I am a big Shenmue fan, to the extent that hearing Yakuza 2 compared to Shenmue made me nervous rather than pleased: I was fairly sure that I was going to be disappointed if I thought too much about that comparison. So I decided to keep that comparison out of my head as much as possible, to try to appreciate the newer game on its own merits.

Which, for a while, I managed to do. Yakuza 2 started off with cut scene after cut scene after cut scene (and why did the game need to load between cut scenes instead of streaming them seamlessly off disk? Were they not prerendered?), but the back story seemed interesting enough, so I was willing to give that a pass. I liked the plot just fine—an odd couple of gangster and cop, warring clans with an old wise man and a changing of the guards, past events coming back to bite you, and all the twists and turns that you’d hope for. The Japanese voice acting was rather good, and, as a bonus, helped my studies: I wouldn’t have wanted to play the game without subtitles, but I could pick up enough from listening to make me happy. (And also enough to notice that, in some situations, they picked different readings for names in the subtitles than were used in the voice acting; oops.) There’s a lot to do in the cities, and many of the side quests seemed pleasantly quirky. And Goro Majima is one of my favorite NPCs ever.

Despite which, the game started to go sour, at two turning points in particular. In the first, I was wandering all over town trying to trigger a cut scene so I could progress the main story line. I had no idea where to go, and ended up looking everywhere; eventually, I stumbled past a male host club, where I was more or less forced to take a job that I had no interest in, and that made no sense for me right then, given that I was in the company of a female cop. And, adding insult to injury, that side mission left a big green directional symbol on my map. I was all for quirky side missions when I started the game; but I wasn’t in the mood for one right then, I doubt I would have particularly enjoyed that one even in better situations, and I was actively annoyed by having the map tell me where to go to do something I didn’t want to do while refusing to tell me how to make progress in the actual story!

The second (much worse) one was when I was wandering around Osaka with Haruka, the main character’s daughter-figure. She was great: I loved the way she was all gangly arms and legs, the way she had to run to keep up but was full of energy and happy to be going anywhere as long as she was with you.

And then you ran across some creep from a talent agency; Haruka, being a sensible child, wanted nothing to do with him. I was willing to write this off as a tone-deaf sidequest, until it became clear that this wasn’t a sidequest at all: the game was going to insist on my meeting with said creep again, and, to my horror, to my character agreeing to sign up Haruka with him. Fortunately, she protested enough to get my character to back off of that, but really: is anybody who worked on this game a parent? When you are confronted by a creep, when your daughter clearly and repeatedly expresses no interest in having anything to do with said creep, then what you do is stay far far away; you do not sign your daughter over to said creep’s care, especially only a couple of hours after meeting him for the first time!

After that, whatever bloom was left on the rose had gone away for me. I played through the rest of the game (including another outing with your daughter, that managed to turn a potentially delightful interlude into a boring-though-mercifully-creep-free grind through the city waiting for a cut scene to trigger), and actually basically enjoyed it. But whatever magic others had seen in the game just wasn’t there for me.

And while I tried to keep the Shenmue comparisons out of my head when I started the game, they had come back in full force by this point. And my opinion on that matter is doubtlessly clear by now: Yakuza 2 is no Shenmue, and it is (perhaps even more strongly) no Shenmue II. Or at least it’s no match for my nine year old memories of Shenmue, but I’m fairly confident that, while the latter game may have warts that the haze of memory has softened, I would still find it far superior if I were to play it for the first time now.

Take the cities that you can wander around. I’m almost positive those in Yakuza 2 are significantly larger than those in the Shenmue games, though I’m not sure that they grew more than you’d expect from the general march of technology. But Yakuza 2’s are much more homogeneous: the game presents you with sizeable chunks of two cities on opposite halves of Japan (which the game tries to emphasize with the plot and the Osakan dialect), yet it all has a much more homogenous feel than you get simply walking down the hill from Ryo Hazuki’s house to the local shopping district at the start of Shenmue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a consistent visual style where it fits, I certainly wouldn’t want change for the sake of change, but in the Shenmue series the changes in scenery were never forced, the game simply presented different regions that had naturally evolved differently in their different contexts. (Which we saw even more spectacularly in Shenmue II than in the first game.)

That’s the cities at a macro level, but, more importantly, Shenmue had Yakuza 2 beat at a micro level hands down. I’ll never forget the way Shenmue starts you off in a house where you can look at everything; it didn’t manage that level of loving modeling throughout the game, but it continued to have its share of places where you just wanted to stop and take a look around you. I never felt that way in Yakuza 2, and indeed I didn’t have the camera control much of the time to let me look around even if I’d wanted to!

