Category Archives: slice of life

A little progress in Japanese

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke (Kana, Chiaki)

I apologize in advance if I make any of my readers look like a slacker, but I am sure you are all eagerly studying something in this fascinating world! Let us do our best today too!

As I have written occasionally this past month, Japanese is a fiendishly difficult language to learn for us Europeans. Not only is almost every word different and the grammar also quite alien (to the point where Google Translate gives mostly gibberish), but the language is written in three different scripts, two of them with several dozen characters and the third with more than a thousand! (Several thousand if you want to read older books, but let’s not go there.) Even Japanese school children, who presumably can speak the language from home, learn only around a hundred characters per year, or so I have read. My Japanese readers should correct me if I am wrong. ^_^

Even with Memrise, the website which combines mnemonics and spaced repetition, I have a hard time remembering more than two out of three words when I revise them. But at least this proportion mostly stays the same, even though I add 15-20 words each day, usually more on the weekends. So the number of words that remain in my head must be increasing, although I am not sure which words I remember and which I forget.

Today, I noticed a couple things. I watched an old anime that I had not seen for years, and I recognized a word in the anime that I had learned from Memrise. Usually it is the other way around, but this is how it should be.  A few days ago I recognized another in a Japanese pop song. So they are not kept in a separate locked room, they are available to my brain. If I keep adding words, they should pop up more often, until I don’t even remember where I learned them the first time.  But for now, I do.

Another thing I noticed today was the hiragana, the most common script, with around 50 characters. Since the JLPT N5 course on Memrise uses mostly hiragana both when it shows the text and when I respond, I keep seeing them all the time. Because of this I no longer think of Hiragana characters as separate data points that I have to memorize. They are becoming a skill. I can read a word I have never seen before and know roughly how it is pronounced. And for the most part I am not in doubt. I don’t have to wonder which sound this character stands for, and then combine the sounds afterwards. I just combine the sounds. This is not quite the case for katakana, the less common script, but it will probably go the same way, only more slowly since I see it less often.

Even so, at this speed it will take months before I can read actual texts in hiragana, even children’s books or comics. I simply don’t have enough vocabulary. But months are a modest price to pay to open the door to one of the world’s greatest cultures. (Not to mention finding out the truth about Ryuho Okawa, the man who wrote 900 books.) Since I yet haven’t been diagnosed with anything terminal except life itself, I intend to forge ahead. Even if it goes slowly, it goes forward. At the least, I feel it is worth a try.

Overwatering memories

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I want to praise myself! But that’s not easy when I have forgotten every third word pretty much every time. Time to bring a bucket!

Nearly two weeks ago, I wrote in praise of Memrise, a website that teaches (mostly vocabulary) by a combination of mnemonics and spaced repetition. Since then, I have discovered a problem with it. Not a showstopper, but an irritation. Luckily, there is a built-in solution.

The problem is that the system is way too optimistic about my ability to remember the words. Actually it is pretty good when it comes to very simple pieces of knowledge, such as the katakana (a Japanese syllable script I have not made the effort to try to learn before). But for more complex information such as Japanese words, I have frequently forgotten them by the time the next repetition comes around. This is particularly bad with longer words. The website uses the same interval by default for single syllables and long words, but my fail rate is much higher for the longer words.

The goal is a 90% memory retention, but my average sessions tend to yield 60-70%, depending on the mix of words. That is not optimal – the perfect time to repeat a fact is the moment it is about to be forgotten. You should ideally have to think for a moment before recalling it; having it at the tip of your tongue but not getting at it is also acceptable. Remembering without effort is less effective, and having to re-learn it even less so. The closer you get to just barely remembering, the better.

The second effect of this, apart from less than ideal learning, is that it is a bit demoralizing. Failing a third of the time feels like failing a lot, even though technically I remember most of the phrases. Failure has a stronger emotional impact in the short run, although psychologists say that we remember our successes better in the long run.

Strangely the Memrise website comes with a tool that fixes this, but subtly discourages its use. The tool is called “overwatering”. The very name is a discouragement: If you overwater your plants in real life, they will sicken and wilt eventually, just not as quickly as if you forget to water them in the first place. To further discourage its casual use, the “overwater” button is white, the same color as the background. (The “water” and “harvest” buttons are in bright attractive colors when they appear at all.)

But the interesting part is that when I overwater, I get pretty close to the target rate, and also have a much more positive feeling. Yes, the short words are now too easy, but correspondingly I spend very little time on them, just write them and press enter to get to the next. The easy words don’t get much attention, as well they shouldn’t. According to the site forum, overwatering does not directly affect the timers. So you won’t get a longer pause if you get a word right during overwatering. This fits with my experience – new words to water appear fairly soon after an overwatering session, and may randomly include words from that session. It seems to be a stand-alone feature, more or less.

I am a bit baffled by the choice to deflect attention from the overwater tool, and the lack of explanation of it anywhere on the site. Only in fragments of discussions on the forum do I get some idea as to why it was included (by very vocal demand, it seems) and the almost fanatical disagreement between its supporters and opponents. I am surprised: Everything I have read about long-term learning implies that memory retrieval fades quickly once you pass the threshold where you can no longer recall it at will, even with effort.

***

One possibility is that the average user of Memrise learns much more easily than I do. That is certainly not beyond imagining: I am almost 54 years old at this time, while college students are probably the most likely to use a site like this. The ability to learn random data tends to drop off over time, whereas the ability to learn by association remains high until dementia sets in. Hopefully I am not quite there yet, although I feel painfully incompetent at work as well. (Then again, judging from the speed at which our pool of cases is solved, many of us are probably like that. I have no idea whether the others actually feel it though.)

