The storm has passed.

Calm After the Storm

No More Rain

I have a sushi addiction that is helped by the fact that I shop for groceries everyday.   Today, on the way out of the apartment building, I noticed a sign in the elevator.  This was a new one printed on A4 paper in multi-coloured ink.  In large red letters it said “Warning”.  It then stated that we had to take everything off the balcony because of a dangerous storm.

When I got outside it reminded me of an early Autumn day in Ireland.  It’s not particularly cold but it’s wet, grey, and miserable.  Not a great day but certainly not a dangerous day.  Nothing much has changed outside but  Typhoon Melor has started to move across Japan and it’s due to hit Tokyo tomorrow.

My teacher told me this morning that I need to learn another 52 kanji before the exam in early December.  She believes that I can learn 4 per lesson.  4 doesn’t sound like a lot but today we worked really hard and it took 30 minutes per kanji.  Each kanji can have more than one way to pronounce it and more than one meaning.  As well as understanding it I need to be able to draw it.  Some are simple like “katana 刀”, or complicated like “kazu 数”.

The 4 kanji took up my whole lesson.  This gave me no time to work on the other parts of the exam and, given that kanji is only 25% of what I need to know, this is not going to be a winning strategy.

The other problem with learning Japanese through kanji is that they are not always relevant to my daily life, making them difficult to remember.  Today I spent 30 minutes discussing Japanese swords.  We didn’t have problems when discussing katana, the Japanese swords, but my teacher’s English is not good enough for her to know the difference between daggers, blades, and knifes.  This means getting out dictionaries and trying to find sentences that adequately describe the meaning.  Sometimes these sentences lead us off on strange tangents.  At one point she said, “Robin Hood used this instead of a sword”.  And I’m left trying to work out the connection between Samurai swords and the weapons that Robin Hood might have used.  The word she was looking for was dagger.

We also spent much too long trying to work out what “meitou” means.  The direct translation is “famous sword”.  But what is a famous sword?  I thought it was something like “Excalibur”.  A sword that had a name or was used by a great warrior.  My teacher believes that it is a sword created by a famous sword master.  Whatever it actually is it’s not a word I’m going to be using very often if ever.  I can remember it today, as it irritated me, but I will have forgotten it two weeks from now.

I know I need to learn kanji but I wish that they were taught in a different order.  Today’s lesson reminded me much too much of the Eddie Izzard sketch on how French is taught in UK  schools.  Only the Japanese equivalent of, “the monkey is on the branch” is, “the Budhist monk wore black robes”.

For the past few years I have attended a YAPC in North America, Europe, and Asia.  All three conferences are very enjoyable but also very different.  YAPC::Asia has been held in Tokyo for the past few years.  The Japanese culture obviously impacts the conference but I can’t always find ways to express these differences.  This year they have helped me out by adding a couple of items to the conference bag that I can’t imagine being given in America or Europe.

The first is a plastic bag that I assume is an advert for one of the sponsors.  Other conferences have given attendees plastic bags and advertising material but the image on this bag is typically Japanese.

Advertising Plastic Bag

The second item was a fan.  Paper fans are very common in Japan and I have been given one at a number of different events.  The image on this fan is a cartoon of two Japanese authors, one of these is Yukihiro Matsumoto, sitting in a Japanese bath with their laptops.

Japanese Fan

I think the image is strange but not as strange as being given a PHP and Ruby advert at a Perl conference.

I need to start studying Japanese again.  I haven’t had that many lessons in the past couple of months but that’s about to change.  I have an exam in December. This isn’t something I want to do but Marty got the application form and filled  it in for me.  My Japanese teacher also thinks it’s a good idea but I’m not convinced.  I only know 50% of the vocabulary and about 60% of the kanji.  I have been too frightened to even look at the required grammar list.  The pass mark for the exam is around 65% and I would fail if I had to sit this tomorrow.  I wish I found it easier to learn Japanese.

I was in one of the bathrooms in the Mori Tower today.  They had bottles of hand disinfectant beside the soap.  These are new but I imagine they have been added because of the swine flu scare. On the wall was a list of instructions written in multiple languages.  It stated that you shouldn’t use the disinfectant under the following conditions:

If you have a deep cut or burn;
If you are alergic:
If you are under a doctor.

I would like to write more but instead of writing I spend time thinking about writing.  Or reading books on language and writing.  Last night I started reading a book on Hypnotic Writing.  I get the impression that this is supposed to be about writing that is so good that you are put under a spell by it.  The book, unfortunately, put me to sleep.

To help me find focus I have decided to join the NaNoWriMo writing challenge.  I have no idea if I’ll be able to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November but it might be a fun thing to try.  This will mean writing around 1,700 words a day.  (At the minute this blog post only has 125 or so words in it).  I also have no idea what I would write a novel about but if all else fails I suppose I could write something about a Japanese half-werewolf, half-vampire, that decides to terrorize Ireland… or maybe not.