Read the manga. Screw the movie. I haven't seen it... but I just noticed the folder sitting in my hard drive and I was overcome by a pretty strong emotion... the kind I get after I finish a REALLY good series with a REALLY good ending. There aren't many stories of this caliber out there. There's one that I can always remember off the top of my head though... Chrno Crusade. I was in a daze for a few days on that one. The feeling has completely faded... but that was another series I feel quite strongly about.
20th Century Boys is weird, but stick with it because the story is complex and what's more, the thematic elements relate to the way we progress through life in a very undiluted way.
Chrno Crusade is just a damn good love story on steroids. Think Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu except far more epic (it's got more substance and you can't really brush the plot off as a psychological motif) and less cute.
PS. The reason why I say read the manga... no matter how good the movie is, I sincerely doubt it'll come close to what the manga did. This isn't lord of the rings where special effects enhance the story 'x' amount. This is... I'd say a character study. Whatever, just read the damn manga.
Japanese
Group 1: 22/25 (88%)
Group 2: 23/31 (74%)
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Handwriting
Mine sucks. Time to improve it. Maybe it'll train the same muscles for calligraphy... with a brush. From what I know... you use your arms more than your wrist and fingers.
http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 13
Group 1: 28/28 (100%)
Group 2: 20/20 (100%)
http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 13
Group 1: 28/28 (100%)
Group 2: 20/20 (100%)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Nothing to write about... whee
I don't think I've ever realized this before... but I spend a lot of time each day reading. I should time myself tomorrow and see just how long.
Some info on how to make flash cards! and some basic guidelines to approaching the learning process.
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm
http://www.nihongoperapera.com/passing-jlpt-2kyuu-supermemo.html
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 11
Group 1: 24/27 (88%)
Group 2: 36/36 (100%)
Some info on how to make flash cards! and some basic guidelines to approaching the learning process.
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm
http://www.nihongoperapera.com/passing-jlpt-2kyuu-supermemo.html
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 11
Group 1: 24/27 (88%)
Group 2: 36/36 (100%)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Certified First Class with Restricted Delivery
Mailed off some key paperwork today. Whoo... I might finally get the green lights to start the process of moving back down to San Diego. Hopefully it'll happen tomorrow so I can go ahead and start calling places... if it doesn't... I won't get anything till Monday probably =/
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 8
Group 1: 31/31 (100%)
Group 2: 23/25 (92%)
Total Kanji learned: 175
I guess I should explain what these statistics represent. Obviously I'm currently studying Japanese. While my level should be intermediate (I was classified as advanced beginner or something like that at the beginning of my trip), I figure recovering the basics yet one more time would be beneficial especially since I'm approaching a self-learning system. Pimsleur is a learn by audio tapes language program and seems to be pretty popular. I do have a few problems with the content as the first 8 lessons have pretty much taught me how to approach a young japanese woman and invite her on a date. Well... I suppose I don't have that much of a problem with it to some extent, but the PC side of me (along with some other unsavory experiences with the stereotypical westerners in Japan) baulks at it. I've checked other 'audio tapes' and the experiences are more or less similar. Pimsleur is by no means advanced material. I have 3 levels and at the end of the 2nd level or at 30 hours of lessons (each lesson is 30 minutes long) I could understand maybe 70% of the dialogue. The plus side is that the pronunciation is quite excellent and the dialogue is at a native speaker's pace... which is quite fast even for my experienced beginners tongue (ha ha... how's that for an oxymoron). I'm not sure how close to fluency these 45 hours of audio lessons will get me, but at the very least I should improve my speaking ability while expanding my tenneigo vocabulary. They also cover keigo by lesson 60!
On the written side of things, I'm relying on Heisig's 'Remember the Kanji' which uses a 1:1 kanji to keyword match to teach you how to write a kanji using visual mnemonics. Heisig claims that you can learn how to write about 2000 standard use kanji (quite a number of them are not practical at all but are taught nonetheless) in a month if you pretty much dedicate yourself to the program. Heisig himself claims to have developed this system and learned the kanji within a similar space of time. I attempted the Heisig method over the summer in Japan and managed to stall at about 500 kanji... eventually kanji retention became an unsustainable burden because I was trying to learn 100 kanji a day (yes... I got up to 500 in about a week or two) and it was starting to corrode my abroad experience. During this time I was using a website called Review the Kanji which has a pretty flashcard program that uses Leithner's learning method. The idea behind the method is quite simple. Once you memorize the desired information, you test it at increasingly longer intervals. If you fail, the timing is reset to 0 and you start again from the bottom. This method is useful in that you minimize the amount of 'testing' you have to do in order to maximize the time spent on other things, like learning more stuff. The timings are broken down as follows:
Group 1: 0 Days
Group 2: 3 Days
Group 3: 1 week
Group 4: 2 weeks
Group 5: 1 month
Group 6: 2 months
Group 7: 4 months
Group 8: 8 months
Obviously this follows a somewhat exponential curve on the fucked up increments we use to represent time.
