malvasia bianca

As I have, perhaps, alluded to previously, we spent the second half of April in Paris. Notes:

• It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some of this has to do with the fact that I rather enjoyed spending the week between Christmas and New Year’s at home, and am not sure how much I want to do any vacationing for the sake of vacationing. Of course, this is all subject to change at any time, and Liesl and Miranda may have different opinions.
• We’ve had bad hotel luck in the past; based on recommendations from comments on this blog post, we decided to try renting an apartment this time. We went with absoluliving; not as cheap as a cheap hotel, but for the same price as a decent hotel, we could get two bedrooms and a living room, with a clothes washer, a stove (not that we used it), a fridge. Or at least we thought that’s what we were getting; the day before we were supposed to leave, they e-mailed us to tell us, with no explanation whatsoever, that they were changing apartments on us; we ended up in a one-bedroom apartment, which they had the gall to call an upgrade because it was in a trendier neighborhood. To be fair, the apartment wasn’t a complete unknown, since we’d marked it as acceptable from the list of apartments they’d initially proposed to us, but I still didn’t appreciate the bait-and-switch, or whatever it was, at all. (Also, to be fair, I’m happy enough with the area we ended up in, and will consider staying near République in the future, but I didn’t like being in the middle of a very long block on a side street.) The other problem with the apartment was that one window kept squeaking open and closed all night when it got really windy; I’m not really mad at them about this, because I’m not sure how they would have discovered it by inspection, but it does point out a problem with an apartment agency that you don’t have with a hotel, namely that you can’t just complain about a maintenance problem and have them move you, because they might, say, be closed on the weekend. (Fortunately, it happened on a Thursday, and they managed to get somebody in on Friday who eventually stopped the squeaking by duct-taping it shut.) Anyways, one separate bedroom (Miranda was in a sofabed in the living room) is vastly better than everybody sharing a bedroom, so the general idea was a good one.
• Poor Liesl was sick some of the time; fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as bad as when we were in Amsterdam, but she stayed in the apartment for three (two?) of the days because of that. Partly because of that, we didn’t go to as many restaurants as we might, but we still got some good food out of the trip (including one from a restaurant that apparently changed hands about a week after our last trip and was completely, surprisingly different this time); visiting salons de thé in the afternoon may have been my favorite part of the trip. (The pizza at decent Italian restaurants in Paris is quite nice, too.)
• Why had I never heard of Lovis Corinth before? My first reaction is that I’d rather look at his art than, say, that of Van Gogh or Gaugin or Seurat. Looking at labels suggested that part of the reason is that his art is scattered around museums in Germany instead of clustered in museums in Paris; glad I’m aware of him now.
• The baboons at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes are a hoot.
• Having internet access in your apartment is a good thing. And no, this is not a sign that I need to relax and tear myself away from the internet: this is a sign that I don’t feel compelled to spend every vacationing hour traipsing from site to site and can, instead, spend time in my hotel just enjoying myself without feeling guilty that I should be doing more on vacation.
• Having a washing machine in your apartment is also a good thing. And points out another benefit to the internet: if your washing machine is refusing to wash and just blinking when you hit a number, you can google the model name and get a manual. (Answer: you accidentally hit the child lock button; hold it down for four seconds to unlock, and what you thought was the off button is actually the start button.)
• Miranda’s favorite museum turned out to be the sewer museum.
• Sacré Coeur is distinctive to look at from a distance but boring on the outside. Not so Notre Dame: there’s something to be said for thousands of people working for hundreds of years to produce something glorious.
• I really am not impressed by the current Orangina ad campaign: large-breasted zebras just don’t do it for me. Sex, fine; animals, fine; combining the two, ick.
• We forgot to buy a power converter; fortunately, the basement of BHV had them for sale. (They had one that went both directions, 110-to-220 and 220-110.)
• Traveling with several puzzle books from Nikoli was an excellent idea: not only are the puzzles top-notch, but the narrower-than-US form factor meant that I could slip one into my jeans pocket, which is very useful when walking through museums where I’ve had to check my backpack, finding myself a room or two ahead of Liesl and Miranda because we go through them at a different pace, and needing to amuse myself. I’m getting a bit burned out on Nurikabe (though I still think they’re an excellent puzzle variant), and Number Link isn’t my fave (once the puzzles get out of the easy range, I have a hard time proving my solution is unique, which frustrates me), but I’m still a big fan of Masyu and Slitherlink. I’ll have to try some of their other puzzle types.
• I really can dial down the number of books that I take on a trip these days: I have enough other entertainments that I don’t need to carry nearly as many to avoid running out of them. (And there are always bookstores if I guess wrong.)
• Heavy curtains are great for the first night or two after getting off the plane, but in retrospect I should have stopped closing them completely after that: I never really got my clock adjusted to Paris time. The flip side of which was that lying awake at night gave me lots of practice in going over my Joyo kanji…

Jim pointed me to this article a few weeks ago, and I’m annoyed to say that I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a guy who claims to have an algorithm (implemented by a computer program) to help you remember a lot more stuff a lot more solidly than you can with other methods, and it strikes just the right balance of potential importance and buy-in required to get me thinking about it more than I’d like.

The basic idea is this: if you want to remember something, you have to practice remembering it periodically. So it’s not enough to cram facts for an exam and then pretend that you know something: a few months later, you won’t consciously remember most of it. (Which is one reason why I question significant parts of our educational structure, but that’s a separate rant.) Instead, you have to periodically refresh your memory of the facts; fortunately, you can refresh less and less frequently over time and still remember those facts. Basically, the optimal time to refresh each fact is right before you’re about to forget it; this guy claims that he has a computer program that will serve up facts to you at the appropriate time for optimal practice.

This would be very useful to me (and, for that matter, to Miranda) right now: while he will happily apply it to anything, it’s clearly extremely applicable to learning foreign-language vocabulary. (And grammar!) And the theory is also obviously quite plausible (and apparently supported by the empirical psychological literature): I’ve spent a lot of time memorizing facts over the years (and in particular over the last year), and I can testify that this phenomenon of memorizing a word, and then not quite having it at the tip of your memory (or barely still having it at the tip of your memory) some time later is quite correct, and I’m quite willing to believe that there’s some optimal decay pattern for the refreshes.

But I also have a system for memorizing vocabulary that works moderately well right now: not perfectly, by a long shot, but I’ve gotten a lot of use out of it. In particular, right now I have 1200 or so vocabulary cards written down; I’m not about to sit down and digitize them all (which isn’t really necessary), but I’m also nervous about switching to another system which may or may not work, and (if I decide to switch back) to then deal with having some of my vocabulary on a computer and some on physical cards.

Also, to make matters worse, the software is basically Windows-only. So using it isn’t a realistic possibility for me. (It does seem like the sort of software that would strike a chord among Mac geeks, but who knows…)

But then I was idly thinking about it some more over the last day or two. Just how hard could it be to whip together a version of the software myself? The basic infrastructure is pretty straightforward: I need a way to save questions and answers, I need it to display questions to me, and I need to tell it whether or not I’ve answered the questions correctly. Then the software could save my history of when I’ve answered each question successfully (or unsuccessfully), and, based on his magic curves, figure out when it should next offer that question up to me. I’d never written a Rails app (a deficiency that I’d like to remedy), but all the data entry/display sounded like it should be very easy to whip up using Rails; I didn’t know what the magic sauce was, but it’s probably some sort of exponential decay curve, so I should be able to just look up his algorithm and implement it, right?

So I spent some more time at his web site, looking up his algorithm. And, at first, I was pretty disappointed. The most obvious place to start was with the paper version, but it had a few glaring deficiencies. The main one is that it had you work on groups of items all at once, treating each group as equally difficult (i.e. with the same decay curve). (Both the grouping and the equal difficulty seemed wrong to me.) Also (and this is, of course, just a minor annoyance, easily tweaked around), having the first review come four days after you’ve written down a group seemed way too long to me.

