So while I've been primarily studying for the past year, I've also been goofing off to do some 'work.'
This has involved everything from writing to visiting a tourist area in the south.
While it has become clear that I will never be a linguistically agile person, what with it taking so long to learn Japanese, I've found that I'm decent enough at dropping in and out of a variety of situations to do a variety of jobs.
I'm coming to the end of my language learning, having spent the last of my saved money on this terms tuition. With that, my options are basically as follows:
Sponge
Mooch
Work
I don't really have it in me to sponge any more than I already have been.
I don't really know what mooch means.
I guess that leaves work.
So the next question is, where to work? I still don't have the necessary language qualifications to work full-time at a 'real,' company, so it's probably going to be a part-time job somewhere. If you will indulge me patronising the reader a little, if you are under 50 or so years old, you might misunderstand the term part-time here.
It used to mean fewer than X hours a week (depending on country, somewhere around 25 hours a week).
Part-time now means a job that pays terribly, has zero benefits (health insurance, pension, etc) and can be any number of hours a week. To put this in perspective, I was a part-timer while I was teaching, because I was paid for X number of hours despite working much longer.
At this point you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about and why I've written this confusing screed against the current state of employment law around the developed world.
Don't worry about it.
This post is entirely for me, reminding myself why I quit my previous job and am working to improve myself. Everyone has to write something like from time to time.
Showing posts with label japanese language learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label japanese language learning. Show all posts
Tuesday, 12 February 2019
Tuesday, 13 November 2018
The Final Countdown
So December is hurtling towards us.
For most people this won't really mean much beyond Christmas and a nice break, but for those of us who are studying the worlds most difficult language, December is the time of reckoning.
On Sunday December the second, the bi-annual exam will happen all over the world. All five levels are taken by hopeful combatants at dozens and dozens of venues.
In all, more than 100,000 entrants will battle against the nefarious puzzle masters. This always astounds me, who knew so many people were studying Japanese?
Around 40,000 will pass their respective exams, although this will obviously vary year by year. Sometimes you get lucky and they make it easy, but more often than not some xenophobic old fart bemoans the lack of Japanese language understanding among foreigners living in Japan, forcing the examining body to make the questions more difficult in order to prove the academic rigor of their tests - thereby completely ignoring the single biggest problem with that JLPT (there is no interview or spoken portion, nor any writing section, meaning two pillars of language understanding are completely ignored). This makes the JLPT great for receptive skills, terrible for production.
Last time I took the test I had been studying Japanese for exactly 6 months (I've lived here for ages, but was working and training all day, every day (including weekends) which left me no free time to study) and failed the N2 by 20 points. This wasn't a huge surprise given how little time I had been studying for, and the experience was both a great measure of my progress and an excellent practice run.
The test is out of 180 in total, so I wasn't too far off. Hopefully, after another 6 months study, I will pass it this time around.
I have confidence in my listening ability, and I've been working my ass off to learn as many kanji as possible, so I think I can probably break even on that front.
The final section is reading comprehension, which is my weakest area by far. If a combatant gets less than 25% (I think it's 25%, but even if it's not exactly one quarter, it's around there) on any one part of the test they automatically fail, regardless of their scores in the other sections. I am absolutely terrified that I will have a mare on the reading comprehension section and essentially invalidate the hard work I've put in elsewhere.
In preparation I'm working through two or three reading questions every night, along with the obligatory kanji practice. The reading questions I am studying can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on how difficult they are, at which point I recruit my wife to check over my answers.
This is in addition to my school homework which usually takes an hour or two a night, and my kanji review. For reference, I usually spend between 4-6 hours a day on kanji alone, so between 6 and 9 hours a day of private studying. I mention this so that in the future, regardless of whether I pass the upcoming exam or not, no one can accuse me of not trying hard enough.
(I am a tryhard, with everything.)
(Although I did take this past weekend, Monday and today off to do some writing work.)
Also, in unrelated news, I published a book. Buy the ebook here, UK, america, Japan, France, India. Buy the physical book here, UK, america, Japan, France.
I don't know why I included France, because it's ENGLISH ONLY. Do not buy it if you can't read English. Also, if you can't read English, why are you here?
It's not the best book in the world, but it is mine.
For most people this won't really mean much beyond Christmas and a nice break, but for those of us who are studying the worlds most difficult language, December is the time of reckoning.
On Sunday December the second, the bi-annual exam will happen all over the world. All five levels are taken by hopeful combatants at dozens and dozens of venues.
In all, more than 100,000 entrants will battle against the nefarious puzzle masters. This always astounds me, who knew so many people were studying Japanese?
