..and studying.

Adding cards to Anki, an amazing open-source flashcard program.

I wasn’t always a morning person.  In high school I stayed up late studying and would sleepwalk to the shower each morning.  During college mom knew not to call before noon or else hear the mumbles of a freshly awoken daughter.

Then came San Francisco, Starbucks.  I opened a couple of times and ended up liking it.  In at four am, out by noon.  The bank was open when I got out of work.  I could pick up a lunch special and it would be my “dinner”.  Weekday shopping was a breeze.

I just had to deal with a pesky 3:30 am alarm.

After two and a half years of that my current 6 am alarm feels… almost luxurous.  It’s summer (and there’s no daylight savings) so the sun is up.  I head to the kitchen to make my lunch then head back to my desk with a cup of tea.  I have an hour, sometimes more, to catch up with my email and my studying and the world.

But then I have trouble staying up past 11 on a perfectly good Friday night.  Ah well… I’m sure I’ll be up early enough tomorrow to make up for it.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (日本語能力試験、or JLPT) is coming up in 11 days so I’ve been hitting the books pretty hard.  I passed a practice test but I want to give myself some more breathing room so kanji and vocab it is.

I originally thought reading was my problem but when I looked at the questions I got wrong vocab was the actual culprit.  I have kanji-based words down but all the linking words get me into trouble.  You know, all those words that connect sentences, make a paragraph cohesive… and get tested on.

Luckily I found a book in the Kanzen Master series that covers all of those annoying important points.  I also got a kanji workbook that I work through during my breaks at work.  This weekend I’ll take another practice test and see exactly how much good all of this has done.

~Karla cracks open a book with one hand while holding a cup of tea in the other~

I know you like steam engines but in Japan this is the best I could get.

Happy father’s day, Dad!

I teach English in Japanese elementary schools but I’m not directly hired by the schools.  I actually work for a contracting company that takes care of things like schedules, communication with the school boards, visas, and the like.  They also provide training and observe one of my classes once a year.  That was this week.

It went pretty well, I think.  The guy who came was quite strict during the initial training so I was bracing myself for the worst but everything turned out okay.  He even had some great tips on how to make particular parts of the lesson flow more smoothly.  He said that I did a great job controlling the class while being just the right amount of fun/silly.  I never thought I would be able to “control” a group of 35 sixth graders so I was really happy to hear that.

I’m finally starting to feel like I’m settling into this job.  I still get butterflies before I teach a new lesson or go in front of a demanding class but things are becoming easier day by day.

All of this being said, I don’t think teaching is the job I’m meant to do.  It’s something I’m good at, sure, but it doesn’t capture my mind and imagination.  At least, not when I’m travelling to five different schools and seeing roughly 1000 different kids every two weeks.  If I had my own class it might be different… but then again, if I had my own class I would have to deal with a lot of problems I conveniently sidestep now.

Originally I was thinking I would teach for one year and then move on to something where I can use my Japanese more effectively and learn more as I go.  But with the economy being so bad and jobs being so scarce I’m now thinking another year of teaching might be a good idea.  I get home in the afternoon and have lots of time to study.  Sometimes I even get the chance to study during work where there’s always a super-nice, understanding, patient teacher around if I have a question.  While teaching isn’t my life’s work doing it for a little longer may be my ticket to Japanese fluency.  I don’t have to decide anything right now (the school year runs April through March) so we’ll see how it plays out.

Touristy shopping in Asakusa, Tokyo.  Best viewed in this large version.

Now that I’m typing more Japanese I’m finding I make different kinds of typos.  In English I mostly make letter order mistakes, such as liek for like.  Every once in a while I make a “visual” typo like replacing a p with a b.

Here’s a Japanese phrase I was trying to punch in just a few minutes ago:

じょし せいと (joshiseito) – female student

There are many, many places this can go wrong:

transposition/the dyslexic ‘oops’ – swap the syllables in joshi (女子, female) and you get shijo (子女, child)

long vs. short vowels – lengthen the short to of seito (生徒, student) and you get seitou (政党, political party) or seitou (正答, correct answer) or… well, have a look.

The most disturbing typo I make is the aural mistake.  The Japanese “alphabet” is a phonetic system.  Voiced and unvoiced sounds can look similar.

ひ – hi

び – bi

ぴ – pi

They’re all basically the same sound–the way the tongue and lips move changes the way it comes out.

Typo-wise this creates some really weird mistakes.  In my mind I’m saying the right thing but my fingers don’t obey.  Here I made じょし(joshi, female) into しょし(shoshi, 書誌, bibliography).

I consider myself a visual person but for whatever reason when I type Japanese my internal ears fail me.  What kind of typos do you find yourself making?

Gotta love paychecks–I can use them to buy games!

This is Rhythm Tengoku Gold and it’s just as addicting as it looks with 50 mini games plus loads of unlockable fun.  Don’t read Japanese?  There’s an English version, too.  Yea!

Japan is nothing if not full of wonderous sights and sounds.  I’m lucky and get to experience them every time I walk out my front door, so for my friends around the world I present Uniqlo’s “calendar”.  Click and watch all the wonder that is Japan float before your very eyes.  Your screensaver will turn on before you know it (mine did).

マグロ (maguro), i.e. tuna, at my local supermarket.  There was a guy right there preparing cuts of sushi, droning on about how fresh the fish was.

Head of tuna – roughly $10.  Knowing where your food comes from – priceless.