Reading that, I was pretty let down. After more poking around, though, it turns out that the algorithm has changed a fair amount over the years; I believe this is the most recent version of the algorithm listed on the website, and that page gives links to earlier historical versions. I haven’t tried to fully understand the most recent version (and, as far as I can tell, there’s not enough information there to reconstruct it, some of the constants there apparently need to be determined empirically), but there are enough ideas to try to remedy the above flaws. It seems like the current version doesn’t always use exponential decay, but I believe earlier intermediate versions did (version 4 seems a particularly useful touchstone), so I could easily start with that; there is a per-item difficulty factor, and there’s some idea that you can calculate the difficulty factor by counting the number of times you’ve gotten the item wrong.

Based on that, it sounds plausible that I could hallucinate an algorithm that probably wouldn’t do any worse than my current method for learning vocabulary. (My current method wastes too much time up-front in going over words that I would ideally review in intervals longer than a day, while at the same time not doing enough review of old words.) And I don’t think it would be too much work to whip up a program to implement it, and I’d get some practice with Rails to boot.

So: would doing that be a good idea? I’m still not sure: if I ultimately decide that I don’t like the results (whether because I don’t think it works well or because I don’t want to be tied to a computer when doing vocab review or because of some other reason), then there would be a real cost in switching back. And it may turn out that this is all really a side-issue: maybe it would be more effective than my current system, even significantly so, if I wanted to memorize a dictionary. But I don’t want to memorize a dictionary, I want to be able to, say, read Japanese, and doing so would probably give me frequent enough review of the words I was actually using to make a program like this superfluous.

Not sure where I’ll go with this yet; for now, I’m too busy, so it’s on the someday/maybe stack. But it’s surprisingly close to the top of that stack; we’ll see where I am in a couple of weeks.

In honor of the release of the Wii version of Okami, I urge all of you who own a Wii (or a PS2) and who haven’t played the game yet to go out and buy a copy. More here, but the short version is: it’s an adventure game based on Japanese mythology with a beautiful art style based on Japanese brush-work, where you level up by (among other things) growing plants and feeding animals, all on a solid core of Zelda-style gameplay. I haven’t played the Wii version, but I can’t imagine adding Wii controls to the brush commands would lower the quality any…

Wow, I haven’t been blogging much recently, have I? Sorry about that; I do most of my blogging on weekends, and the last few weekends have been pretty busy. (And much of my weekday free time in the evenings has been spent watching Twelve Kingdoms.)

Fortunately, I have not been slacking off on all of my side activities: I’m finally caught up with all the back episodes of JapanesePod101! I even managed to catch up a couple of months earlier than I predicted, largely due to the fact that, for a while, they were only doing two episodes a week that were at about the right level for me instead of three episodes a week. (I listen to all the episodes, I just pay more attention to some than others.)

Actually, learning Japanese has been going well for the last two or three months. I was unhappy with how long it took me to go through the first ten chapters of the textbook I’m using; since then, I’ve done six more chapters, and only one of them took more than two weeks, so my pace has increased noticeably. (And that one only took three weeks.) And I’m up to 301 characters in my march through the Joyo Kanji; I still have years to go on that journey, but at least it isn’t showing any signs of stalling.

Happy signs everywhere.

Eternal Sonata is a quite good Japanese RPG for the Xbox 360. Unfortunately, the main lesson that I’ve learned from it is that I don’t particularly like JRPG’s; I won’t say I’m swearing off of them forever (in fact, I’m glad I played this one), but I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt in the future.

My first impressions were good. I pretty much decided I had to play it as soon as I heard that it took place in the imagination of a dying Frederic Chopin; they didn’t do as much with that theme as they could have, but there were other compensating virtues. The art style is very nice: I loved the color palette, and it used cel-shading in a subtle, less stylized manner than other cel-shaded games that I’m aware of, to good effect. You could see your enemies and avoid them, should you chose (in particular, there weren’t any random monsters), and the battle system was reasonably clever, with you taking an active role controlling movement, with light and dark areas on the battlefield giving access to different powers, and with a party level system making the fights more complicated (albeit not much more complicated) as the game went on.

It started to go south in chapter 2, in the Fort Fermata dungeon. This is the first puzzle dungeon (almost the only one, really), where you press switches that cause a few of the rooms to move; you’re supposed to figure out the effects of the switches and gain access to areas of the dungeon that you couldn’t before. Unfortunately, there were two problems with this. The lesser problem was that it, frankly, wasn’t a very good puzzle: it was hard to tell the effects of the switches, so ultimately I ended up wandering around more or less at random until I eventually noticed a new room that I couldn’t get to before; repeat three times and you’re done. Which would be okay, except that the areas were quite large, with almost all of it unaffected by the switches, so it was heavy on wandering and light on thinking/progressing.

The more serious problem, though, was that this was where the monsters started getting to me. There was a reasonably high density of monsters in this dungeon, but the monsters (like pretty much all (non-boss?) monsters in the game) just weren’t that much fun to fight. So about five battles into the dungeon, I’d gotten all the pleasure I was going to get from fighting in the dungeon, and was only fighting battles to make sure I’d be appropriately leveled up when I reached the boss; ten battles in, I was actively avoiding the monsters, and cursing when I accidentally touched one of them.

Even that might have been okay, were it not for one very serious flaw: the monsters respawn each time you re-enter an area that you’d previously left. So if I find a room and press a switch, the monsters outside will reappear when I exit. The dungeon was divided into two halves; each time I went from one into the other, the monsters respawned.

There is, as far as I’m concerned, no justification for this. Maybe there is a video game player who would fight all thirty or forty monsters in that dungeon and still be thirsting for more; I have to believe that such players are few and far between. More seriously, there are only so many ways you can enjoy the core mechanics of a game like this; one of those ways of enjoying the game is exploring, seeing what’s around the next corner. But the respawning directly attacks that way of enjoying the game: if poking around a corner brings you into a new area, and then you decide that you wanted to look around the original area some more, tough like, you’ll have to refight all those monsters again. I really would like to know what the thinking was here: did they not think about the matter at all, did they think that players would enjoy respawning monsters? Did they playtest the game or not; if they playtested it, did this issue come up?

Fortunately, that dungeon was the one that was most hurt by that flaw. Having said that, the respawning enemies problem kept on biting me on a lesser scale. Most dungeons were relatively linear, but you frequently came to a fork in the path where going in one direction would keep you in the same area and lead to a chest while the other direction would lead to the next area. The problem is that you couldn’t see the chest from where you were: you’d have to go part way down, and then the camera would shift for you. And if you picked the wrong one, it was very hard to figure out how far to go before deciding that the camera should have shifted by now; if you went too far, you’d be in the next area, at which point you’d have to go back (assuming you didn’t want to skip the chest), and the monsters would respawn.

I should emphasize that there are a lot of traditional RPG mistakes that they didn’t make. As I mentioned above, the battle system was better than normal, and at least you could see and avoid the respawning monsters. And avoiding them was a realistic possibility: most of the time, you could avoid almost all of them if you wished, and while doing so would mean that you weren’t leveling up enough for the boss battles, you certainly could skip several of the monsters and still be strong enough to fight the bosses without breaking too much of a sweat. You had up to nine people in your party, of whom only three could fight at once, but the others leveled up anyways; I believe they leveled up at a somewhat slower rate, but not enough to make the characters unusable if a plot twist forced you to use somebody other than your favorite characters.

