I start feeling that the kanji become my friends. As if I’ve been to a huge mingling party for years on end, and finally started to get to know the people there, one after the other. The feeling came not from Heisig, but from when I started to write down the words in the sentences in the Japanese Core 6000 deck. All of a sudden the words became so much easier to pronounce and read fast – I read them out loud along with the speaker. It felt as if I recognised them as individuals. Friends. Male, female and in other forms. Magic, love, ecstacy!
I finished the second volume of Yankī Shota to Otaku Onēsan. It’s such a lovely story that centers the conflict (?) of 2D and 3D realities, in the form of a woman (the otaku) and a boy (the shota) who always seem to end up together, which causes the woman stress about whether her interest in fictional 2D shota says anything about her predilections in the 3D reality. Again, there are several scenes with direct bearing on my research. The fact that they are there says something about what the readers have on their minds. Pop culture is a perfect source.
As for the language, thanks to having mastered the 2,200 kanji in Heisig (which I keep repeating in flashcards), I can understand so much more in manga now than before. I’ve never been as immersed as when I read the last three chapters of Yankī Shota in one sitting (in my favourite corner of the sofa) on Wednesday. I had planned to do other stuff, but I just kept sitting and reading. I felt like a child who has just discovered reading (and who has his long summer break from school so he can just read all day long). Japanese is opening up for me. A whole world of literature and research is becoming accessible.
I absolutely loved this text, which I found via Khatzumoto’s email:
- Seb Pearche: Grammar is cheating: the brain vs. language learning (2014)
It turns everything I’ve known about language learning upside down. Ever since I studied Czech at university, my approach has always been “just show me the grammar tables”, because I felt that private language schools always tried to hide those since they thought people were intimidated by grammar. And although I still stand by that criticism, it doesn’t mean that grammar is the way. This text, Krashen’s principles, MIA, Ajatt, and so on stress the importance of input. Two mind-opening excerpts:
In the last few decades, classroom language teaching has undergone a major upheaval in the English teaching world, possibly because people cottoned on to the fact that they were hopeless at German even after studying it for 5 years. Now, the emphasis is on “communicative competence.” Accuracy, which used to be paramount, has effectively been replaced by fluency, and grammatical errors are given minimal attention.
…
And you can study as much grammar as you want, because you’ve already internalised the language that you’re analysing. Using grammar rules will no longer be blindly gluing words together, but understanding why the language you already speak works the way it does. Now you’ve got some bread to put the butter on.
Made a PS5 meme with Wataru.
Japanese
- Flashcards Deluxe: 51 min per day
- Anki: Ca 90 min per day
- Matt vs Japan: Anki Tutorial | Deck Options and Anki’s Algorithm
- MIA: About half of the super interesting and nerdy Low-key Anki tutorial
- 新にほんご500問 N2: Week 4 (pp. 213–), test: 23/35.
- Manga: 星海ユミ: ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん, volume 2, chapter 12–15 + extra, pp. 61–154.
Anime
- 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E31 (raw)
- 1989: Madou King Granzort. E16 (raw)
- 2016: Boku no Hero Academia. S1 E9–13 = end
Articles
- Euronews: Assita Kanko: Leopold II is part of the uncomfortable truth of who we are. We can’t erase him ǀ View
- BBC: Atatiana Jefferson: ‘Why I will no longer call the police’
- The New Yorker: Postscript: Remembering Aimee Stephens, Who Lost and Found Her Purpose
- Rolling Stone: Seattle’s Autonomous Zone Is Not What You’ve Been Told
- Jason Hickel: The case for reparations
- GP: Anna Björklund: Alexander Bards fall är ett modernt gladiatorspel
- Vice/Eric Cervini: Spying Before Stonewall: How the FBI Secretly Tracked Gay Activists in the 60s
- The Japan Times: 900 LGBT couples have been certified in Japan since 2015, survey finds
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