Around 40,000 will pass their respective exams, although this will obviously vary year by year. Sometimes you get lucky and they make it easy, but more often than not some xenophobic old fart bemoans the lack of Japanese language understanding among foreigners living in Japan, forcing the examining body to make the questions more difficult in order to prove the academic rigor of their tests - thereby completely ignoring the single biggest problem with that JLPT (there is no interview or spoken portion, nor any writing section, meaning two pillars of language understanding are completely ignored). This makes the JLPT great for receptive skills, terrible for production.
Last time I took the test I had been studying Japanese for exactly 6 months (I've lived here for ages, but was working and training all day, every day (including weekends) which left me no free time to study) and failed the N2 by 20 points. This wasn't a huge surprise given how little time I had been studying for, and the experience was both a great measure of my progress and an excellent practice run.
The test is out of 180 in total, so I wasn't too far off. Hopefully, after another 6 months study, I will pass it this time around.
I have confidence in my listening ability, and I've been working my ass off to learn as many kanji as possible, so I think I can probably break even on that front.
The final section is reading comprehension, which is my weakest area by far. If a combatant gets less than 25% (I think it's 25%, but even if it's not exactly one quarter, it's around there) on any one part of the test they automatically fail, regardless of their scores in the other sections. I am absolutely terrified that I will have a mare on the reading comprehension section and essentially invalidate the hard work I've put in elsewhere.
In preparation I'm working through two or three reading questions every night, along with the obligatory kanji practice. The reading questions I am studying can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour depending on how difficult they are, at which point I recruit my wife to check over my answers.
This is in addition to my school homework which usually takes an hour or two a night, and my kanji review. For reference, I usually spend between 4-6 hours a day on kanji alone, so between 6 and 9 hours a day of private studying. I mention this so that in the future, regardless of whether I pass the upcoming exam or not, no one can accuse me of not trying hard enough.
(I am a tryhard, with everything.)
(Although I did take this past weekend, Monday and today off to do some writing work.)
Also, in unrelated news, I published a book. Buy the ebook here, UK, america, Japan, France, India. Buy the physical book here, UK, america, Japan, France.
I don't know why I included France, because it's ENGLISH ONLY. Do not buy it if you can't read English. Also, if you can't read English, why are you here?
It's not the best book in the world, but it is mine.
Friday, 8 December 2017
Good God, Is This What Being an Adult Feels Like?
For the past month and a half I've been back in school, formally learning the language I've muddled with for the past few years. I've never really sat down to learn Japanese properly, which is a sign of my laziness, but also a sign of my financial situation.
Learning is not cheap.
Learning should be cheap, but it is not.
As a result, I've penny pinched my way to Shinjuku Nihongo Gakko. This is not an advertisment for them, but I thought you might be interested in where I've ended up.
I chose them for two reasons. Firstly, they're on my line which means a forty minute ride with no changes, giving me ample opportunity to do some work to and from school. This is great, because a lot of the busy work when learning language is memorisation. There really isn't a lot of logic, problem solving or argument construction when trying to learn a language. This is obvious if you think about it, but you can't argue your way out of a grammatical error until you get into exceptionally high level arguments over the correct usage of obscure particles or whatever the case may be.
Unfortunately, the stuff I loved about studying in university is the construction, deliberation and execution of a well (sometimes not so well) thought out argument that oftentimes ended in me looking like a pillock. For the sake of coming to understand the impetus behind a particular literary trend, I will suffer that indignity.
The astute among you may have come to realise that I am (in a long winded way) saying that language learning is boring.
There is literally no challenge in it. I have to memorise verbs, nouns, adjectives (of two varieties) and a smattering of other stuff, then learn how to put them together. Learning a language is more like learning a bizarre alternative maths, where all the rules are already known and you are told to plug in components to get an already known outcome. The most rewarding part comes when poking at the boundaries and seeing what sticks and what doesn't, which is absolutely infuriating as a teacher, particularly when you're teaching a low level class like mine.
Coming from the other end of the profession, I know how tempting it is for a simple 'BECAUSE IT JUST IS,' to slip out of the mouth without really thinking about it, but to their credit, the teachers do their best to explain their way around the problem.
Being one of the oldest, if not the oldest student, and coming from the workforce, has also had a profound effect on my understanding of the learning experience.
I haven't stopped working. I am working so much. This past month my schedule has been as follows: Wake up. Study. Get on train. Study on train. Study at school. Get on train. Study on train. Get home. Study at home. Make dinner. Study. Clean clothes, then study until bed. Sometimes there's a shower in there.
One of the facets of learning Japanese is learning Chinese too. Their writing system is based on 2 alphabets of their own, and Chinese. It's difficult to explain without spending hours on the who's where's and why's for's, because I'm not sure of the rules myself, but the upshot is that there are literally thousands of characters to learn.