The overall rhythm was off, too. Typically, RPGs have a mixture of fighting, exploring your environments, and plot advancement. As I’ve said above, the fighting got in the way of exploring your enviroments in the overworld and dungeons; unfortunately, you spend far too much of your time such environments. The towns are nice enough, but they generally felt like way stations that you’re just passing through. As far as plot goes, I like it, but it’s conveyed by cut scenes that are way too long: about once per chapter, you’ll run into a cut scene that is long enough that your controller will go to sleep if you don’t fiddle with it during the cut scene. (I believe that the sequence of cut scenes at the end of the game lasted a full thirty minutes.)

Having said that, the cut scenes are pretty good. Mostly they’re advancing the plot of the game, but once per chapter there’s a cut scene (usually paired with a traditional one) that consists of somebody playing a piece by Chopin, along with pictures showing places where Chopin spent his life and subtitles explaining that portion of Chopin’s life. So you get some quite nice music and reasonably interesting history mixed in with your adventuring. Also convenient for me was that you can set the game to Japanese voices with English subtitles, so the cut scenes (and many other areas, e.g. battles) let me practice my Japanese; I certainly wouldn’t have been able to follow most of the conversations without the subtitles, but I was glad to be able to pick up words and phrases. (Warning for other people who do the same thing: for whatever reason, they leave off subtitles for most of the final cut scene, so you might want to switch back to English right before the end.)

It’s a quite good game; I’m happy to have played it, though I’m also happy that it’s now over. Miranda really liked it, and has started playing it herself; I’m curious how far she will get. They made several decisions which I consider boneheaded, and which soured me on the genre: Lost Odyssey is getting some amount of buzz right now, for example, but I’m going to stay away from that one. (Admittedly, enough games are clamoring for my attention right now that I would probably have stayed away anyways.) But there are more than enough surprising good decisions that the good outweighs the bad.

I’ve now hit the 200 kanji mark in my quest to memorize all 1945 Joyo Kanji. Where by “memorize” I mean that, if my memory is working well (which it usually is), I can write down the first 200 characters (actually, the first 217 characters: I’ve been procrastinating on writing this blog post) in the order given by Hadamitzky and Spahn, in correct stroke order.

I don’t claim to have the readings and meanings memorized as reliably for all of them: they’ve all gone through my flashcard box (as have several hundred other kanji), but sometimes I forget. Still, I’m doing pretty well there, and at least it’s a line in the sand: if I run into evidence that I’ve forgotten a meaning of one of those characters, that’s a sign that I should take the corresponding card out of the box and put it back into my daily vocabulary drills.

But the point of memorizing isn’t really to memorize the meanings: it’s to make storage locations in my head where I can later put the meanings. I never get different English words confused, even if they’re unfamiliar to me, whereas, most of the time, when I “learn” a new kanji, if I see a kanji that looks kind of like it in an unfamiliar setting, I’m not sure if it’s that kanji or a different one. (Or I might not even recognize that kanji as familiar at all!) Whereas I can now reliably tell those 217 kanji apart from each other and apart from the thousands of kanji that I don’t have memorized. (The Joyo list is far from a complete list of all kanji that are used.)

So I’m pretty proud of myself! But I still don’t really believe that I’ll make it through the whole book. I memorize a page at a time (7 kanji per page; a side benefit is that I’m better at recognizing multiples of 7 than I once was…), adding one or two new pages a week. Say that averages out to 10 kanji a week (and it’s taken me more than 22 weeks to get this far); if that holds up, I can do about 500 a year, so I have three and a half years ahead of me. Which is a pretty long time; a lot can change between now and then.

I’m also not sure how the review process will scale. One reason why I’m sure I have them memorized is that I periodically go through the whole list and trace them all out with my finger. But it takes a long time to do just 217 of them; pretty soon, I’ll only rarely have time to write down the whole list. (I certainly don’t have time to do that most days today.) I break them up into groups of 70, and go through one or two of those groups at a time (a small enough chunk that I can do it most evenings after putting down my book but before falling asleep), but I think it’s important to periodically rotate through the entire list. Hmm, I guess I could do that in multiple settings? E.g. every night go through the current group and one other group where I cycle through the other groups in order?

The other Japanese-related thing I’ve done recently is place my first order from Amazon Japan. I’m still not particularly fluent with entering Japanese text using the computer, but I could do it well enough to muddle through. For the curious, my order consisted of a few volumes of Hikaru (I now have the first five in Japanese), a few puzzle books from Nikoli (we’ll be going on vacation in a few weeks, and I wanted some nurikabe puzzles to work through, which was actually the impetus for the order), an art book from Okami (which I felt a little bit silly about ordering, but which turns out to be totally beautiful; Miranda likes it a lot, too), and two DVDs: a pre-Ghibli Takahata movie and a Juzo Itami movie. (Most of his movies are almost as out of print in Japan as they are in the US, alas.) Comics are a lot cheaper there than here; DVDs are a lot more expensive, which I wasn’t expecting.

The most fun part was receiving the “your order has shipped” e-mail and realizing that I could actually make sense of most of it. (It, of course, helps that I’ve received hundreds of those from the US branch…) And then I went to the “your account” web page to track my order, was confronted with a drop down with five characters (four kanji and one kana), and I knew that they were pronounced “saikin no chumon” and meant “recent orders”. (Not “open and recently shipped orders”, as the US site says.) So that was pretty cool! Since then, I’ve tried to look at Japanese text in other contexts, and realized that my being able to piece that together was very much an aberration, but it was a pleasant one.

They only have one shipping rate for orders to the US; it’s pricy if you’re just ordering one thing (about 29 bucks), but the incremental cost of extra items isn’t too high. (A little less than 3 bucks each.) And the good news is: that shipping rate is fast. I placed my order on Monday night (US) and they arrived on Friday. So I didn’t need to order so far in advance of the trip after all! I’ll definitely do more of this in the future.

For the first time ever, or at least since the dawn of time, I listened to an episode of JapanesePod101 today that showed up in my RSS reader earlier this same month. So the end of that backlog is in sight! I’m not quite ready to declare victory yet—at my current rate, I still have another four weeks to go before I’ll be caught up, even if nothing intervenes—but I’m close enough to be getting excited about it.

I’ve been going through some changes recently in my Japanese study. I finished the Manga-based grammar I’d been reading sporadically, and finished going through the characters in Read Japanese Today. Which I recommend (both of them, but I’m thinking particularly of the latter here): in my experience, you need as many methods as possible to get kanji characters to really stick, and learning about the origin of the characters is a good one. (I also recommend preferring to learn easy easy characters and focused memorization.)

Of course, now that I’ve finished those, the question is: what next? To follow up the latter book, I’m trying to spend more time imagining ways to link radicals to characters when memorizing characters. And Amazon commenters recommended the book Chinese for Begninners, which is apparently really about the characters rather than other aspects of that language; I’ve ordered a copy, we’ll see if I like it or not.

To follow up the former book, I’d been tentatively thinking that I’d start going through Hikaru no Go: I have the first volume in both English and Japanese, so it seems like a good place to start testing myself against the language more. The problem with that, though, is that I’m not sure exactly where in my schedule I’d find time to read it in Japanese! Fortunately, the problem doesn’t seem very urgent right now: I’ve found other ways to expose myself to Japanese (watching episodes of Hikaru and Twelve Kingdoms in Japanese with English subtitles; playing through Eternal Sonata in Japanese with English subtitles), and I’m learning a fair amount from them. I get the feeling that I’ve gotten over some sort of hump: most of the time, I very much rely on the subtitles, but more and more often I can figure out individual words after the fact or even decode whole sentences after the fact, and there are even some very simple sentences that I can figure out without the translation.

