Karl Andersson

On Tuesday we discussed my rough cut in class and it was extremely useful. Will have to change quite a bit. Important parts. Really enjoyed it.

Tonight I finished the outline of my thesis. It feels a bit uninspired but I’ll have to take a step back and look at it again. It’s at least good enough to send to my supervisor. Maybe he can point me in the right direction – I guess that’s his job.

I’m very focused on kanji – the power of continuing feels exhilarating at the moment! I’m at 2,100 in RTK edition 6 now – only 100 kanji to go! Plus the 150 that were lost on the way in the flashcards deck – I’m only at 1,950 there and that’s the one that counts since I don’t remember any kanji outside the deck.

SRS’s are so amazing! Can’t believe I’ve never used them before outside proprietary versions such as Iknow and Memrise. I’ll do the switch from Flashcards Deluxe to Anki though.

I’m watching and listening to a lot of MIA and AJATT for inspiration – I’m a bit infatuated with Khatzumoto (but then who isn’t). The input hypothesis for language acquisition. I had never thought about it let be tried it, despite having learned several languages, but it seems to make sense. Output is overrated. The focus with which these mostly young men tackle language studies reminds of an extreme sport, discussing the best techniques and publishing beautiful statistics. Almost like the world of road cyclists using Strava and Veloviewer.

We watched the docking of Dragon into ISS live! Which propelled me into a Wikipedia orbit of the American space shuttle programme, its disasters and eventual discontinuation in 2011. S told me we do this kind of procrastination because of stress.

Japanese

• Remembering the Kanji: Kanji 1876–2100
  • Flashcards Deluxe: 106 min/day
• Radio: FM Haro in the mornings

Article

• Francine Prose/The Guardian: What the arrest of a black CNN journalist on air taught us
• Cnet: Breathe deep: How the ISS keeps astronauts alive

15th German (Göttingen) International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF) – online

• Murghab (Martin Saxer, Daler Kaziev, Marlen Elders, Switzerland/Germany/Tajikistan, 2019, 81 min)

Recent video

• Khatzumoto unlisted:
  • 【Full Ver.】AJATT Khatzumoto is BACK!? Taking about WHY he was away from internet ! And BOOK review!
  • Q&A: Khatz do you consider yourself to be native-level at Japanese?
  • 【AJATT】How To Buy Books Like a Trillionaire Without Being a Trillionaire
  • 【AJATT】Thucydides Traps Aren’t Pretty Girls
  • [Video] [Raw] [Unedited] [NoFilter] Happiness, Gamification, Analog Thoughts and Digital Actions
  • Everybody Who Uses Frequency Lists Is….
  • Some Secret Deadly Kung-Fu Ninja and Other Stereotypically East Asian Thing Immersion Techniques
• Tkyosam (interviews with Khatzumoto):
  • All Japanese All the Time pt. 1 (2008!)
  • All Japanese All the Time pt. 2
  • All Japanese All the Time pt. 3
  • RACISM in JAPAN!　日本の差別の話 P 1/2 (2009)
  • RACISM in JAPAN! 日本の差別の話　P 2/2
  • AJATT 2014 – Renew Your Mind! PART 1
  • AJATT 2014 – Renew Your Mind! PART 2
  • AJATT 2014 – Renew Your Mind! FINAL
• Matt vs Japan: Matt’s AJATT Journey + Complete AJATT Guide (3 hours!)
• Brit vs Japan: English Guy Speaking Japanese
• CinemaShowFilms: True Otaku: The Documentary (Part 1 of 3) (cringe!)
• tantinoburatino: Delivery (bike messenger short)
• Marques Brownlee: Escobar Responds! A PSA
• CNN: Police arrest CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and crew on live television

I went into the zone with the rough cut this week, as planned. Edited until 3 or 4 in the night, got up around 9, did my kanji reps in the morning and learned new kanji after lunch, and then editing again from 15. I watched two more versions with S, but the huge difference was between the first (55 min) and second (32 min). The final version happened to become quite exactly 30 minutes, which feels like a nice format, and which I know that at least one film festival has as their limit for short film submissions.

The upcoming week will be all about the thesis.

