Metamorphosis

I finally got a date to start work, August 1! Let the countdown begin!

You know that feeling you get when you study like mad for an exam or something but then you find out it's later than you originally thought? It's the exact opposite feeling of "oh fuck I'm screwed" -the "of yeah I'm set, baby let's party!" feeling. I've gotta do this more often.

It's a whole new world. I've gone from illiterate to stupid in three weeks flat. 1,700 characters. I can pretty much go to any Japanese website and sound out almost the entire page of kanji compounds. About 50% of those compounds I'll actually know the meaning to, either because I've learned it or it's obvious. Trying to guess the meanings of the remaining compounds is hit and miss - it's a bit of an art. There are also those characters that have multiple, completely unrelated meanings, but in those cases it's very easy to learn the new word and attach another meaning to the character(s).

I'm starting to appreciate the beauty of the Japanese writing system. Each of the kanji is really just an extremely complicated letter in an extremely complicated alphabet, but once you've learned them all, learning new vocab is a snap. It's like putting together the pieces of a puzzle you've been holding in your hands for months, or, for some people, years. It's very fun and quite satisfying. I couldn't imagine trying to cram English vocab with all these random letters which, unless you're a etymologist, bear no underlying meanings. Thank god most katakana loan words are from English.

It's kind of an interesting situation I've gotten myself into. With a bit more work I probably have enough kanji knowledge to pass the the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), level 1. But everything else, like listening and grammar would probably only be enough to get me through the lowest, level 4. It's typically the other way around with adult foreigners learning Japanese (non-Chinese ones anyway).

A couple of other things i'm doing to increase my immersion: I changed my iBook's language to Japanese, which means that pretty much everything is in Japanese: menus, buttons, error messages, everything except third-party apps which don't have a Japanese localization. (I'm lovin OS X more and more, it literally took a single click and drag in the International prefpane to change that, and not even a reboot). Blogger.com recognized my locale and automatically served up my admin interface in Japanese. now that is slick.

I've also made it a policy to only watch shows which I can obtain raw (unsubtitled) or at least soft-subbed. Not that I can really understand what they're saying, I just figure why hold off what I'll soon be experiencing firsthand, that is, people talking in Japanese with no handy subtitles underneath them. 誰も知らない (Nobody Knows) is a good one to watch raw. It had a very simple story that transcends language. Or at least I think it did.

The COEs were supposed to arrive today, but no dice. Nothing from Japan yet. So I'll continue to study by stumbling through my new Japanese-language OS and finishing up the remaining 300 or so characters from RTK2. That being said, they should really be arriving any day now. Any day now...of course I'll let you guys know when they do ;)

For those who are curious how exactly I'm pulling off this insane kanji cram and why I won't be on MSN for at least another two weeks:

I spend hours per day learning new readings and compounds, getting example sentences from WWWJDIC and then many more hours drilling staring at the screen just like that. Yeah it's kinda boring, and I have no life right now, but also very exciting because I'll be done soon. Here's my glowing review of Kotoba for all my Mac readers... yeah all two of you.

I think I've found it. I started by attacking the beast from all fronts -the Basic Kanji Books from school, song lyrics, dramas, Pimsleur. But for Remembering the Kanji 1 graduates, I think RTK2 is the key to quick kanji literacy after all. This second attempt is going much smoother than the first mainly because

1. I have solid foundation to work with from Reading Japanese, and
2. I'm saving a lot of stress with an excellent flash card program that I found for my Mac called Kotoba. Now, instead of spending 5 to 10 minutes making a beautiful handmade card for each character, I can spend that time using the virtual card for what it was created for - drilling the bastard into my head a million times until it never leaves.

Since I started the cram, I've been able to learn around 60-70 readings a day. I'm not getting any context practice, but that's ok because If I can keep this up, I'll be able to read (but not necessarily comprehend) a newspaper in about 3 weeks. Which is just in the nick of time, because I just heard that our COEs are due in on June 23, which should mean an early July departure :)