Another cause for optimism: for whatever reason, I’m going through the textbook faster than I had been. The last three chapters have taken me two weeks each to finish, instead of the three weeks pace that I’d been going at before, and the pace feels sustainable. My guess is that I’d run into a patch of unfamiliar grammar before (while the recent grammar has been stuff that I’d been at least somewhat familiar with from other sources), and I’m also getting better now at learning new vocabulary, and those have combined to speed up my progress. I wouldn’t be surprised if I occasionally go back to three week chapters (or longer, if illness/vacation get in the way), but I’m now a good deal more optimistic than I was that I’ll manage to finish the last twenty chapters in about a year.

I’m also getting more out of my use of JapanesePod101. I’d been annoyed by two flaws with their RSS feed: they only list the last seven episodes, which makes me worried if I ever go on vacation or need to send my computer in for repairs (previously, when I’d checked, they listed all episodes since their inception in the feed), and they started to throw in “premium lessons”, which I had to download by hand. (I do have a subscription, but I did that because I wanted to support them rather than because I wanted to have special access to stuff; I wished they’d just make the premium lessons available for free and stick them in the main feed!)

So I poked around a bit, and realized that there was a feed available for paid subscribers. And it not only remedied both of those issues, it also contained more material that I was aware of but hadn’t been using. The occasional “bonus audio” tracks are amusing but nothing special; having the lesson-specific PDFs available in iTunes, though, means that I actually look at them (since I see them in iTunes when deleting episodes that I’ve listened to), and they’re a good tool for helping reinforce my learning. I don’t actually generally use them to follow up on the grammatical points in the lesson: their main benefit for me is that they write out each dialogue in four forms: one including kanji, one kana-only, one in romaji, and an English translation. Which gives me a lot more reading practice, and in particular is a good way to test my kanji recognition skills in a safe environment. So now I’ll recommend a basic subscription to other people learning Japanese: it’s not just good for giving yourself warm fuzzies, the extra material in the RSS feed really is useful. (I don’t yet have an opinion about the premium subscription; the price difference is such that I didn’t seriously give it a thought, given that I’m learning enough via other means.)

So: I still have a long way to go, but I’m happy with the recent concrete signs of progress.

One other tweak that I’m considering: I write up lots of vocabulary flash cards (which is clearly useful!); when I’ve decided I know the word in question, I put it in the box in alphabetical order. This takes a noticeable amount of time (not a huge amount of time, but time I’d be happy to eliminate), and is largely drudgery; is it actually useful?

In some circumstances, the answer is yes: if a kanji has lots and lots of readings, I’ll only memorize a few on my first attempt, and take the card out later to add more. But for other words (kana-only ones, compounds), I almost never take out the card once it’s gone in the box. So I’m tentatively thinking that almost all of the time I spend alphabetizing those cards is waste; and, if I decide that I’ve forgotten a word that I once thought I knew and want to take out the card again, I could always just rewrite the card from scratch.

So now I’m thinking I might just throw away cards that don’t correspond to a single kanji. I’m going to think about it for a few weeks, since that’s not a step that’s easily reversible, but it might be a good opportunity to reduce inventory.

Sorry I’ve been so quiet recently; I spent most of my evenings for about three weeks playing Mass Effect. (Which I quite recommend, incidentally.) But I’m done now, so I finally have a bit of time to get back to blogging. (And to catch up with reading the things.)

I’m a third of a way through my Japanese textbook now: I’ve finished ten of the thirty chapters. Which is, I believe, farther than I made it through the book when I was in grad school, and I’m showing no signs of losing track of grammar / vocabulary, so my strategy of not forcing my way through the chapters before I’m comfortable with them is working.

Having said that, it’s been slower going than I thought: it would seem that it’s taken me about six and a half months to make it as far as I have. Which suggests that I have a bit more than a year to go before I’m through the textbook, which is a little disenheartening: I’d have hoped it would only take a year total to go through the book. And, actually, the situation might be worse than that: I breezed through some of the first chapters, while these days it takes me three weeks to go through a chapter, or more if I get sick or go on vacation or am particularly busy. So I probably have more than 60 weeks ahead of me.

Or maybe not. I’ve been getting exposed to bits and pieces of grammar through other sources; I actually don’t believe that the difficulty curve is really going to increase, and in fact I’m on track to finish Chapter 11 in two weeks instead of three weeks. Still, even at two weeks each, I have 40 weeks ahead of me, and in practice I don’t see how I could possibly have less than a year left, unless I find other techniques that significantly speed up my learning.

That’s fine, I guess; I’m in this for the long haul, and if the outcome of all of this is that in five or even ten years from now I’m reasonably comfortable reading a range of Japanese materials and not embarrassed speaking the language, that would be a win: I hope to have that enrich my life for another three decades or so after that. Still, I might as well take this as an opportunity to review my approach. Is there anything I could be doing better?

Well, one question is: better for what? What’s my goal? To learn Japanese, of course, but how do I define having learned Japanese, and what’s the goal that underlies it? (There’s no end of other things I could be learning, after all.)

The answer isn’t as obvious as it once was. When I thought about doing this in grad school, I had some pretty good answers: learn Japanese = be able to read Japanese, and I had some specific ways in which I’d like to use that skill. There are a lot more go books in Japanese than in English; also, I’d been really impressed by the literary fiction that I’d read translated into English, and I was pretty sure that there’s a lot more where that came from. And then I started getting into comics and video games; again, there was a lot of good stuff that hadn’t been translated into English.

A decade later, though, none of those motivations holds water very well. I don’t spend much time playing go these days, I can’t even keep up with the go literature in English any more, and if I wanted to get back into the game, one obvious way to make time would be to give up learning Japanese. Reading literary fiction is a noble goal, but getting to a level where I can enjoy doing that isn’t easy; even reading French literature is enough of a strain that I don’t do it very often, I can’t think of the last time I read literary fiction in German, and realistically it seems unlikely that I’ll end up learning Japanese as well as I know German. Manga and video games are more realistic goals, but the importance of learning Japanese to delve into those areas is much less than it was not very long ago: I’ve been astounded at how much stuff has been translated into English over the last decade.

Still, enough of my entertainment comes from Japanese sources that I think I have a good case for learning the language on those grounds. And I’d like to visit the country pretty soon; we’re not going this year (Paris again), but I very much hope we’ll go there in 2009 or 2010, and if that goes at all well, I hope that will be the first trip out of many.

The truth is, though, I’m not sure either appreciate cultural artifacts or visiting the country is the real reason why I want to learn the language: I think I just like the idea of learning Japanese. Or maybe the idea of knowing Japanese, I’m not sure. I just like knowing something about different languages, and I’m pretty fascinated by the writing system. So maybe the trip itself is the goal, instead of any putative destination.

I don’t want to go too far down that path, though: it’s easy to use that as an excuse to avoid testing myself (in either the written or spoken arena), and that won’t do me any good: I don’t want to be able to just do textbook exercises or recite lists of vocabulary (even if I enjoy the latter rather more than is healthy), I really do want to know the language at a deeper level. In fact, I’ve gotten far enough that I should start testing myself more seriously soon; more thoughts on that in a later blog post.

So am I doing a good job of meeting my goals? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m sure I’d make faster progress if I were taking lessons with a native speaker. That would cost money, but probably not enough to be a big deal; it would also cost time away from the house, which is a bigger deal. (Though it’s not like my present approach doesn’t have any time cost - I’m probably putting in about five or six hours a week.) I certainly plan to take lessons at some point, the question is when.

So what would trigger that? One trigger would be if I were going to be in a situation where I’d need to speak the language; when it gets to a year or so before I’m planning to travel to Japan, I’ll want to seriously think about taking lessons. Another trigger would be if I’m finding evidence that book learning isn’t doing a good enough job; hopefully I’ll start trying to read some real books soon, and that will give me more information about the extent to which having outside help would be useful. And a third trigger would be if I see myself avoiding to an unhealthy extent figuring out how well I’ve learned the language: if I do that, I’d need to face my fears.