This theme of less sprawling but richer experiences in Shenmue is present in the combat, as well. Yakuza 2 is a brawler; the fighting system is pleasant enough, but (despite all the leveling up options) nothing to write home about, as far as I was concerned. This shallowness doesn’t stop the game from insisting on having you fight all the time, however: that’s great in the sequences in the game where you have to go through enemies for a focused goal, but the last thing I want when wandering around a city and trying to drink it in is to be accosted by punks every block or two. (Yakuza 2’s atmosphere may have a less complex flavor than some, but there’s still enough there to make it worth experiencing!) It’s the same sort of combat fatigue that I blogged about recently in the context of BioShock: games that have clearly put in a lot of effort into building up a world, but constantly jerk you out of it to beat up somebody.

If I’m remembering correctly, Shenmue didn’t have such random battles at all: if you wanted to wander around the city, you could do so, with interrupts driven much more naturally by the clock instead of by combat. (I may be over-romanticizing this in hindsight, judging from my notes at the time, but the use of forced street fights as a source of money in Yakuza 2 gave me a lot more respect for the job system in the Shenmue games.) And, on the flip side, the combat system in Shenmue was much richer than that in Yakuza 2: Shenmue contains a fully-fledged fighting system, so if you want to take the time to hone your combat art, that game will give you the means and space to do so.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my Christopher Alexander analyses (hmm, I really should get around to reading the fourth volume of The Nature of Order, shouldn’t I?); I suspect that Shenmue would come out well in that regard. In comparison to Yakuza 2, it does much better with Levels of Scale (going down to smaller levels, in particular), which in turn leads to Strong Centers, and its gameplay has more Positive Space and Contrast, developing (especially in Shenmue II’s final act) into The Void and Simplicity and Inner Calm. Is it time, perhaps, for me to replay those games, if I can get my Dreamcast to cooperate? I wonder if I could get other Vintage Game Club members to go along.

Other discussion of Yakuza 2 (including some linked to above); I only wish I could include an archive of the relevant Twitter chatter:

• Steve Gaynor’s segment on the 2008 Brainy Gamer Holiday Confab.
• Michael Abbott on “A cutscene offer you can’t refuse”.
• Mitch Krpata asks if it was the most overlooked game of 2008″.
• Duncan Fyfe on Osaka.
• Two from Daniel Primed: “The Cultural Dynamite” and “Institutional Knowledge and The Virtual Classroom”.
• And finally, Iroquois Pliskin labels Yakuza 2 “The Game About Nothing”.

Being a good GTD devotee (or a good lean/agile devotee), this means that something has to go. Fortunately, I’m actually pretty well on top of things right now—in particular, my Next Action list is about as short as I can ever remember its being—so I shouldn’t have to prune too much; but I have to prune something. And I’m certainly not going to take a break from learning Japanese—in fact, one of the unintended consequences of the memory project has been to make there be pretty serious consequences if I take even a couple of days off from my study. (One could make a sensible case that I am being a total idiot in subscribing to ChineseClass101 right now, however. Though I certainly don’t intend to treat that as seriously as I’m treating learning Japanese.)

So I think my only choice is to cut down on my video game playing for the time being. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not going to stop completely, you’ll still find me every Thursday evening at the VGHVI play nights, and I’ll keep up with VGC activities. I imagine I’ll do some playing and blogging outside of that, too, but for those of you who read this blog for game-related content, don’t be surprised if there are relatively slim pickings here for a while.

But don’t unsubscribe, either! In particular, my conference activities won’t continue forever, so by the fall I should be back to normal. Heck, I might even be back to normal after Agile 2009—I certainly want to find time in early September to play a certain game.

Actually, I subscribed to several of the company’s series: I was pretty sure that the lowest level they offered was too basic for me, but the next five levels (going from 2-year-old through 6-year-old) all seemed plausible. So I subscribed to all five, planning to unsubscribe from the lower levels as I got more confident. In fact, I subscribed to them several months before I finished the textbook, so I had a backlog built up before I started reading any of them.

So I started working through my backlog of the 2-to-4-year-old fiction level, こどものとも年少版. (Which means something like “child’s friend early years edition”?) It was surprisingly hard, in some ways harder for me than later levels: it uses an awful lot of onomatopoeia (which Japanese uses much more than English in general), and I’m fairly sure that some of the speech forms are somewhat nonstandard parents-talking-to-kids forms rather than what I’d learned in grammar books. Fortunately, the books were totally charming, and while I wouldn’t want all books to be as repetitive as those ones are (a lot of doing the same thing on different pages with different numbers or colors or animals or whatever), it really helped me to have the same sentence structure and half of the same words to cling to while figuring out the rest of what’s on the page. And I’ve gotten a lot better at reading books in that series over the intervening months; the onomatopoeia words are even starting to stick.

Once I made it through my backlog of books at that level, I started on the next level: ちいさなこどものとも (little science’s friend?), nonfiction for 3-5 year olds. This was a great level for me: the sentences didn’t have the word usage quirks that previous level had, and the sentences were a bit more interesting while still not requiring me to look up an overwhelming number of words.