Japanese

• Remembering the Kanji: Kanji 1651–1875
  • Flashcards Deluxe: 109 min/day
• Radio: FM Haro in the mornings

Article

• Maria Celander: Analys: Därför är alla nya filmer så mördande tråkiga (2018)

15th German (Göttingen) International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF) – online

• Sky, Earth and Man (Carolien Reucker, Germany/Morocco, 2018, 70 min)

The power of continuing: I kept up the kanji studies and am now at kanji 1,650, which is three fourth of the goal of 2,200 kanji. Since I started on 30 March 2020, that makes 48 days for the first three fourth, which would mean 64 days for the whole book if I keep up this pace. Plus a week of capturing those kanji from Heisig that are not part of the flashcard deck I’m using, probably due to a glitch in editions.

However, I have a deadline coming up on 1 June 2020, when I am supposed to have handed in both a thesis outline, as in draft, and a rough cut of the film to my supervisor, so I might have to focus more on that than on kanji over the next two weeks. I finally exported the rough cut I’ve been working on so far, but will remake it from the bottom up after feedback from S.

We watched some films at GIEFF – I am Sheriff was the gem among them. S participated in a Q&A after his film was shown.

We had the first classes of Editing Forum and Gender and Film. I will not take the latter as at this stage I’d rather only do readings directly related to my research. As for the first one, my rough cut will be dicussed in class on 26 May 2020, which means my actual deadline for the rough cut is in a week: 25 May 2020. Time to get to work!

Took the road bike for a round today, 60 km in the north, just like last weekend. And I finished the Yankeeshota manga, so sweet!

Japanese

• Remembering the Kanji: Kanji 1431–1650
  • Flashcards Deluxe: Ca 75 min/day
• Radio: FM Haro in the mornings
• Podcast: 男性BLマンガ家と中性マンガ家のふたりぐらしトーク公式番組, E1–5
• Manga: 星海ユミ: ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん, chapter 7–8 (end), pp. 95–146.

Anime

• 1995: Neon Genesis Evangelion. E19–21

Article

• Make Muse: Intersectional Feminist Vocab: Using the Term Womxn

15th German (Göttingen) International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF) – online

• I am Sheriff (Teboho Edkins, South Africa/Lesotho, 2017, 29 min)
• Lost Boy (Shin Thandar, Germany/Myanmar, 2019, 15 min)
• A New Era (Boris Svartzman, France/China, 2019, 71 min)
• Warehouse (Constantinos Diamantis, Lillian Dam Bracia, Malwa Grabowska, S. Buse Yildirim, Greece/Germany, 2018, 8 min)
• Ghost Tape #10 (Sean David Christensen, USA/Vietnam, 2018, 28 min)
• Chidra (Nadav Harel and Arik Moran, Israel/India, 2018, 40 min – watched first ten)
• The Stone Guest (Marina Fomenko, Russia, 2018, 8 min)
• First Harvest (Martin Gruber, Rika Shinkai, Germany/Japan, 2018, 7 min – watched first five)

Up and down week. I edited a bit but was mainly focused on the kanji. I’m on 1,430 out of 2,000 now and have a retention rate of 98 percent. So it really feels like the Heisig method, combined with a flashcard SRS, is working. Unfortunately the deck I’m using is lacking kanji every now and then, probably because it’s based on an earlier version of Remember the Kanji. So I’m only at kanji 1,332 instead of 1,430 in the deck, out of how many I don’t know (because it also includes a thousand or so kanji from the last volume which is not part of my goal now). I reckon I will need a week to catch up the lost 200 or so kanji once I’ve reached the end of RTK.

As for immersion, I’ve substituted Haro FM for my dear old Swedish radio in the mornings. And I’m reading an entertaining manga called ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん.

Japanese

• Remembering the Kanji: Kanji 1204–1430
  • Flashcards Deluxe: 98 min/day
• Radio: Haro FM in the mornings
• Manga: 星海ユミ: ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん, chapter 1–6, pp. 3–94.
• Video: Inside of Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower

Anime

• 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E26.

Article

• The Guardian/Rutger Bregman: The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

Pretty good classes this last “in-house” week:

• Editing class.
• Archival filmmaking.
• Exceeding the corporeal.