There are also other tools that I could consider using (and paying money for) other than lessons, e.g. the Learning Center at JapanesePod101. For now, I’m not worrying about that; I doubt that would be a better use of my time than going through a textbook would, though it’s something to think about once I’m done with the textbook.

Something to think about. For now, I guess I should be happy with the real progress that I’ve made; I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, I don’t want to stay on autopilot, but I know more than I did half a year ago, and that’s worth being proud of.

I’m going through a low energy point in learning Japanese right now: I’m on the ninth chapter (out of thirty) in the textbook, I’m going at a rate that makes it pretty clear that I have at least a year to go before I’ll be done with the book (a year and a half looks more likely), and I’m past the stage where I’m reviewing old material (either grammar or vocabulary) but nowhere near getting a real payoff yet. No big crisis or anything - I knew this was going to take a while to pay off (I’m no longer seven years old, paired with an excellent teacher, or about to be living in a country that speaks the language), and this is a natural time to expect a down spot. Still, I might as well look at my workflow and see if there’s anything I can do to help improve my mood.

Actually, I started looking at the workflow a couple of weeks ago. One problem I was having was that it was taking me more and more time to review my vocabulary each night, and yet I still wasn’t sure I really really knew words when I claimed I did! Before I go further, I should explain my vocabulary flow: I have three bins of cards. One is a bin of words I know, one is a bin of words I don’t know. And there’s a third bin, of candidate words that I think I know, but need to prove it.

I go through the “words I don’t know” bin every day. But, on weekends, I also go through the cards in the “candidate words” bin, and every card either gets promoted to “known” or sent back to “unknown”. On the same day, I also go through the “unknown” bin and promote words that I’m comfortable with to the candidate bin.

The theory here is that having words spend a week in the candidate bin will give me time to forget them - it’s one thing to be able to remember a word night after night, and another thing to remember it after not seeing it for a week. I’ve been using variants of this system for decades, and it works pretty well. (I wish I could remember exactly how I used this system back when I was in college - was I using it just like this, or in a different way?)

The problems, though, were that I wasn’t sure spending a week in the candidate bin was long enough for me to forget words, and that also I would spend a noticeable amount of time going through words in the unknown bin that I actually knew pretty well. Fortunately, when you phrase it that way, the solution to at least the latter problem is pretty obvious: promote more frequently. (I was probably conflating the notions of transfer batch and processing batch.) The easiest way to do that is to introduce another bin, the “early candidate” bin; I can move words in there at any time, and then, on weekends, after clearing out the candidate bin, I promote everything from the early candidate bin to the candidate bin without looking at them.

Seems to be working well so far - it’s cut down the time I spend on vocabulary review each night, without any obvious cost. And it actually helps my first problem, too, since words are in one of the candidate bins for a week and a half on average instead of a week. If that’s not good enough, I guess I’ll introduce another candidate bin, to let words sit for (at least) two weeks before final approval instead of one.

That’s helping with the time I’m spending midweek. But, last week, I must have spent three or four hours studying, which is a pretty good-sized chunk of my weekend free time. And today, I really wasn’t excited about doing the exercises in the current chapter over again, as well as writing new vocabulary cards, going through the above candidate rigamarole, etc.

I’m not entirely sure about what to do with that, but at least part of the problem is that I’m trying to do too much at once on the weekends. (Especially on weekends when I’m starting a new chapter.) I think the lesson here is that I should just avoid doing everything in one sitting: I shouldn’t read through a chapter, do the exercises, sort through old vocabulary, and write down new vocabulary on a single day. There’s simply no need for me to do all of that at once: e.g. today I sorted through old vocabulary and wrote down new vocabulary, which was maybe an hour’s worth of work, so why not defer redoing the exercises until tomorrow? And, on weekends when I’m starting a chapter, maybe I can defer some of the work until midweek, or even the next weekend?

The down side of splitting that up is that it means that, on weekends when we have something planned to do, it will be hard to find time on both weekend days. Still, I don’t want to stay in a situation where I’m not looking forward to learning because of the quantity of work; if need be, it’s better to take three or four weeks for a single chapter than to push myself too hard, I’m fairly sure.

On a related note, Miranda and I looked at one German class today, and will probably look at another one next week; hopefully she’ll start lessons this month or next month.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but learning Japanese continues to increase my sympathy towards kids who are learning to read and misread words in ways which seem inconceivable to me. My brain is pretty much incapable of looking at a word in English and not reading it immediately; the same is far from true in Japanese. For example, one of my vocabulary cards has a character written on the front, and the readings shutsu, desu, and deru on the back. (With their meetings.) At least that’s what I thought was written on the back for several days, until I took a closer book, and noticed that the second reading was dasu, not desu. Oops. I mean, it’s not like da and de even look similar, I simply wasn’t paying attention, and my brain isn’t yet wired to read correctly when I’m not paying attention.

I started off studying the language with the help of JapanesePod101 and a textbook (Japanese for Today). Then I added Read Japanese Today, which I continue to think is an excellent way to learn kanji. I’d also been using Kanji & Kana as a reference book, so I got my stroke order right when writing characters for vocabulary cards; over the last few month, however, I found myself browsing through it more often in odd moments.

It’s a book I’ve had around since the last time I tried to learn the language. It contains the government-approved list of 1945 basic kanji, showing how to write each, giving the various readings and meanings, as well as a few compounds in which they appear. And does so in an order based more or less on how important they are. A great book to have around, if you want to immerse yourself in the basic kanji; last decade, I tried to go through the book and memorize the kanji in order.

But I went too far with the book. At one point, I could go through the first 200 characters or so, and write them down in the order given in the book, with the proper stroke order. Which is a very seductive thing to do: it gives you something to practice if you just have some spare time, or are falling asleep at night, or whatever. The problem is that my memorizing of my strokes got ahead of my memorizing of the readings and the meanings, so things got unbalanced.

Because of my bad experience, I stayed away from doing the same thing this time. But then I glanced through the start of the book and realized that I claimed to know most of the characters on the first few pages. So what’s the harm in memorizing the order in the book, and reviewing the strokes in my head?

Thinking about it more, I think that, not only isn’t there harm, there’s virtue in it. If I claim I know a character, even if I’m only interested in reading the language rather than writing it, I have to be able to recognize it completely reliably; given the number of characters that look similar, in practice I can’t claim that unless I could write the character. But vocabulary cards, by their nature, don’t give me practice in writing characters. So I have to find another way to practice writing them; memorizing them in the order in that book is as good a way to practice that as I can think of.

Having said that, I don’t want to forget what happened last time. I think/hope I’m doing a better job of managing my learning; the key here is to not have my memorizing how to write the characters get ahead of my memorizing their readings/meanings. If I do that, I’ll be okay.

The other book I’m reading right now is Japanese the Manga Way. It’s a relatively informal grammar of the language, with examples taken from manga. Which works well: besides being fun, manga gives a natural source of language examples that are closer to regular spoken Japanese than other written examples would be.

Other things I like about the book: for one, I can occasionally figure out what the examples are saying, kanji and all, before reading the explanations. And, for another thing, it presents the grammatical points in a rather different order than other sources that I’m using. (Perhaps because it isn’t constrained by having examples only use material that has been previously introduced.). I like seeing another lens on the language, and one which is perhaps a bit more coherent than others I have access to, one which is less intent on mapping the grammar to concepts in English.

The other thing I’ve been doing is watching (the excellent) Last Exile in Japanese with subtitles; again, nice to occasionally be able to figure out by myself what people are saying. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of the time I depend very much on the subtitles, but I’m starting to get the feeling that it might really stick this time.

Or maybe I’ll burn out in another couple of months! Always a possibility…

I’m on the fourth chapter of my Japanese textbook now, enough for a new set of difficulties to surface. All of which ring vague bells from a decade ago; I’m trying to do things right this time, which means that I need better strategies for facing these difficulties than I had last time.