About a month ago, I made it through my backlog of those (I’d been reading one every weekend), and moved up to the next level. It’s called こどものとも年中向き (child’s friend targeted at intermediate years?), and is fiction for 4-5 year olds. And I’m enjoying the transition: the books are a bit longer than previous volumes (28 pages instead of 24 with more words to a page), but my practice from previous levels is paying off, as is my memorization practice, so they’re not taking too long. I’ve only read three books from that level so far, but they’re really quite varied: one was a regular story that confused my a lot until I realized that some of the word endings were in regional dialect; one consisted of scenes from a train station that might have fit better in the science series; and one was a counting/animal story that, honestly, probably would have fit better at an earlier level.

I’ve subscribed to but not started reading two more levels after that (one nonfiction, one fiction, both going through age 6); for now, I’m staying subscribed to the earlier levels, but I imagine at some point I’ll unsubcribe to those and add a subscription to something still more advanced. Also, for what it’s worth, all of the levels I’m subscribed to are kana-only, so my kanji practice isn’t paying off here yet. Though it’s paying off in other areas: for example, it’s kind of weird looking over at the spines of my Japanese go books and realizing that I actually recognize most of the characters I see there, even the non-go-specific ones.

I’m still listening to JapanesePod101, of course (incidentally, they just added a Chinese sister site, if you’re interested in learning Mandarin), and I’m spending a lot of time (almost certainly an unproductive proportion of time) memorizing vocabulary in general and Kanji in particular. In particular, I basically haven’t skipped a day using my memory program since it went live almost 10 months ago. (I usually use it during my lunch break at work.)

Which has been an interesting experience: in particular, at first, I ignored some of Wozniak’s suggestions, and I’ve learned that I was wrong to do so. To be clear, I don’t claim to be following any of his algorithms at all—I’m sticking with the algorithm I outlined here—but there are recommendations he makes that would apply to my algorithm that I ignored. In particular, he suggests a floor of 1.3 for the exponent; initially, I figured I’d put in a floor of 1.0 instead. But, after a few months, that turned out not to work at all: it was taking more and more time each day to review stuff because, once an item got tagged as “most difficult” (not too hard with kanji), I’d review it every single day for a month, and that clogged up fast. So I bumped the floor up to 1.2, and things got better; I then figured I should stop reinventing the wheel and bumped it up to 1.3, and I’m glad I did.

I’m also doing a better job now of following his suggestion of breaking up items into small chunks to memorize. Before, I would list all of the readings of a Kanji as one item: e.g. for the question 問 I would list the answer “もん、と（い）question, problem; と（う）matter, care about”. But now I break that up into three pairs: Q: 問, A: もん question, problem; Q: 問い, A: とい question, problem; Q: 問う, A: とう matter, care about. That has several advantages: individual items are smaller (as Wozniak recommends), I naturally focus more on the readings that are harder for me to remember, and I’m testing myself on something that actually matters when reading instead of an abstract skill. (I.e. I will encounter 問う when reading, but I will never be in a situation where it matters if I can list all the endings that you can stick after the Kanji 問.) In particular, the previous method wasn’t good at training me to tell whether, say, 上る was the reading のぼる or あがる. (It’s the former, the latter is written 上がる.)

Also, I made another Japanese-specific change while breaking up the kanji into multiple questions: I started writing the On readings (derived from Chinese) in katakana and the Kun (native Japanese) readings in hiragana. (So the answer to 問 is really モン.) It’s actually usually pretty obvious whether a reading is On or Kun, so that’s not important from a memorization point of view, but it meant that every day I was exposed to hundreds of katakana characters, so my katakana recognition speed has increased dramatically. (Incidentally, if any of you are learning Japanese, a recommendation: learn how to use your keyboard input method. Under Linux, you can convert a word to katakana by hitting F7; under OSX, by hitting control-k.)

Another surprise: I’d sort of assumed that some sort of geometric series magic would mean that I would be able to keep adding items to the database without increasing the amount of time I need to spend reviewing each day. Which, if you think about it for a minute, isn’t the case at all: e.g. if all items are at exponent 2 and I never make a mistake, then every day I need to review all the items I added yesterday, all the items added 2 days ago, all the items added 4 days ago, all the items added 8 days ago, all the items added 16 days ago, etc., and the growth here is unbounded. (Or rather, is bounded only by my lifespan!) I don’t think this is a big problem, but it might be; it does suggest that if I have too many items with small exponents then I’m in trouble. I hope that that problem will naturally ease: there’s a limit to the number of Kanji I have to memorize (I’m almost halfway through the official common usage Kanji list), and as I start reading more, I’ll get exposed to vocabulary more frequently in other contexts, which should manifest itself by the vocabulary seeming easier from the program’s point of view. We’ll see how it goes; if it gets too bad, I’ll cut down on the forced memorization and spend more of my time just reading and not worrying much about words I don’t know.