While in Japan I didn't follow the Leithner method, I just studied the entire deck... which is horribly inefficient when the deck grows to 500 cards. Hopefully it'll be better this time around. In an effort to shorten the time it takes to include new kanji into my working Japanese toolset, I plan on starting the learning process on kanji reading. The downside to Heisig is that the keyword matched to a kanji only suggests the meaning of the kanji on its own. There is no reading (which is the difficult part of Japanese kanji as opposed to Chinese hanji which typically only has one pronunciation) and sometimes the readings don't even match a standard definition of the kanji. I figure the sooner I can master these kanji, the smoother the vocabulary learning will be. The thing about Japanese is that there are a fair amount of synonyms which are in-differentiable without kanji. Furthermore, reading large blocks of kana is a bitch. Having kanji delineating words from particles and even foreign derived words from native Japanese words makes communicating in writing so much more convenient and really, complete reliance on kana just doesn't work... but I suppose its better than relying on romaji.
It is my plan to follow a similar course for Cantonese. While I am pretty close to being a native speaker (I've spoken a broken version of Cantonese all my life) it is by no means complete or correct. If you were to throw me out of a plane in Hong Kong I could survive, but I'd be severely limited in understanding. I can't watch the news or listen to the radio because the Cantonese used in these forms of media are out of my reach at the moment. I have several grammatical and vocabulary issues since I learned the basic day to day language as opposed to actually having an education in it... think pre-Civil Rights Movement Black English... then take away the worthless schools they had back then. The trip through Cantonese is meant to serve as a spacer so that I can solidify Japanese before moving on to Mandarin.
Here are the other goals in order of approximate priority:
German
French
Spanish
Hindi (or Pali)
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 8
Group 1: 31/31 (100%)
Group 2: 23/25 (92%)
Total Kanji learned: 175
I guess I should explain what these statistics represent. Obviously I'm currently studying Japanese. While my level should be intermediate (I was classified as advanced beginner or something like that at the beginning of my trip), I figure recovering the basics yet one more time would be beneficial especially since I'm approaching a self-learning system. Pimsleur is a learn by audio tapes language program and seems to be pretty popular. I do have a few problems with the content as the first 8 lessons have pretty much taught me how to approach a young japanese woman and invite her on a date. Well... I suppose I don't have that much of a problem with it to some extent, but the PC side of me (along with some other unsavory experiences with the stereotypical westerners in Japan) baulks at it. I've checked other 'audio tapes' and the experiences are more or less similar. Pimsleur is by no means advanced material. I have 3 levels and at the end of the 2nd level or at 30 hours of lessons (each lesson is 30 minutes long) I could understand maybe 70% of the dialogue. The plus side is that the pronunciation is quite excellent and the dialogue is at a native speaker's pace... which is quite fast even for my experienced beginners tongue (ha ha... how's that for an oxymoron). I'm not sure how close to fluency these 45 hours of audio lessons will get me, but at the very least I should improve my speaking ability while expanding my tenneigo vocabulary. They also cover keigo by lesson 60!
On the written side of things, I'm relying on Heisig's 'Remember the Kanji' which uses a 1:1 kanji to keyword match to teach you how to write a kanji using visual mnemonics. Heisig claims that you can learn how to write about 2000 standard use kanji (quite a number of them are not practical at all but are taught nonetheless) in a month if you pretty much dedicate yourself to the program. Heisig himself claims to have developed this system and learned the kanji within a similar space of time. I attempted the Heisig method over the summer in Japan and managed to stall at about 500 kanji... eventually kanji retention became an unsustainable burden because I was trying to learn 100 kanji a day (yes... I got up to 500 in about a week or two) and it was starting to corrode my abroad experience. During this time I was using a website called Review the Kanji which has a pretty flashcard program that uses Leithner's learning method. The idea behind the method is quite simple. Once you memorize the desired information, you test it at increasingly longer intervals. If you fail, the timing is reset to 0 and you start again from the bottom. This method is useful in that you minimize the amount of 'testing' you have to do in order to maximize the time spent on other things, like learning more stuff. The timings are broken down as follows:
Group 1: 0 Days
Group 2: 3 Days
Group 3: 1 week
Group 4: 2 weeks
Group 5: 1 month
Group 6: 2 months
Group 7: 4 months
Group 8: 8 months
Obviously this follows a somewhat exponential curve on the fucked up increments we use to represent time.