One problem: when I claim I know a vocabulary word, when I move it from the “review regularly” stack of flash cards to the “mastered” stack of flash cards, I want that to mean that I really do know the word! But, for an uncomfortable number of flash cards, what is really going on is that I can reliably, upon seeing the front of the flash card, recite what is on the back of the card. Which isn’t the same thing.

Some aspects of that problem show up no matter what language you’re learning. For example, I usually only do my cards in one direction, so I regularly drill going from megane to “glasses” but not in the other direction. Also, their are grammatical issues: to really know a verb, you should be able to conjugate it at will, and recognize it in any of its forms.

Those particular problems aren’t that big a deal for me yet. I haven’t learned too much grammar, and I’m doing a pretty good job so far in being able to go from English to Japanese even though I’m drilling Japanese to English.

What is a big deal is the presence of kanji. This increases complexity in a few different ways. For one thing, I have to go between three forms of the word (kanji, pronunciation, and English) instead of just two forms (Japanese and English). And, of course, a single kanji character can have multiple pronunciations, which may or may not have multiple readings, and which may or may not be signalled by adding some kana at the end. (After some experimentation, I’ve decided to exile all the extra kana to the back of the card, instead of leaving it on front.)

That’s the obvious problem, but there’s also a more subtle one. When I see a vocabulary card, I see something I wrote by hand, taken from a limited number of other vocabulary cards that I’ve written. So when I see, say, the kanji for bijutsukan, what I really see is a card with three kanji characters on the front, where in this case I happen to have written the kanji characters a little smaller than would be ideal, and a little bit off center. And, honestly, that enough is almost enough to allow me to uniquely identify the vocabulary card from among my current set, especially if one of the radicals in one of the kanji seems familiar for some reason.

But, of course, that doesn’t mean that I know the word at all: if I saw those same three characters in a Japanese book, I would have almost zero chance of recognizing them as bijutsukan, and for that matter I’d be equally likely to mistakenly think that some other sequence of three characters might represent bijutsukan. I now appreciate what kids learning to read and write English are going through when they see a sequence of letters and guess that it’s some other word that happens to start with the same letter or two and is more or less the same length: they don’t have any deeper grasp of the phonetics of written English than I do of the radicals that make up a kanji character, and in both cases we quickly get overwhelmed by the task of really understanding how a word is written.

So what do I do about this? Part of my solution is to simplify the problem. I can adopt a classic agile planning technique: recognize that there isn’t a strong correlation between the difficulty of a task and its business value, and that, when chosing between two equally tasks of equal business value, you’ll get the quickest bang for the buck by doing the easier one first. What that translates to in this case is that, all things being equal, I should try to memorize words made up of as few kanji characters as possible. So one is best, two might be okay, especially if I’ve seen one of them before, three is unlikely to be a good idea. And not all kanji characters are created equal: given a choice, I should choose characters made up of as few radicals as possible, to increase the chance that I’ll be able to really know the whole character. (As opposed to, say, having the left side of the character trigger a memory in me.)

That alone isn’t good enough, though: it doesn’t leave me with a strategy for dealing with important but more complicated characters/words, and doesn’t directly address the complexity of what it means to learn a character. To really learn a character, I should be able to write it out myself, and be able to reliably tell it apart from similar-looking characters, characters with, say, the same radical on the left and on the upper-right but a different one on the lower right.

The answer to both of these aspects of knowledge is, for me, the same: I need to learn to love radicals. Once I really know the radicals, I won’t have to, say, recognize and reproduce the thirteen strokes making up a complicated character, I’ll just have to recognize and reproduce the three radicals making it up. That’s not a simple problem, given that there are about 200 radicals to grapple with, but it’s at least a tractable problem. Especially since the radicals in a character aren’t chosen arbitrarily: radicals have meanings on their own, so you can frequently build up the meaning of a larger characters out of the meanings of its radicals, and radicals can at times lend their pronunciation to the pronunciation of the entire character. So there’s real structure to work with here; as I buff up my radical credentials, it should become easier and easier for me to learn more and more complex characters.

And, fortunately, I’ve recently acquired an excellent book on the subject. It does a great job of showing how the characters evolved (and is historically accurate, as far as I can tell), and of gradually introducing radicals and showing how they add meaning in more and more contexts. So I’m gradually adding characters from that book into my stack of cards to memorize, even if I haven’t run into those characters in my textbook, and trying to remember the evolution of those characters in the bargain. Should make learning characters more fun, and easier.

That’s the main problem; there are a couple of other problems that I’m running into as well, though. One is that there are too many new words in each chapter for me to be able to memorize. I was worried about this three weeks ago: it seemed like my stack of unmemorized cards was getting longer and longer. Since then, I’ve been doing a pretty good job of moving cards into the memorized stack, but I don’t want to ignore the problem. (Especially since I’m now adding vocabulary cards from a source other than my textbook!)

Part of the solution is to simply not memorize every new word in each chapter. Each chapter introduces maybe 80-100 new words; I’m pretty sure that I can get away with only learning 40 or 50 of them right then. So I’m picking the ones that seem particularly likely to be important, or particularly likely to be easy to learn, and I don’t sweat the other ones for now. And if, in subsequent chapters, I keep on encountering a word that I didn’t memorize when it first showed up, then I can always learn the word later. It’s not completely clear that this is a scalable strategy - maybe, once I get to chapter 15, I’ll have to memorize 5 new words from each of the previous 15 chapters along with an extra 50 words from that chapter, which would suck - but I think it’s worth giving a try.

The second part of the solution is basic queue management: the problem here is an unbounded queue. And if you don’t want to have an unbounded queue, then put a cap on it! So I could adopt a rule that I can never have more than, say, an inch of unmemorize vocab cards in the box. Once I reach an inch, I have to do something else until the stack goes down: some combination of memorizing a smaller proportion of words in each chapter, taking longer to go through each chapter, and learning to be more effective at memorizing words. I don’t have an exam schedule or anything that I’m working towards: I want to do this right, and to do this right I need to balance my capacities, my time, and the number of words that I’m attempting, instead of letting artificial pressures skew my attempts at the cost of a loss of effectiveness.

So far, all the problems I’ve talked about have been about memorizing words, but it’s also starting to get a little harder to put everything in the chapter together. In the fourth chapter, for the first time, I had a bit of trouble doing all the exercises in the chapter the first time through, because of a combination of not having all the grammatical details, the usage details, and the words at my fingertips. I think that, for now, the best approach is to acknowledge that this is a potential issue, and be alert for warning signs. So I’m planning to go through the exercises in this chapter until I can do them all easily; if that means it takes three weeks to get through the chapter instead of two, that’s fine.

I imagine that further non-vocabulary issues will crop up as I go along: needing to memorize conjugations, for example. It’s been a while (almost 15 years! Ouch) since I’ve had to deal with that sort of thing, but I was once adequate at memorizing grammar, so I assume I’ll be able to do it again, and I don’t think Japanese holds any particular horrors in that area. And further holistic issues will appear: getting practice in reading actual books (and finding a suitable gradual series of books to practice that), practicing spoken Japanese. I imagine that, once those become urgent problems, outside guidance will be essential; fortunately, outside guidance shouldn’t be hard to find around here.

Fun stuff.