I had plans to quickly spiff up this application and make it multiuser, but that didn’t happen: basically, it became useable shockingly quickly, and I really didn’t have much of an impetus to improve it past that stage. It’s amazing what I’ve managed to leave out: for example, I assumed that I would have to implement a search functionality early on. But part of the basic Rails CRUD functionality is a URL that lists all the items, and combining that with browser search still works acceptably for search even though I’ve got over 3000 memory items listed. Or I assumed that I would have to secure it (and probably naturally add multiuser functionality as part of that) to get it useable while at work or travelling, but ssh tunnelling to an unsecure deployment was working fine for me until I got my new iPod and wanted to be able to use the program from the iPod’s web browser.

That’s changing now: aside from the iPod issue, I’ve recently gotten a bit frustrated with some UI elements, Miranda has shown some curiosity in using the program, and I just finished reading the paper version of the third edition of the Rails book. So now I’m pretty excited to start up my tinkering again! And in fact I started that last weekend (I continue to be impressed at how easy it is to write functional tests in Rails, incidentally), and I plan to continue with that on future weekends until the program looks/works a lot better. So: Jim and Praveen, I apologize for the delays, I’ll have a multiuser version available soon if you’re still interested! And anybody else who is interested, let me know; I’ll announce it here when it’s ready for use by people other than myself.

Cna yuo raed tihs?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef but the wrod as a whloe. Azanmig…

Azanmig indeed: I was pretty shocked to find that I could read that paragraph pretty much as fast as I could have if it had been spelled correctly. especially once I relaxed a bit. (Typing it in was another matter…)

Another datum for the “kids new to reading and writing are doing a completely different thing than I am” point of view. (Or is it? It’s related somehow, but I’ll have to think about exactly what it might imply.) I wonder if we should put something like this in the PACT parent ed new parent training, to give people a bit more sympathy for what K-1 kids are going through?

I think I’ve said this here before, but I’ll repeat it: it wasn’t until I started learning Japanese that I really had sympathy for what kids were going through. (My experiences with Greek and Devanagari scripts are far enough in the past to not have a current impact.) I’ve been studying it for a while now, and I still can’t even read Hiragana script with anything like the fluency that I can read Roman: I’m literally unable to misread Roman script in ways that I’m quite capable of misreading Hiragana and that first-graders are quite capable of misreading Roman. But that’s just script-to-sound translation; the above points out that that’s not what’s really going on when fluent readers read…

So I spent most of the day getting serious about it, and I’m proud to say that I just finished my first quiz through it! At the start of the day, I had the structure for entering items (almost all of which Rails gave me completely for free, I’m not sure I’d spent as much as 30 minutes working on it); today, I tweaked the layout for that and then added the quiz functionality. So now I have a nice slightly AJAXy quiz page which shows the next question to review (if there is one), plus an “Answer” button; if you click on that, it reveals the answer, plus another pair of buttons to mark your answer as correct or incorrect. Click on one of those and it brings you to the next question, and updates the data base with the appropriate review time, winning streaks, wrong answers, etc. for the one you just answered. (And the next review time takes all of those factors into consideration, so you see harder items more frequently.)

Amusingly, the process of working on it gave me examples of how I can use it for things other than Japanese vocabulary review: I don’t program in Ruby in my day job, so I occasionally forgot bits of syntax and other functionality. So, from now on, I’ll just enter that stuff into the database! Which turned into a feature request: I was already planning on making sure that newlines were preserved, but I decided that I’d better make sure that indentation is preserved as well…

There’s a lot of work to do: it’s incredibly ugly (in appearance, the code is much nicer), there’s no search functionality, there’s no pretense at security (I’m running it on my home machine, so it’s inaccessible from elsewhere without ssh port forwarding), there’s no multiuser support. (Sorry, Jim and Praveen, you’ll have to wait a bit, but multiuser support is very much on the road map!) But what is there is genuinely useful, and (as far as I can tell) works. I’m planning to switch my vocabulary review over to it as fast as possible; and I’ve added nightly database backups, including offsite replication, in case anything goes wrong.

And my experience with Rails as part of this has been quite positive: I didn’t have any Rails experience before this other than what I’ve gotten from books, I’ve spent something like 6 hours programming, and I have something useful at the end. That’s really good, as far as I’m concerned.

Incidentally, don’t be confused by the naming, the Beginner series isn’t quite for raw beginners, that’s what Newbie is. (Well, the first Beginner season was. But the later ones weren’t.) Also, the buttons at the top of the web page don’t include the later seasons of the show: if you want to browse by category, use the ones on the right side. The free feed only contains the last week of lessons, but older lessons are all available on the web page. (Or via the feed for the paid subscriptions; if you do commit to learning the language, I recommend signing up for one of the subscriptions, I’ve found the reading practice from the PDFs to be worth the Basic subscription price alone.)

