Catching Up Part 1 - March

Okay so it's been a LOONG time and so much has happened so I'm just going to use old facebook statuses as a guide. I'll probably end up forgetting a ton of things but I think this might be the better way for me to blog. I always felt that time spent blogging is wasted time I could have spent learning Japanese. Also this way people reading will only hear the really noticeable stuff in my learning experience rather than lots of detail and stuff that's probably not really relevant or needed. I think I'll try and get into a habit of just doing bigger posts every month or two. So anyways, let's get started.

First there was a big earthquake/nuclear disaster here you might have heard of. That threw my schedule off for ~2 weeks at least with regards to studying. I ended up traveling to Kyoto(京都), Osaka(大阪), and Nara(奈良) for two weeks after the earthquake for various reasons. One noteworthy event that happened over there was that I had a conversation with a Japanese guy in a bar in Kyoto for ~30min in Japanese. I struggled like crazy and didn't understand about half of the things the guy was saying, but he was very patient with me. It turned out he was an English professor in Kyoto. After finding that out we spoke mostly in English. It’s a long story but by the end of the night I made a goal to one day be good enough to read the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World(世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド) by Haruki Murakami(村 上 春樹). I find this goal a much more interesting one than knowing some number of kanji or words or so many hours spent on smart.fm.

Soon after I had to deal with the train staff at my city JR station because I left my backpack on the train. I had a pillow in it and I couldn’t think of what the word was, but when the staff said “makura”(枕) I remembered it from Rosetta Stone. The exact same thing happened with me trying to explain there was a Canadian flag (旗) sewn onto it. I.M.O. there’s lot of vocab (mainly nouns) that Rosetta shows a few times and never goes back to like “flag” or “pillow” while others are shown too much of. (Common/more useful words being the ones that appear more often.) Personally I like the iknow.jp/ smart.fm idea of making all items appear equal on your study (but even that’s not even true if you look at the words used in their example sentances). Anyways, my friend was with me (an English teacher for 2 years in my city) and he was impressed with my English level for my short length of time in Japan. That compliment meant a lot to me since I feel that every compliment I get from a Japanese person is them just being polite. Anyways, back at home I had to answer my first phone call in Japanese with no help from anyone. It was with the staff at the train station my bag ended up at. I was able to pull it off, but they kept asking me what the contents of my bag were and I could tell only from the tone that they meant “was it a mistake?” or “was it wrong”. I realized later that they must have just been looking in the wrong pocket so it didn’t match the description I left at the station. Either way, important word(s) to learn: mistake=machigae/machigau(間違え/間違う)

About this time I decided to buy a manga book. I went into the book store not really knowing what to look for and figured I would just ask the staff for something easy. Although after looking in what I think was the “easy” section, it looked far too babyish and boring. And there was so much in just hiragana/katakana, which I felt was something I didn’t want. It just felt like doing it that way would mean I would have to learn the words twice. However the other ones seemed too weird/difficult or expensive. I wanted something I would be interested and motivated to get through yet cheap enough that if I didn’t follow through, it wouldn’t be a big waste of money. I was about to ask for help, or give up, or something at this point when I came across “Tales of the Abyss”. I ended up choosing that since “Tales of Symphonia” was one of my favourite games and I had always wanted to play Tales of the Abyss, so I figured it would be interesting. (I never even imagined the tales series would have a manga.) Anyways here's a point form description of how that worked out for me.

• It was hard
• I found out that it was pretty much identical to the videogame's dialog
• I found out that my computer could handle a PS2 emulator
• So I made a plan to read the book first while doing my best to understand it, then play the game in English up to that point, then go back and read that section of the book again
• The game was too fun
  
• It was easy to play first, read after
• This soon became just me playing the game and no reading.
  
• I ended up beating the game which took A LOT of hours that could have been spent studying. (It's a loong game)

So it definitely was not a good thing for my Japanese but two good things did come out of it.

1. I loved the game, so much so that it might be my new favourite game (here’s a demo for anyone interested) )
2. It eventually led me to learn my first Kareoke song in Japanese. (more on that later.)