Some random notes from our recent trip to Boston and its environs:

• T tokens are no more. Which made me a little sad, but I was very happy that, when arriving Tuesday evening for a trip where we’d be leaving the next Tuesday morning and would spend three days outside of Boston, there was a week pass available that was a good value. And I now know that kids under 12 can ride for free, but didn’t know that when buying the passes…
• I was surprised that we got a good rate at the Park Plaza for a couple of days - is it normally affordable, or did we get lucky with a Tuesday/Wednesday request? Good location (though it took us a little while to find it, because we were confused by the construction at the Arlington T stop), and I could live without free internet access for two days. And an Amino set-top box on the TV - just like being at work!
• Hampton Inn has decent internet access at no extra charge. Though I was pretty annoyed at the fake nameserver at the Norwood one that sticks in an ad page if an address doesn’t resolve. Especially the one evening when, for whatever reason, a fair number of lookups were timing out, poisoning any future requests to those domains for the next 15 minutes or so. Not good if you’re reading blogs and can’t get to feedburner.com any more…
• I was impressed how we could get from downtown Boston to a turnpike entrance three short blocks away to out of town almost immediately. Especially since it doesn’t feel like there’s a turnpike cutting through downtown Boston, though I realize that I have walked on bridges over it several times.
• Sturbridge Village turned out to be a really good choice for a place to spend much of a day. Enough stuff to keep us interested, very low key, we got to see 1820’s welding technology in practice, Miranda liked it too.
• The suburbs that aren’t in the inner ring seem to kind of suck, at least near the arteries. I was not pleased with being stuck traveling at 5 miles an hour on 128 at 5pm, and route 1 in Norwood was not a place where I’d want to spend much time, if largely for aesthetic reasons.
• Got to see a couple more retirement communities. I’m glad these things are around. (Though I’m sure there are bad ones out there, too.)
• Didn’t get to see almost any friends or old haunts: we were too busy doing other stuff. Which is fine, actually: almost all of my Boston-area friends have moved away. I wish I’d had another day to just putter around places, but I can live with that.
• The MGA is still active. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it on a Tuesday or a Friday, so I didn’t get to see any of my old friends from the club, but you can get together a few people to play go on a Sunday at the Diesel Cafe. Which apparently opened about a year after I left the area; it’s a long narrow space (running all the way through the building from one street to the next), with good food and pleasant decor.
• That day, about 75 percent of the people in the cafe were using laptops, and about 20 percent of the people were reading the latest Harry Potter. (Which had come out the day before.)
• I enjoyed meeting blog reader Chris Ball in person (and other MGA members and Chris’s wife Madeleine), and we had a couple of exciting games - we turn out to be quite close in strength, conveniently! And I got to see the OLPC laptop in person, too.
• Harvard Square is doing okay; a few stores I like closed, one out-of-place building has appeared, but no wholesale destruction. Wordsworth’s has closed (though their children’s book store still exists, didn’t go in to see what it’s like these days); Harvard Book Store is still open. (I also didn’t go into the Coop to see what it’s like these days.) I’d be willing to believe that the square is declining, but I’d also be willing to believe that it’s at a steady state.
• And Schoenhof’s is still open. I broke my rule and bought several books that I don’t plan to read immediately, that indeed it’s not completely clear that I’ll ever read. But I was just so happy that the store is there! One book on learning kanji that I actually have started, a general Japanese grammar, and small individual books on verbs, particles, and connections (”Making your Japanese Flow”.)
• Grammar and verbs are pretty basic concepts, but I like the ideas of books on particles and connections. I was going to say that those seemed like “only for Japanese” sorts of things, but of course there’s The Greek Particles.
• We went to a couple of old favorite restaurants. The food at Chez Henri is still good, but the waitress we had drove me crazy. When I go out to eat, I do so for exactly two reasons: the food and the company of people I’m eating with. The waitress apparently thought that I had several other goals for the evening, prioritizing (among other things) her comedy routine above, say, getting us dessert menus. I am pleased to say, however, that the Elephant Walk still has both excellent food and excellent service. (Though it’s not that much better the food we make at home from their cookbook.)

Not sure when we’ll visit again, but I’m glad that we’ve managed to make it back every four years or so.

I pulled out my Japanese textbook over the weekend and read the first chapter. All stuff I knew, so it went really fast - no big surprise.

So I pulled out my box of blank vocabulary cards, and started writing down words. At which point I felt like I was stuck in molasses.

Basically, my handwriting in hiragana sucks. Admittedly, my handwriting in roman script sucks, too, but I’m used to that, and if I slow down just a bit, I can produce writing that I don’t mind looking at. While, when writing in hiragana, I simply don’t know how to produce writing that I don’t mind looking at!

Part of the issue, I’m sure, is that I have basically no experience to hiragana outside of print or artworks. So I expect some of my issues are similar to somebody who was used to reading English in the Times font, had a hard time reproducing those serifs, but felt that writing looked weird without them. But I’m sure that there’s a lot of plain old practice required, too. (I bet practice will help with the basics of generating characters with the appropriate spacing and relative size, for example.)

Actually, I suspect that hiragana may be a bit tricky to generate neatly, as writing systems go: I’m not nearly as self-conscious about my kanji, it turns out, and I don’t remember being particularly self-conscious about my greek or devanagari. So hiragana may be a bit higher of a hill to climb than most. I was surprised to learn today that I was even getting the stroke order wrong on some of the characters; I’m sure that much of that is simple ignorance, but it also suggests that the characters don’t fit into patterns that I’ve learned to expect.

I’m optimistic that this will get better pretty soon. For one thing, I bet that I’ll gain a lot from just reminding myself to slow down. I usually scribble quite quickly, and correspondingly illegibly; if I were to take, say, two seconds per character, it would feel like a glacial pase, but I bet I could do a decent job of writing neatly without too much practice at that rate, and I’d still be able to churn out a bunch of cards in five minutes. Whereas now, I try to do it faster, but have to practice over and over again to get it right, more than eating up the time savings. Tonight already felt better than last time: I came armed with some practice sheets, and I spent a fair amount of time going over each character there before I wrote it on a card. But the results seem to be sticking: I just slowly wrote a ka on my palm with my finger, and I didn’t cringe in horror or anything.

I sure hope it gets better soon. There’s some virtue in having the process be a bit slow, so I don’t try to cram too much stuff into my brain at once, but I’m already finding it hard to make time to do this, and having the process of generating vocabulary cards slow me down excessively doesn’t make me any happier. Compounding the problem is that the book contains a fair amount of vocabulary, without much guidance as to which words to learn in each chapter. (As opposed to when you’re taking a class, where the teacher will give you a list of words to memorize.) So I think that I’ll probably end up basically trying to memorize them all, which means that I have to generate a lot of cards; the more time that takes, the less time I have to drill on them!

Another useful web site I’ve found: Real Kana is a nice, flexible drill for reviewing characters. I’ve just been using it for a few days and I’ve already swapped almost all of what I’ve forgotten back into my brain; I’m optimistic that, after not too much longer, I’ll be able to recognize individual characters completely reliably and fairly quickly. At which point I’ll want to switch to reading more Japanese passages written out in kana (as opposed to romaji or a kanji/kana mix), not as practice in figuring out what it means but as practice in drilling my brain in going from kana to sounds without an explicit recognition phase in the middle.

Speaking of which, another area where I wish my brain didn’t have to do as much of a recognition phase is numbers: whenever I hear somebody read a number out loud, it takes me seconds to decode it, which is way too long. I wonder if there’s some web site out there that can help me with that, too? Even a robotic-sounding voice would be a big help, I suspect.

Now that I’ve finished my book queue, my next major queue to work through is my backlog of JapanesePod101 episodes. I first subscribed to that podcast just a few months after it started, but it took me several months after that to start really paying attention to it; by the time I got hooked, I was way behind.

It’s a remarkable podcast. Daily Japanese lessons, presented in such a way that reminds me of the recommendations from the late lamented Creating Passionate Users blog. From the beginning, it was all focused on the users. Some of that was straightforward (but not so common) community-building stuff - in the early months, they had a news post every Sunday, and it was full of expressions of gratitude for all the reviews, sounding sincerely thankful and amazed at how well it was going. (I haven’t participated in their forums, but they sound like lively places, too.) But the content itself was all focused on what users, too: rather than talking about how clever they are, they were focused right from the beginning on how, when you go to Japan, you’ll be able to find your way around and talk to people. And done in a style full of personality and, as far as I can tell, honest expressions of themselves: I’m sure it would drive some people crazy, but if it works for you, it’s great.