To make a long story short: largely, it Just Works. (At least under Ubuntu 8.04.) I was a bit confused at first by the wealth of possibilities: in particular this page talks about UIM (better but less standard?) versus SCIM. I compared the pages that it pointed at (both for 7.10), and then I found this page which was an updated version of the SCIM recommendation for 8.04; reading through that, it seemed like some of the UIM advantages had gone away, so I decided to go with SCIM and follow the steps listed there.

I made it as far as turning on Japanese language support (including the support for entering complex characters), and got confused at the next line on the HOWTO: it was directing me to edit a file in my home directory which didn’t currently exist (so why not ask me to create it instead?), and it was telling me to edit it via sudo, which didn’t make any sense. While I was googling to make sure I wasn’t about to do anything stupid, I ran across this page on SCIM, which claimed that things should work now with no further configuration.

So I tried typing Control-space, and up popped a SCIM window; a bit of typing later, and I had both kana and kanji appearing! Pretty cool. And the input method does seem quite usable; I didn’t have to do to much experimentation before I felt like I could enter characters fairly reliably, without too much extra typing. One thing which I might want to tweak is using a key combo other than Control-space to enter it, because I use that a lot in Emacs; fortunately, SCIM only recognizes the actual control key instead of the caps lock key that I have remapped to control (perhaps related to this bug), so the default mapping isn’t interfering with Emacs use; if it starts doing so, it should be easy enough to change.

The upshot is: under Ubuntu 8.04, Japanese input Just Works, as long as you have it turned on! I wish I’d found that latter page first, rather than the longer page. For now, I’m not doing anything more with the longer page (and am considering removing the extra repository it had me add); the next thing on its list is a handwriting recognition system, which sounds cool but which I have no particular desire to use.

I am considering following its font instructions; in particular, I agree that it’s annoying that kana look blurry at small sizes. Having said that, for now I’m holding off: my main planned use for Japanese input is in the memory project, and I’m planning to use larger font sizes for the flash cards there, so it may not be a big deal. And these days, I’m generally in the mood to go with defaults whenever possible: I have other ways that I’d rather spend my time than fiddling with system configuration.

One thing which it pointed out which is useful: go to System / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts and turn on subpixel smoothing. (It also recommended clicking on Details and making sure hinting is set to ‘full’, which was already the case on my system.) That noticeably improved the look of my (roman character) fonts on my monitor; if you’re using an LCD monitor, you might want to check that your system is configured that way, even if you don’t care about Japanese at all.

Edit: I’m no longer so convinced of that last sentence: fonts started looking a bit green when I did that. It’s worth trying, but I’m thinking of going back to ‘best shape’ instead.

For whatever reason, the grammar in the middle third didn’t seem any harder for me to learn than the grammar in the first third. And there are actually fewer vocabulary words to memorize than in the first third; I suppose it makes sense that, when starting the language, they have to throw more new vocabulary at you to enable you to read anything.

I’m also getting better at memorizing vocabulary and kanji. I’m now up to 448 kanji on my journey through the joyo kanji; I can reliably learn fourteen a week (seven every three days, actually), whereas before I only did seven some weeks. I still have a hard time believing that I won’t run into a wall at some point during the 1500 kanji that remain, but I could be wrong; if I haven’t run into problems so far, maybe I won’t run into problems later? I still have a good two years of kanji memorizing ahead of me, unless my rate speeds up dramatically, but that trip is starting to look increasingly manageable.

If I could wave a magic wand and fix one thing right now, it would be my retention of vocabulary (and, to a lesser extent, grammar) that I learned a few months ago. I don’t have a magic wand, but I’m hoping that the memory project will solve that problem. (I still haven’t started programming on it—bad David—but I did write my first toy Rails app this evening, so I am taking baby steps.)

It looks like I’m about five months away from finishing the textbook. Which isn’t exactly right around the corner, but it’s close enough that I should start thinking about next steps. Some possible areas to work on:

• Speaking Japanese.
• Listening to spoken Japanese. (E.g. in movies or video games.)
• Reading Japanese.
• Increasing my vocabulary.
• Learning more grammar.

For now, my main goal is to improve my ability to read Japanese, so I’m going to have that drive my next actions. (Though if we decide to travel to Japan next year, I’d want to bump up the priority of speaking Japanese.) I’m getting some pretty good ideas of what I might want to do next in that vein: Japanese volumes of Hikaru no Go, the annotated books I recently purchased, some kids’ magazines that Jim mentioned. (I realized that I’m acting like some of the people mentioned in the NLP book: I want to learn Japanese, so I try to imitate people who learn Japanese better than I do, so I act like a Japanese kid (or an American kid with Japanese parents), so I order Japanese children’s magazines!)

And, of course, reading Japanese will require me to increase my vocabulary and grammar; I’m comfortable with my plan for the former (words that I run into in books, the joyo kanji), and I have some resources for the latter.

All in all, pretty happy. I just need to get off my butt and start programming, so I’ll have the memory program available before I go on vacation. (Or before I run out of blank cards in my vocabulary box!) And I should probably just go and subscribe to a subset of those magazines; I might as well start trying to read some of the younger ones right now.

