Karl Andersson

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)

Full day classes Tuesday through Thursday. I liked the game “The Quiet Year”, which I read the introduction to and which we attempted to play during class.

I generally spent the mornings learning new kanji and the evenings editing my film.

I started using Reddit. Funnily enough I’ve never used it before at all. It always felt like this wonderful site that you will dive into when you have nothing else to do, and that time never came. Anyway, I’m following the Japanese learning and Anki subreddits, and the huge Anki community and the possibilities for tweaking the app through add-ons and even custom HTML and CSS code (or Javascript if you’re so inclined) makes me want to switch from the relatively simple Flashcards Deluxe app that I’m using on my ipad. Especially the beautiful statistics screens that people are posting are what will eventually make me switch, I think. Of course, what matters is consistency and putting in the work. It’s always tempting to spend time researching and discussing study methods instead of actually studying.

I rewatched the first episode of The Wire with S, who hadn’t seen it but was recommended it. We’ll see if I continue, I’m not crazy about TV series in general. We saw another Miyazaki: Porco Rosso. I gave it a 4 out of 10 on Myanimelist = “bad”. It felt like the script was a halfmeasure, with the theme of the pig spell not developed enough, not being cared for enough by the creators, so why should we care as viewers?

It’s getting warmer again, I took a couple of bike rides and they do me good.

Adam Alsing died.

Japanese

• Try N2: Chapter 7.1 (pp. 103–10).
• Remembering the kanji (James Heisig): Kanji 446–687.

Articles

• The Left Review/R. Taggart Murphy: East and West: Geocultures and the Coronavirus
• BBC Travel: Amabie: The Japanese monster going viral

Anime

• 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E22.
• 1990: Yuusha Exkaiser. E2.
• Miyazaki Hayao: Porco Rosso (1992, 94 min)

TV

• The Wire, S1 E1.

A pretty mellow week. It’s Easter. I took a couple of shorter bike rides to stay healthy. I finished a manga page. And I’ve started to edit!

I keep being focused on Japanese. Mainly by learning kanji through the Heisig method, which works amazingly well and fast so far. (As I wrote the word “mellow” above, I automatically thought of the mnemonic to that word: A tall and a fat child being grilled over the fire until their bodies get mellow = 熟.) I also dug through another double chapter of the Try N2 book, which I bought in Japan in October 2019. Buying is easy, actually sitting down with the books and putting in hour after hour of learning is harder. At least it’s clear to me what my strong and weak points are. In the Try N2 book I score well on grammar but have severe problems with reading and listening. In the cute little 新にほんご500問 N2 book, which I bought last month, I score very well on kanji readings but very bad on both grammar and vocabulary.

I wonder if I should give JLPT N2 a try in December. It was in December 2014 (!) that I failed it with a weighted score of 67/180 (vocabulary/grammar 22/60, reading 15/60, listening 30/60). Now that I was going to check out the application deadline I realise that the test center in Berlin has disappeared! I also note that they have added one in Stockholm.

I made a new acquaintance in my field and chatted a lot with him on Line. He gave me a very valuable perspective (from the West!) on my research, as well as inside knowledge.

I dug into the Japanese concept of “yankee” or “bad boy” manga together with K.

Next week our “in-house” classes will begin, which will take place online.

Japanese

• Try N2: Chapter 6.1 and 6.2 (pp. 86–102), review: 12/16.
• Remembering the kanji (James Heisig): Kanji 246–445.

Book chapter

• Robin DiAngelo (2018): White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
  • 1: The Challenges of talking to white people about racism

Stories

• Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World, edited by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro.
  • Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa: “Once Upon a Time in a World”, pp. 83–117.

Podcast

• The Intercept: Somebody, ep. 2: The Nurse

Articles

• CNN Philippines/Chuck Smith: Why Philippine TV doesn’t have ‘Boys’ Love’ shows like ‘2gether: The Series’
• Africa is a Country: The virus of whiteness
• The Intercept: It’s a Scandal That We Don’t Know Who Supported the Coronavirus Bailout. Help Us Find Out.
• Tagesspiegel: Neuer Radweg zugeparkt – Polizei sieht “keine Gefahr”

Film

Arsenal 3

• The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (Elizabeth Povinelli/Karrabing Film Collective, Australia, 2018, 27 min)

Video

• Freedom Forum: Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks
• WordPress: Matt Mullenweg: State of the Word 2019
• Matt vs Japan:
  • What is MIA? Introduction to the Mass Immersion Approach
  • “JLPT N1 and Not Fluent” | Confessions of a Traditional Language Learner
• Sky News: Could Sweden’s controversial COVID-19 plan pay off?