While in Japan I didn't follow the Leithner method, I just studied the entire deck... which is horribly inefficient when the deck grows to 500 cards. Hopefully it'll be better this time around. In an effort to shorten the time it takes to include new kanji into my working Japanese toolset, I plan on starting the learning process on kanji reading. The downside to Heisig is that the keyword matched to a kanji only suggests the meaning of the kanji on its own. There is no reading (which is the difficult part of Japanese kanji as opposed to Chinese hanji which typically only has one pronunciation) and sometimes the readings don't even match a standard definition of the kanji. I figure the sooner I can master these kanji, the smoother the vocabulary learning will be. The thing about Japanese is that there are a fair amount of synonyms which are in-differentiable without kanji. Furthermore, reading large blocks of kana is a bitch. Having kanji delineating words from particles and even foreign derived words from native Japanese words makes communicating in writing so much more convenient and really, complete reliance on kana just doesn't work... but I suppose its better than relying on romaji.
It is my plan to follow a similar course for Cantonese. While I am pretty close to being a native speaker (I've spoken a broken version of Cantonese all my life) it is by no means complete or correct. If you were to throw me out of a plane in Hong Kong I could survive, but I'd be severely limited in understanding. I can't watch the news or listen to the radio because the Cantonese used in these forms of media are out of my reach at the moment. I have several grammatical and vocabulary issues since I learned the basic day to day language as opposed to actually having an education in it... think pre-Civil Rights Movement Black English... then take away the worthless schools they had back then. The trip through Cantonese is meant to serve as a spacer so that I can solidify Japanese before moving on to Mandarin.
Here are the other goals in order of approximate priority:
German
French
Spanish
Hindi (or Pali)
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
More paperwork
Spent another 7 hours getting this questionnaire done. Paperwork sucks.
With that said... I cut 300 new cards... studied none. My testing stack is going to be large tomorrow =/
Buckwheat hulls make good beds and pillows. If they came in a hypo-allergenic form... that'd be awesome.
But I tested Group 1 cards anyways...
8/29 (27%)
I've forgotten everything I learned over the summer... sigh
And because I couldn't leave it alone... I studied up and took the test again (group 1 is supposed to be 0 days anyways)
Group 1: 28/29 (96%)
Group 2: 31/36 (86%)
With that said... I cut 300 new cards... studied none. My testing stack is going to be large tomorrow =/
Buckwheat hulls make good beds and pillows. If they came in a hypo-allergenic form... that'd be awesome.
But I tested Group 1 cards anyways...
8/29 (27%)
I've forgotten everything I learned over the summer... sigh
And because I couldn't leave it alone... I studied up and took the test again (group 1 is supposed to be 0 days anyways)
Group 1: 28/29 (96%)
Group 2: 31/36 (86%)
Monday, February 23, 2009
Paperwork
Spent the bulk of today doing pre-employment paperwork. There are so many forms to fill out... its nuts. No wonder why the government is so slow at getting work done. The biggest one is going to spill into tomorrow. I haven't had a chance to study the new kanji either =/ Guess i'll have to do it in the morning and test in the evening.
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 6/7
Group 1: 28/32 (87.5)
Group 2: 13/13 (100%)
Japanese
Completed Pimsleur 6/7
Group 1: 28/32 (87.5)
Group 2: 13/13 (100%)
Sunday, February 22, 2009
WCK
Just got back from a Wing Chun lesson with Robert Cheung (I think... his card doesn't have a last name =/) It's been about a year since I've last trained... it wasn't all that fun getting grilled the way I got grilled... but that's all fine and dandy because he covered a few of my mistakes that i need to fix. It did however make me want to get in touch with my sifu to get counter arguments to certain things.
Japanese:
Completed Pimsleur 5
Japanese:
Completed Pimsleur 5
Habits
This is kind of an extension to the New Year's Resolutions since I'm struggling to actually adhere to them ha ha (go figure =P)
As noted previously, my stumbling upon FSI helped remotivate me to continue my foreign language studies. Although I'm starting again from the beginning, I don't mind too much. I've managed to get a copy of Pimsleur's Japanese 1, and I have the first book of Heisig and a good set of flash cards (I have to print them out though =/) so I'm all set to go. I've also found the blog of a guy in Brazil who did something similar and it seems he managed to get pretty fluent over the course of a year. I hope to be able to do the same so I'll go ahead and emulate his method, which basically involves an online progress report. He started doing it in a forum and eventually moved it to a blog because it was pointless to keep bumping the thread when no one was reading. For the few people that actually read my blog... I can set up a second blog if you so desire because its unlikely I'll write anything meaningful.
