of effort.

Starting out, different aspects of Japanese — reading, writing, speaking, listening — competed for my time and attention. If I focused exclusively on speaking, I’d remain unable to read anything, even if I made progress with vocabulary and grammar. So I ended up working on reading and writing as well, but that slowed my acquisition of new language to a crawl.

So, overall, it was a pretty rough start.