Each one of those characters will have up to four different sounds attached to them. If we're counting, we are already up to very many thousands of sounds and meanings and whatnot. Combining this smorgasbord of characters gets you the words that are used every day.
The Japanese and Chinese will tell you there is logic behind the way the kanji are constructed and subsequently combined, but that's utter bollocks. It's all a hodgepodge of lines and squiggles.
Anyway, I have to learn about 2,000 I think? I'm going for a specific test, and while I have done the research, I can't remember off the top of my head what the requirement is. Those 2,000 will then combine among themselves to give words and meanings and make an entire language. So I'm told.
So far I have about 300 under my belt, from a month or so of trying to memorise them. If you say the meaning, or show me how they are spelled, I will be able to write those 300 kanji, with about a 5% error rate. Reading those kanji is harder, but is what I am focussing on at the moment. Next week, I start on the next 300 and then so on and so forth until I die, or learn the 2,000. There are way more than 2,000, but that's what they decided is the level for competency.
All in all there's a long, long way to go. I've not even mentioned the grammar which is bonkers. How many ways can you conjugate a verb? You would be surprised.
I'll leave that for another post though.
Learning is not cheap.
Learning should be cheap, but it is not.
As a result, I've penny pinched my way to Shinjuku Nihongo Gakko. This is not an advertisment for them, but I thought you might be interested in where I've ended up.
I chose them for two reasons. Firstly, they're on my line which means a forty minute ride with no changes, giving me ample opportunity to do some work to and from school. This is great, because a lot of the busy work when learning language is memorisation. There really isn't a lot of logic, problem solving or argument construction when trying to learn a language. This is obvious if you think about it, but you can't argue your way out of a grammatical error until you get into exceptionally high level arguments over the correct usage of obscure particles or whatever the case may be.
Unfortunately, the stuff I loved about studying in university is the construction, deliberation and execution of a well (sometimes not so well) thought out argument that oftentimes ended in me looking like a pillock. For the sake of coming to understand the impetus behind a particular literary trend, I will suffer that indignity.
The astute among you may have come to realise that I am (in a long winded way) saying that language learning is boring.
There is literally no challenge in it. I have to memorise verbs, nouns, adjectives (of two varieties) and a smattering of other stuff, then learn how to put them together. Learning a language is more like learning a bizarre alternative maths, where all the rules are already known and you are told to plug in components to get an already known outcome. The most rewarding part comes when poking at the boundaries and seeing what sticks and what doesn't, which is absolutely infuriating as a teacher, particularly when you're teaching a low level class like mine.
Coming from the other end of the profession, I know how tempting it is for a simple 'BECAUSE IT JUST IS,' to slip out of the mouth without really thinking about it, but to their credit, the teachers do their best to explain their way around the problem.
Being one of the oldest, if not the oldest student, and coming from the workforce, has also had a profound effect on my understanding of the learning experience.
I haven't stopped working. I am working so much. This past month my schedule has been as follows: Wake up. Study. Get on train. Study on train. Study at school. Get on train. Study on train. Get home. Study at home. Make dinner. Study. Clean clothes, then study until bed. Sometimes there's a shower in there.
One of the facets of learning Japanese is learning Chinese too. Their writing system is based on 2 alphabets of their own, and Chinese. It's difficult to explain without spending hours on the who's where's and why's for's, because I'm not sure of the rules myself, but the upshot is that there are literally thousands of characters to learn.
Each one of those characters will have up to four different sounds attached to them. If we're counting, we are already up to very many thousands of sounds and meanings and whatnot. Combining this smorgasbord of characters gets you the words that are used every day.
The Japanese and Chinese will tell you there is logic behind the way the kanji are constructed and subsequently combined, but that's utter bollocks. It's all a hodgepodge of lines and squiggles.
Anyway, I have to learn about 2,000 I think? I'm going for a specific test, and while I have done the research, I can't remember off the top of my head what the requirement is. Those 2,000 will then combine among themselves to give words and meanings and make an entire language. So I'm told.
So far I have about 300 under my belt, from a month or so of trying to memorise them. If you say the meaning, or show me how they are spelled, I will be able to write those 300 kanji, with about a 5% error rate. Reading those kanji is harder, but is what I am focussing on at the moment. Next week, I start on the next 300 and then so on and so forth until I die, or learn the 2,000. There are way more than 2,000, but that's what they decided is the level for competency.
All in all there's a long, long way to go. I've not even mentioned the grammar which is bonkers. How many ways can you conjugate a verb? You would be surprised.
I'll leave that for another post though.
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