And it worked for me. I’d flirted with learning Japanese before, so some of the lesson series (Survival Phrases) were easy for me. (Though even those I wasn’t bored by, and if I were actually traveling to Japan, I’m sure lots of the specific topics would be very useful.) The Beginner series was just right for me, though: I had to pay attention to it almost from the first episodes if I wanted to understand everything, and I would finish each lesson by listening to the opening dialogue over again to make sure I got it all. (And once every few weeks I’d have to listen to an entire lesson twice, because of something I missed.) I’d gradually learn more stuff as the weeks went by; about 150 episodes of that series later, I’m still feeling that it’s a great level for me, still providing an appropriate challenge level.

The Intermediate series started out too hard for me, and continues that way, but I still like listening to it just to get the sound of the language in my ears. (And they recently commented that the early Intermediate lessons are easier in some ways than the current Beginner lessons; I went back and listened and, you know, they’re mostly right! Wow!) There’s other nice stuff, too, like Japanese Culture Class episodes once every week or two.

So it’s a great mix of stuff: lessons for a range of levels, and I enjoy even the levels that aren’t targeted at me. Actually, I’m glad that they’re not all targeted at me: I would simply be unable to keep up with seven lessons a week at the Beginner level. For one thing, I’m pretty sure I’d burn out: I have enough experience with learning stuff that I know that, if I push myself hard, it’s a lot of fun for about three months and then I just run into a brick wall. And, for another thing, the Beginner lessons demand enough concentration that I can’t listen to them while driving, so I basically only listen to them when jogging or grocery shopping, which I don’t do every day. (In contrast, the lessons that are either easier or harder are fine while driving, though I’ve gotten in the habit of pairing one Beginner lesson with one other type of lesson every time I jog, and so rarely listen to anything in the car.)

Unfortunately, it took several months for me to realize how much I liked it, and several more months for me to work up to a reliable schedule. With a daily podcast, you can fall behind really fast; I’m pretty sure I was more than a year behind at some point. I’ve been catching up since; I’m up to the middle of last November, and my current pace has me going at about 5/3 real time without signs of burning out. My goal now is to be completely caught up a year from now; I’ll check back next summer and let you know how it’s gone!

My fondness for the podcast is actually forcing one rather tough decision on me. A year ago, I thought about what to do next; two main contenders were learning Japanese and learning Ruby. I decided to do the latter (though hardly single-mindedly), and I still have quite a lot in that vein that I want to do. Having said that, I’ve been devoting enough time to Japanese as well that it would be a bit of a shame to lose that, and I’m afraid that, without some effort to consolidate my knowledge, it will get rather less satisfying soon.

Let me be clear: I don’t consider myself to really be learning Japanese now. I’m listening to podcast episodes and being exposed to new vocabulary and grammatical structures in such a way that, at the end of each episode, I can listen to the dialogue at the start and feel that I understand it. But I couldn’t typically engage in a similar dialogue myself, or feel confident that I’ve really mastered the grammar involved. It’s the difference between responding to cues in context after a reminder and really knowing something, and it’s not the fault of the podcast: that’s all you can hope from 10 or 15 minutes a day without study outside of the podcast. (Their website provides tools for that study, should you choose to use them and to pay money.)

And I’m afraid that, as the grammar gets more complex, it will become more obvious to me that I really don’t know the material, and will be harder and harder to get as much out of the episodes. In fact, my gaps are already starting to be painful: I’ve just gotten to the part where they introduced the Lower Intermediate lessons, and the dialogue in the lesson notes is in kana instead of romaji. I can puzzle out kana just fine, but I can’t read it with anything like the fluency with which I can read Roman characters; that’s exactly the sort of thing that I should be able to learn how to do if I just take time to practice it and that would help me a lot in providing a solid foundation for other sorts of learning.

And I’m sure there are a lot of basic vocabulary and grammatical structures that would similarly repay a bit more concerted study. I don’t necessarily want to immediately memorize everything new in each Beginner lesson, but it would help if I had the material from, say, six months earlier down pat. If I could do that, I think I really would be on the path to learning Japanese.

So I’m starting to think that it’s time to break out my old textbook, start writing down vocabulary flash cards, and get to work. Or maybe buy a new textbook - one of my coworkers was greatly amused by the “for Today” part of the title, and somehow my showing him the insert explaining that, in this modern world of 1988, color televisions are a standard appliance in Japanese households, didn’t convince him of its modernity. But I think it’s pretty well written, so I’m planning to stick to it - after all, I have JapanesePod101 to explain modern vocabulary to me, so I won’t be left in the dark if I hear a hip Japanese person referring to the governor of California as “Shuwa-chan”. Figuring out how to budget time for that is not going to be easy; I think it can be done, but I want to think it over for a bit before committing. I suppose, though, there is one bright side to this lack of time: when I flirted with learning Japanese in grad school, I was unsuccessful largely because I took it too fast and burned out; time pressures should do a good job of preventing that from happening this time, I hope.

I’ll let you know how it all turns out a year from now, when I’ve finished off this queue.

I’ve finished the last important code cleanups from my dbcdb code: I removed some proxy objects that had been used for lazy loading. I was really surprised to see how much that cleaned up certain aspects of the code: my Entity objects’ constructors got a lot cleaner, useless attribute setters/getters were removed, and in general responsibilities were greatly clarified: the Entities’ only job is to convert from SQL to HTML.

Which brings me to a pause point. I’ve met some of my objectives: gotten a little more practice with Java and HTML, learned a little about SQL and CSS, and provided an alternate linking structure to use in the blog. Nothing earthshattering, but it’s been of some modest use to myself. And there aren’t any obvious gaping holes to be filled.

So it’s time to take stock and figure out what to do next. For a while, actually, I was considering taking the time I’d been spending on this and using it to learn Japanese instead. (Which would actually take rather more time, but never mind that.) With some regrets, though, I’ve decided that isn’t the best course of action right now. My best guess is that I’ll be looking for another job in about two years from now. (With a huge margin of uncertainty, of course.) And, while I’m not sure what I’ll target in my search, I would like my options to be as many as possible; to that end, spending more time broadening my skills could be of some use. Exactly how much use isn’t clear - having been on the other end of the resumes, I realize how easy it is to reject candidates whose professional experience isn’t exactly what you’re looking for - but it’s worth a shot. So I’ll want to keep this up for another year or so. (After which, I hope to have enough time to take a break and learn Japanese. But who knows what the future will bring.)

So, given that I’m not going to stop now, what next? Rewrite it in Ruby, for one. I’m starting to chafe at Java more and more: just today I ran into a few places where I could use lambda, a few places where static typing was being mildly annoying. So I’ll start by rewriting the CLI tool in Ruby, then rewrite the HTML conversion part in Ruby. After that, I’ll generate the web pages on the fly instead of statically, using mod_ruby. (I don’t plan to learn Rails for now: I don’t have any good applications for that in mind.) After which, who knows; maybe I’ll stop there, maybe I’ll convert the editing tool from a CLI application to a web application. Maybe I’ll play around with web services, scraping book information from Amazon. Hard to say.

The immediate next step isn’t entirely clear. I’ve read/skimmed the Ruby book, but it hasn’t all sunk in; clearly I need to get my hands dirty. And I need to learn how to use Ruby to interface with a database. (Maybe the book talked about that; I skimmed the library section.) It’ll probably take a few months to have anything to show there; I also have a bit of unit-test library cleanup that I’ve been putting off. So don’t be surprised if I go quiet on the programming front for a little while.