Like all my other self-motivated habits, we'll see if this one actually sticks. Who knows... maybe I'll actually write meaningful things along with the progress reports.
Here's where I stand this morning:
Canto:
FSI 1
Japanese:
Completed: Pimsleur 3/Heisig 100
Flash Card Statistics
Group 1: 25/32 (78%)
Group 2: 19/19 (100%)
As noted previously, my stumbling upon FSI helped remotivate me to continue my foreign language studies. Although I'm starting again from the beginning, I don't mind too much. I've managed to get a copy of Pimsleur's Japanese 1, and I have the first book of Heisig and a good set of flash cards (I have to print them out though =/) so I'm all set to go. I've also found the blog of a guy in Brazil who did something similar and it seems he managed to get pretty fluent over the course of a year. I hope to be able to do the same so I'll go ahead and emulate his method, which basically involves an online progress report. He started doing it in a forum and eventually moved it to a blog because it was pointless to keep bumping the thread when no one was reading. For the few people that actually read my blog... I can set up a second blog if you so desire because its unlikely I'll write anything meaningful.
Like all my other self-motivated habits, we'll see if this one actually sticks. Who knows... maybe I'll actually write meaningful things along with the progress reports.
Here's where I stand this morning:
Canto:
FSI 1
Japanese:
Completed: Pimsleur 3/Heisig 100
Flash Card Statistics
Group 1: 25/32 (78%)
Group 2: 19/19 (100%)
Monday, February 16, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Old Friends
Bumped into some old school friends today... some of my closest intermediate school friends actually, Steven Ly and Brenda Hao. I'm not sure how we became friends, but I eventually got roped into Steven Ly's posse of friends and as he was he quintessential politico-nerd of the school (being a geek was cool back in those days because of all the gang affiliations) I got caught in a bit of crossfire with the rest of the school. But we were all kids and we were all stuck together so it didn't stop me from making friends at least superficially (it was my intention those days to not get too close to anybody back then). Brenda was... that really cute girl that sat in front of me during social studies. I don't remember much besides that (like what we talked about exactly because we did talk...), but for awhile I looked forward to class just because of her. Guess its not surprising she didn't remember (or recognize) who I was. It's been practically 8 years since I've seen these people anyways.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Work
I got a job offer today. Looks like I'll be headed back to San Diego... yay. The not so hot part about today... I'm still sick...
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Race
Now the question arises... was it really that bad back then? At least I never got lynched... How much of it was racism and how much of it was really kids being kids? Kinda hard to say now seeing as I don't remember much anymore.
I do remember being chased around campus by the entire class. I was presumably running away from my problems, likely coming from the fact that I looked different from everyone else. My comrades were... the fat kids, the nerds, the... well she wasn't an orphan but she was living with her grandparents and great grandparents cuz her parents were missing for various reasons, and the other outcasts. But I usually went home on the bus, cuz I lived outside of the housing communities. Things were a little worse there. The children were usually from migrant worker families, a lot of which found their daily bread at the local dairy farms. That's mostly where I got the name 'Chink'. Most of the other nicknames I got were racial in meaning. But was it really any worse than what the other kids were facing? At that school? How about here in Rosemead? Or... the inner city schools? It's hard to say... I managed to escape that reality when I came here.
BTW... the day I learned the word melancholy... I thought it was a flower. It was sunny that day and I was standing in line for lunch because my dad didn't have time to make lunch for me like some of the other kids.
I do remember being chased around campus by the entire class. I was presumably running away from my problems, likely coming from the fact that I looked different from everyone else. My comrades were... the fat kids, the nerds, the... well she wasn't an orphan but she was living with her grandparents and great grandparents cuz her parents were missing for various reasons, and the other outcasts. But I usually went home on the bus, cuz I lived outside of the housing communities. Things were a little worse there. The children were usually from migrant worker families, a lot of which found their daily bread at the local dairy farms. That's mostly where I got the name 'Chink'. Most of the other nicknames I got were racial in meaning. But was it really any worse than what the other kids were facing? At that school? How about here in Rosemead? Or... the inner city schools? It's hard to say... I managed to escape that reality when I came here.
BTW... the day I learned the word melancholy... I thought it was a flower. It was sunny that day and I was standing in line for lunch because my dad didn't have time to make lunch for me like some of the other kids.
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