Which I was strangely taken by, but I have to admit that it sounds more like snake oil than not. At least I hope that the psychological profession is sensible enough to pick up on techniques that can cure serious phobias in five minutes, if those techniques actually work! Then again, it’s not like I actually took the few minutes to go through any of the exercises in the book; maybe traditional psychologists took the same approach to the ideas as I did…

Having said that, there were a couple of ideas in the book that seemed worthwhile. One was the notion of the direction of motivation: you can either be motivated towards something you want or away from something you don’t want. Or, of course, a mixture of both, even in a single situation, and certainly people can be motivated towards something in one aspect of their lives and motivated away from something in other aspects of their lives. But their claim that most people, in general, lean in one direction or the other sounds plausible to me; and I think it’s worth playing around with the idea of exploring both sorts of motivations in various context. (Of course, I still think it pales in comparison to the power of the distinction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.)

In particular, I’m starting to buy into the notion of how powerful having a strong vision of a future goal can be. This is, of course, the core of “motivation towards”, and also ties in with their approaches that I outlined in the first paragraph. Thinking back on my life, or even about my present-day life, I think it’s not too implausible to think that the areas where I’ve been successful are areas that I’ve had a strong vision pulling me forward, while areas where I’ve been less successful are ones where that hasn’t been the case.

For example, I think you could make a reasonable claim that part of the reason I left academia was that I didn’t transform my vision of somebody who knew a lot of mathematics into a vision of somebody who discovered a lot of mathematics. I was quite good at the former and mediocre at the latter; some of that is doubtless due to my innate talents, but I bet a lot of the reason why I would pull out a math book at a moment’s notice (and work through all of the exercises in it) during parts of my life without putting in the same energy towards discovering new math later in my life had to do with my lack of vision of what the latter would be like.

Though, of course, having a strong vision by itself isn’t good enough. On that note, I thought their presentation of research on what factors lead to successful rehabilitation for injured athletes was quite interesting. The list they presented was:

1. Inner Motivation. Both towards a future vision and away from the painful present, in the case of rehabilitation.
2. High Standards. The successful athletes wanted to get back to their former peak performance levels or better: they wanted to run like the wind, not just get to where they can walk.
3. Chunking Down Goals. They broke goals into extremely small chunks, e.g. gaining an extra quarter-inch of range of motion in their feet.
4. Combining Present and Future Time Frames. They concentrated on the present when moving towards those small goals, while also having a vision of the future to sustain them through the rough times.
5. Personal Involvement. They helped design their recovery plans and carry them out themselves, not just putting themselves in others’ hands.
6. Self-to-Self Comparisons. They’re not worried about comparing themselves (especially in their injured state!) to other athletes: they’re comparing themselves today to themselves last week, and noting how they’ve progressed.

There are several things that I like about this. For one thing, it fits well with my view of areas when I’ve been successful: in those situations, I have a vision for what I want, I break that down in small steps, I take charge of my own plans, I don’t worry particularly about comparing myself against others but instead note the progress that I’ve made on my own. Whereas in areas where I don’t satisfy those criteria (which is also frequently the case), I make much less progress.

To take a much more modest example than a world-class athlete recovering from injury, I want to become a fluent reader and speaker of Japanese. That’s my motivation, mostly towards, though there’s a bit of an away from motivation in that there are art works I can’t really access right now! I won’t claim that my standards are wonderfully high, since even if I succeed fabulously there will still be more than a hundred million people who are more fluent in the language than I am, but I’m also rejecting goals of being able to just get by: one of my goals right now is to memorize the two thousand basic kanji and all of their common readings and meanings, for example, and I have no intention of stopping when I get there. But that goal will take me years to reach; that’s okay, as long as I know 14 more kanji this week than I did last week, and can keep that up for a little over two more years, I’ll make it to that goal. (I suppose that will also serve as an example of combining time frames!) I’m certainly involved personally: I’m not depending on anybody else laying out a course of study for me, I’m doing the best I can of finding resources to help me wherever I can and combining them to make a coherent plan that I’ll actually be able to carry out. And I’m not comparing myself to anybody else while doing this; sure, the kindergartener two houses down is probably learning Japanese much more quickly than I am, but that’s her, I’m me.

And, of course, I’m always gratified to see somebody talk about the virtues of breaking large tasks into small steps. I’ve certainly spent enough time obsessing about that over the last five years, whether in the TDD cycle, in breaking up features into small, coherent stories, or in the GTD notion of “next action”. It’s a very powerful concept.