I keep focusing on Heisig’s kanji learning method and I’m now halfway!

Finally installed Anki and experimented a bit with sentence mining but in the end added the premade deck Core 6000. (I still don’t understand “best practice” with Anki learning, and none of the videos on sentence mining answered that.)

Flashcards Deluxe this week:

We watched another Miyazaki movie, Howl’s Moving Castle, but it felt like all effect and no heart. As if something he crafted with his left hand using the same old Miyazaki routine of ingenious creations, likeable characters, funny sidekicks, and a love story. And again there was no clear resolution to the spell!

I also rewatched Haneke’s debut Der siebente Kontinent with S, and it was even more gruesome now than when I was twenty. Actually, I think I thought it was “fun” when I watched it back then. The rest of the trilogy coming up.

Took another little bike ride today and it feels so good.

Japanese

• Remembering the Kanji: Kanji 931–1203
  • Flashcards Deluxe: 87 min/day
• 新にほんご500問 N2: Week 3 (pp. 145–212), test: 26/35.
• Anki
• Haro FM: Sunday 14-15 = 21-22: “The Experience”

Anime

• 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E25.

Film

• Der siebente Kontinent (Michael Haneke, 1989, 111 min)
• Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki Hayao/Studio Ghibli, 2004, 119 min)

Video

• Doha Debates: Arguing for a Fairer Global Economy | Speaker Spotlight: Jason Hickel
• Matt vs. Japan: How to Make Japanese Sentence Cards (SRS)
• BritVsJapan: Learn Japanese Rapidly using Anki | Best Flashcard Layout + Sentence Mining

Scattered in-house classes online. It’s hard to keep concentrated in front of the virtual classroom for five hours straight. So far we’ve had one really good class. Wednesday was supervision day, so I got direct advice from my supervisor. It felt useful despite there’s nothing concrete to comment on yet.

I tried to learn more kanji every morning and repeat them through the flashcards app in the evening:

Via Reddit I found a long text on sex in pre-Meiji Japan. I only read until Wabi Sabi, but I like how the author emphasises sex as one of many appetites, similar to how Foucault describes the “dietetics” of ancient Greece in The History of Sexuality, volume 2 (if I remember correctly). I remember discussing these various “appetites” with K once, he tought me about shokuyoku (食欲) for food and seiyoku (性欲) for sex, and how they were seen in similar ways. (The “yoku” kanji being represented by a “valley” and a “lack thereof”, where “valley” is a euphemism for vagina – according to the Heisig mnemonic at least.) The author even calls Japan of that time a “matriarch” society:

Sex was experienced in and beyond one’s marriage. Marriage had been very fluid in that sense. Again, for many Japanese people, sexuality had been like quenching their thirst. There had not been any serious religious intolerance and taboos on sexuality in Japan. In our contemporary concept, the Japanese people were often in open relationships or polyamory. In this free environment, a child might be born with no certainty as to who a father was. But it did not matter, for a child was raised by a mother and her family, if not by someone in the community. It is how a matriarch society works.

He is also critical of monotheism, and rightly so:

Much like the Ancient Israel and much of the rest of the world before monotheism’s invasion, sexual unions were believed to have power to fertilize the lands.

Closed 200 tabs in my browser. The modern-day version of throwing away papers from your desk. Feels as good!

Japanese

• Try N2: Chapter 7.2 (pp. 111–21). Review: 20/25 (or 19/20 when excluding the listening, which obviously is my weakest point).
• Remembering the Kanji: Kanji 688–930.
• That Japanese Man Yuta: Can Japanese Kids Pass JLPT N3? (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test N3) – I got them all right!

Articles

• Vice: Quebec Author Charged with Child Porn Over ‘Hansel and Gretel’ Retelling
• Stanahashi: Free, Open, and Sacred Sexuality had Thrived in Japan Till 150 Years Ago

Anime

• 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E23–24.
• 1992: Chameleon. OVA1.
• The Cat Returns (Morita Hiroyuki/Studio Ghibli, 2002, 75 min)

Film

• NOAH (Patrick Cederberg & Walter Woodman, 2013, 18 min)