16/100 days(?)
320/1000 kanji
SRS/Study
Since last update:
- Bunpro N3 Lessons 9+10, N2 Lessons 1+2+3
- 175ish new vocab, a bunch of reviews
- 120 new kanji, a bunch of reviews
Immersion, Thoughts, Life
This entry will be a bit scattered.
Life: For those reading who haven’t lived in Japan you may not know but the beginning of April is a pretty busy time in Japanese workplaces as it is the beginning of the financial year and old people leave whilst new people arrive. It is also the beginning of the school year here and since I work in a school that means lots of meetings and class prep. Although I am an ALT (a position famous for its lack of actual work) I have always insisted on attending every relevant meeting since I started this job. I also have a non-English class which I run (it is a research class) and belong to a kind of study support department as well. My two main classes are also totally run by me and I don’t use any textbooks and instead design my own curriculum. If I am not working then as much as possible I will try and study. Basically I have been busy this week. Next week classes start so I will be busier still probably. Later this month I am also doing a guest lecture on British culture for a local charity so I have spent a couple of evenings this week preparing for that.
Despite all this busyness I actually think doing daily updates probably works better for this little 100 project as I started to lose track of what I was doing or had done pretty quickly after I stopped updating daily. So from now on I will try and update daily or at least every other day. I don’t think it suits my personality longterm but for the sake of staying focused on this project it seems to work better than leaving this kind of larger gap. It’s my first time really doing this kind of thing so I don’t really know what works for me so excuse my going back and forth. Weirdly it is probably quicker to do daily updates and braindumps than more considered weekly posts.
Reading: You can see from my tracked books below that I started the furigana version of the “Bookworm” series. It is not really my thing but it is the right level for this little project and it is fairly simple to pick up and put down which was perfect for me this week. You can also see I read maybe another 30k of Kafka on the Shore and did a little bit of the book club reading plus a tiny but of the Sadako book. Because my reading sessions have been more like 20 minutes here and there this week I haven’t been able to get into one thing and focus hence the quite wide spread. I also read Yotsuba. I don’t think I am gonna track manga in my currently reading/completed list as I don’t read much and for me it is more about the art than the language.
Listening: Most of my immersion this week has been listening as it tends to be less intensive for me and it is a bit easier to turn my brain off whilst watching youtube than when reading. Due to meetings I have probably been “listening” for about 2 hours a day at work besides my actual study time. Recently things at work have been getting easier to understand but there are still plenty of times when announcements or topics in meetings that kind of go over my head a bit. Like I know what they’re talking about but it is easy to miss the details.
Speaking: Also, I have someone new sitting next to me at work and we have been chatting for maybe an hour or so each day. The guy who used to sit there was a nice buy but a bit taciturn so we didn’t speak to each other much beyond basic courtesies. The new woman is the 書道 (calligraphy) teacher and we’ve been chatting a lot about kanji - pretty useful desk buddy to have honestly. I will probably also sit in on one of her classes once lessons begin. I did a bit of 書道 in the past but I am at the level of a 4 year old still so I’m looking forward to learning a bit more. There’s another new person in my department as well and she is always striking up conversation. It may sound silly but I have never liked talking (in Japanese) too much at work as it just feels worse to make stupid mistakes and sound like a monkey at your workplace than with friends or in a bar or something. One thing I am trying to work on this year is speaking more at work and trying to accept the fact that I can, to some degree, speak Japanese. I am constantly telling people I meet I don’t speak Japanese since when I moved here that was true but slowly it is becoming un-true and it is hard to know where that line is. I almost said it to my new desk buddy the first day we met because she was asking if I can read hiragana (lol) and I was about to say something like “Actually I find reading to be the easiest thing about Japanese - I can read a bit but I can’t speak at all” but we’d been having a conversation for about half an hour at that point so it would have been ridiculous. I think the issue is that my standards are high so even if I can have a long conversation about daily topics without any gigantic issues there are still so many things I don’t know how to say properly or I have to avoid specialist topics or I make a silly little grammar error or I become aware how poor my pronunciation is (To beginners reading this: Pronunciation is much much harder than you have been led to believe. It’s an “easy to learn, hard to master” kind of thing. My hot take for the day is that pronunciation is harder than kanji.).
Review of Oppenheimer
Unrelated to Japanese language learning but I saw Oppenheimer in the cinema last weekend. The reason I mention it is because it was originally not released here and was subject of some online controversy due to the subject of the film and also the fact that some people found the Barbie-heimer meme marketing thing to be offensive. I watched the film with a Japanese friend and we discussed it afterwards. Safe to say it really was at the limit of my conversational ability but it was pretty interesting to hear her opinion. From my side, I thought the film was excellent and clearly has an anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons perspective. Due to the film being mostly from the perspective of Oppenheimer himself (and partly from the perspective of Lewis Strauss) naturally the narrative focused mostly on things besides Hiroshima/Nagasaki. I won’t say more for fear of “spoilers” but basically the focus is elsewhere, on areas that make sense for the characters and also for Nolan/a Western audience. The film goes on for perhaps another hour after the dropping of the bombs. My friend who I saw it with found the message of the film to be far more ambiguous than I did. I have since spoken to other Japanese friends who saw it and they also found it more ambiguous than I did, interestingly. The film itself is excellent and everyone I know here who has seen it says it is excellent but I can also understand why some people may not want to go out of their way to see it. I have brought up the Ghibli film “The Wind Rises” as a comparison when speaking to Japanese friends. Anyway, I will leave my thoughts there as I don’t really want to get too much deeper into it and derail this post further. But overall good movie, 9/10.
Mini-forecast: I will be pretty busy so I am expecting my reading numbers to drop further but I am looking forward to my new classes and I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get some good listening in and keep ploughing through the kanji and grammar. In May there is Golden Week and a test week so I am roughly planning to get a lot of reading in then, depending on my mood.
Thanks for reading! (Also please excuse the typos in this one - I haven’t proofread it and don’t intend to!)
Currently reading:
- 禎子の千羽鶴, 13,334/49,591
- 本好きの下剋上（TOジュニア文庫), 27,986/99,257
- 海辺のカフカ（下）, 88,880/222,476 (was at around 25k at the start of this challenge, I think(?))
- (Bunpro Book Club, Intermediate) スーパーカブ, 5880/109,076
- (Bunpro Book Club, Advanced) スター・ウォーズ４, 11,807/169,574
Completed (since the start of this challenge):
-
もしもの世界ルーレット (volume one) ; 1/10 (for small kids so more abysmally underdeveloped trash to go on the cultural heap); 70,941 characters
-
むらさきのスカートの女 ; 6/10 (a well written if ultimately dissapointing quick read); 59,733 characters
-
変な家 ; 4/10 (an initially breezey but farfetched little mystery which soon turns into something quite silly and poorly executed); 62,734 characters
.