The list also sheds an interesting light on Seth Godin’s The Dip. I blogged before about my mixed feeling towards the book: I initially found it seductive, but when I thought about it more it didn’t really feel right to me. And comparing it to the above list is useful: Godin does great on the High Standards part, and okay on the Inner Motivation part. (Though even there I think the fit is a bit uneasy.) I think he’s fine on the next three factors (they’re not particularly the focus of his book, but that’s okay), but the Self-to-Self Comparisons seems to me where his presentation really doesn’t work with me. Don’t worry about being better than everybody else in your niche: follow your nose, and see if you’re getting closer to your vision every day. Maybe this will lead you to being king of your niche, maybe you’ll open up a glorious blue ocean, maybe you’ll just end up having your life quietly spiritually richer without being able to say you’re more successful than your neighbors. Any of these seems like a good outcome to me; focusing on being the best has its virtues to the extent that it encourages you to set High Standards, but is harmful to the extent that you’re excessively comparing yourself against others.

Hmm, maybe I should figure out what, if any, my vision is for this blog?

In my first game, I took one stone, and the only reason why it was particularly close was that my opponent made a stupid mistake in the endgame that cost him about 10 points; I should have resigned earlier. Judging from conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he normally plays as 3 dan but his rating has slipped recently; I’m quite willing to believe that, it felt like he was 2-3 stones stronger than me.

My second game was frustrating in that the score on the board was 61 to 54, and the AGA rules have a rather large komi of 7.5. Oops.

The way my third game ended was instructional. We were fighting a ko; I made a ko threat. At least I thought it was a ko threat: my opponent started looking at it, and I realized that, because of a snapback, it wasn’t actually a threat to capture the stone it seemed to be threatening.

And then I looked more closely at the ko, and got really nervous. If I’d given in and connected, it would have only cost me a point. If he won the ko, rather than connecting, he’d capture four of my stones, which could be a big amount at some points in the endgame, but I had (despite my misreading of this one) several ko threats on the board that were bigger than that.

But then I realized that his capturing those four stones wasn’t all that was going on: it created a serious threat on my group adjacent to them, and in fact I wasn’t completely sure that my group would survive if I tenukied. (Which I would have to do to make good on any ko threat I would play.) This is something I hadn’t really thought of when doing ko fights: it’s not enough to just calculate the value of your opponent’s first move if he ignores your ko threat, you also have to figure out if that move is sente. And, if it is, you have to play ko threats that are enough larger to make it worthwhile to ignore that sente move.

Despite all of that, it turned out well. My ko threat wasn’t a threat in the way I thought it was; fortunately, when I read it more carefully, there was a more subtle shortage of liberties there. Which my opponent missed, so he won the ko; he captured four of my stones, lost twenty of his, and didn’t manage to capture the other ten of mine that were threatened! (In our post-game review, we decided that the best play after his initial capture lead to my group living in seki, but as it was it lived outright.) A very odd result: we both misread my ko threat, and the result was that, as an outcome of a ko fight that I’d initially miscalculated as small, the game turned from a close game to one where he resigned!

My fourth game was really weird. My opponent’s grasp of large-scale structures was even worse than mine, but he constantly wanted to get into fights with me. And, in doing so, he left himself weak, so I was constantly attacking him! Really bloody, and we both misread situations in significant ways; I misread more than he did, and lost. I really shouldn’t have misread some of those situations; the flip side is that I should probably look for clever attacks more often, because if he can find weaknesses like that in my positions, I’m probably missing some in my opponents’ positions.

One big takeaway from my first two games, which jives with my memories from other recent tournaments: I’m probably doing a better job of building up influence than I did a few years ago, but I’m also being far too cavalier about letting my opponents getting significant territory on the sides. In particular, I really underestimate how valuable it is to have an entire side of the board.

The nice non-go-related aspect of the tournament was that it was in the SF Japantown. I had lunch at Sapporo-ya, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but which we discovered has quite good ramen when we tried it out because we NEEDED FOOD NOW the last time we went to Japantown. And I did some shopping at Kinokuniya; they didn’t have what I was looking for (more Puzzle Nikoli books; fortunately, the ones I have will last me through the only upcoming trip we have planned), but I found a go book I didn’t already own.

And I browsed through the instructional language section, and acquired more inventory there. Which doesn’t entirely thrill me, but I’ll be finishing my Japanese textbook in about half a year, I’m not sure I’ll go to a Japanese bookstore between now and then, and I could use ideas from browsing in a bookstore. And if I learn about books that I want to buy while browsing in a bookstore, I’m going to almost always buy them there, instead of noting them down and buying them elsewhere. The haul:

• Collections of essays and fiction with “translations of all the complex passages”, copious notes, and a dictionary. (And a CD and profiles of the authors.) I’m really excited about these: they look like a great way to make the transition from book learning to reading real Japanese.
• Two volumes of Japanese in MangaLand: I liked the other introduction-to-Japanese-via-manga book that I read, so I figured I’d give these a try as well.
• A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. I bought this partly because I figure it might be a reasonable thing to read once I’m done with the textbook and/or a reasonable reference, but mostly because there’s an intermediate grammar in the same series, which I expect will be a good follow-up to the textbook.

All in all, if I’m going to accumulate inventory, it doesn’t look like too bad a choice: I have specific triggers coming up in the not-too-distant future that I expect will cause me to start reading all of them, and I’ll probably start reading the manga volumes sooner than that: the first one would be a good candidate to bring on vacation.

A quite pleasant day. I even got some studying done over lunch, so I didn’t particularly fall behind in my regular activities.

What algorithm should I use to schedule the reminders? I’ll work under the theory that each item that I want to remember is best reviewed at exponentially increasing intervals; see, for example, Wozniak’s Algorithm SM-4. (Though I should note that Algorithm SM-11, his most recent version, seems to drop this assumption.) And, of course, different items are best reviewed at different rates, depending on how easily my brain seems to remember them; let’s call the multiplication factor that we use in the exponential curve for an item its “difficulty factor”. (Where smaller DF = more frequent repetitions = more difficult.)

In SM-4, he suggests that a natural goal is to try to remember items correctly 90% of the time, and that a difficulty factor of 2.5 makes sense as a first guess. In earlier versions of the algorithm, he has what seem to me somewhat complicated ways of tweaking the difficulty factor, but, in later versions, it gets simpler: if you get it wrong, start over reviewing the item from scratch, and increase the difficulty.

Given that, assume you’ve gotten an item wrong W times, and have S winning streaks of 10 correct answers. (So a 20-win streak would count two towards S.) (Though, with the power of exponential growth, a 20-win streak would take decades at all but the hardest difficulty factors.) Then I’ll set the difficulty factor DF for that item equal to 2.5 – .1(W – S). The point here is that ten correct answers balances one mistake, which fits with getting it right 90% (or 91%, I suppose) of the time. And I pulled the .1 more or less out of my hat: I don’t want the difficulty factor to get too close to 1 most of the time, and subtracting .1 each time I get it wrong should fit in well with that goal, based on my experience over the last year with Japanese vocabulary.

With the above definitions, assume that your current winning streak for an item has length n. Then I’ll say that you review the item immediately if n=0, and review it in DF^(n-1) days if n > 0. Actually, I think I’ll change that last to (DF^(n-1)) – .5 days, since I only plan to do the review once a day, and I want to avoid weirdness that might occur if I do it at 8pm one day and at 6pm the next day, or even 11am.

This looks pretty simple: for any given item, I just have to store the next review time, W, S, and n to have enough information to schedule future reviews. (And the fact that one of the items to store is the next review time is very convenient, because that means I can figure out what to review by just doing a simple database query on that column.) I could even store W – S instead of storing both W and S, but I think I’ll keep them separate. One reason for this is that one of the ideas in the original is that different items can be considered more important to learn or less important to learn; if I have something that’s really important to learn, e.g. kana characters, then I could have each mistake count as -.2 instead of -.1, while each 10-time winning streak would still only count as +.1.

That’s the algorithm; what do I use to program the application? One of my motivations is to make it easy to continue my studies when I’m on vacation, or for that matter during my lunch break at work, so I’d like to make this a web app. It looks like a good fit for Rails, and I’d been meaning to get practice with Rails anyways, so that’s what I’ll use. Hmm, what are the best ways to learn about Rails? It’s alleged to be simple enough that I should probably just jump right in and program instead of spending hours reading about it.

The program will have to present questions and answers; each one will be a simple Unicode text field. (And I’ll want to do automatic line wrapping but to preserve manual line breaks.) It won’t affect the programming, but I’ll have to learn a bit more about multilingual input in the various operating systems I use; I’ve done kanji input on the Mac, hopefully it won’t be too hard in Linux, either, and hopefully it will be easy to switch between keyboard layouts on the fly. I can start off with buttons for “show me the answer” and “correct/incorrect”, but eventually I’ll want keystroke inputs for those, to minimize typing. And that’s all there is for the “test yourself” part of the interface; I’ll also need an interface for adding questions and for editing them. (Where the latter will require search functionality.)

If this works well for me, I may well want to let Miranda use it to help with her German; so I’ll have to think about account management, authorization, security. (And if any of my readers are curious, I’d be more than happy to open it up to y’all, too.) OpenID is the trendy up-and-coming authorization mechanism these days; maybe I’ll give that a shot? I would assume that there’s probably some Rails plugin that makes OpenID easy to use.

That should be enough to get me going; in particular, I have a clear next step, to get my hands dirty with Rails, and I have a clear first goal, to get the basics of adding and reviewing items working locally. And then followup goals of searching/editing and of doing this remotely in a not-hopelessly-insecure fashion; I’m going on vacation for a week in August, so I’ll try to get to that stage by then. The multiuser stuff can wait until after that.

Should be a pleasant way to spend some of my free time over the next few months. Andd it will directly address some of the issues I’m having with my current Japanese review: I’m currently managing to review vocabulary items both too frequently and not frequently enough! So I’d really like an algorithm that asked me questions at just the right time.

• 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…

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.

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.

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 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.

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.