Anyway, if college students remember 90% of the phrases through the ordinary watering process, they will not feel any need to press the white button. So that is one possibility. But I don’t have that luxury. If I want to actually learn enough Japanese to read Japanese books one day, I have to forge on. Even if it means overwatering, by the standards of other people.

“Into the West”

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“What can you see on the horizon? Why do the white gulls call? Across the sea, a pale moon rises; the ships have come, to carry you home. And all will turn to silver glass; light on the water, all souls pass.”

For about two days, this song has kept playing in my mind. Not quite continually, but pretty much at any time when I was not concentrating enough on something else to crowd it out. I found myself humming it at various times and places, albeit softly (because after rarely ever speaking for two decades, my vocal cords cannot speak or sing except softly and briefly, for which I am mostly thankful.)

What is particularly bothersome about this song, unlike others that may have a special promotion weekend on my brain at other times, is that it is about death. It is all phrased very poetically, and so that a young child hearing the song will mistake it for a lullaby. But to the adult (and older child, probably) it is clearly about the immediate passing away of a loved one. As such, I hope with all my heart that it is not an omen in any way for anyone. Personally I like to think that it suddenly came before me because of the surge of interest in the Hobbit movie, which also has shown up in my Google+ stream. Thus my memory of the previous Tolkien blockbuster and the departure of the hobbit main character into the West.

Yet in Tolkien’s story, the hobbit leaves across the sea to live forever with the elves and their demigods; but to those left behind, hobbits and men, they had only the words of the elves for this, if even that. It was only a hope, whereas his parting from them was definite and final. “To part is to die a bit” say the French, and with a parting such as this, it was very much so. It was to die completely from everyone and everything he had held dear in his old life, if he had not already done so in his heart.

I wonder if I would have been able to do that.

When my great-grandfather was young, many people sailed here from Norway into the west to seek a new life in America. They had no illusion of living forever, but they hoped for a better life. They also left behind most of what they knew and had relied on until that day. But unlike our hobbit friend, they knew it was physically possible to return. The ships sailing back were as many as those who sailed over in the first place, although they had fewer passengers. If I remember correctly, one of my ancestors (great-grandfather or great-great grandfather, I can’t remember) actually went to America, but returned after some years. If not, I would have been an American. (Actually, I would not have existed in anything like my current form, but there might have been another descendant around my age instead.)

But when the time comes to cross The River, it will be a final journey, to an unimaginably distant shore, if we reach it at all – it is a journey we cannot watch on a documentary in advance or travel in the comforting company of relatives or neighbors. I hope to board together with my Invisible Friend when the time comes, but to be honest, I am in no hurry. No hurry at all.

“Into the West” – Annie Lennox – Spotify. And on YouTube, complete with heart-tugging comments, until the appropriate corporation sees fit to remove it.

Time flies…

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Time flies while we’re having fun, and so do I. Fly while having fun. Flying is somewhat more complex in Champions Online than in City of Heroes, but it is still nice to do sometimes.

Between Memrise (see previous entry), Champions Online (see earlier entry), a bit of Sims 3 and a bit of fiction writing, the days just roll off the conveyor belt. Especially workdays, I usually don’t leave until close to 5 or close to 5:30, depending on which bus I aim for. It is already dark when I come home. Dark and icy cold, so no jogging anymore.

In Champions Online, I discovered a light-based class, or archetype as they call it. One of the two initial powers is a long-distance ray of light that will heal heroes but hurt villains. I’m starting to like this game! It’s not City of Heroes but then nothing is.

A downside to experimenting with heroism and Japanese for hours is that I don’t get to read the good books I thought I would. Pretty much every day I plan to get some reading done, sometimes I even pick out a book, but in the end I don’t actually read it. Perhaps just a little, but not seriously. I need to rebalance this. But first I have memories of Japanese phrases to water.

Snoopy’s Christmas

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My childhood hero. This explains so much about me, doesn’t it? ^_^

When I was still a boy on a small farm in western Norway and had not yet learned English, this song must have appeared on radio, for my brother had captured it on his tape recorder. I think this was our first tape recorder, before my second brother got his hands on one of those newfangled cassette recorders. So yeah, back in the days.

I loved the song obsessively, but I was too young to understand the lyrics except a few words here and there. My brother claimed the song said Snoopy was dead, but I defiantly refused to believe it. My hero could not die that casually. (Besides, my brother did not exactly have a sterling reputation for upholding the truth…) I assumed he was just trying to torment me, but now that I have access to the lyrics, I realize that my brother, although older than me, might not have been familiar with the idiom of having someone “dead in their sight”, meaning aiming straight at them. Still, the context should have given it away.

I played the melody of the chorus over and over on my toy xylophone, quite probably driving the rest of the family nuts. I still remember the melody now decades later, and I would not be surprised if the surviving members of my birth family remember it too, although less fondly. ^_^

We named our next dog Snoopy, with quite a bit of input from my side, I’m afraid. He wasn’t even a beagle, but he was the smartest dog I’ve met so far. How much this song contributed to that event, I am not sure. But the Norwegian translation of Peanuts has another name for the dog, so it is likely that the name came from this song or another.

Months became years, and the song was lost to me. Years became decades, and I occasionally whistled the melody to myself during happy moments, in this way keeping it alive as one generation of Peanuts fans gave birth to the next. But knowing nothing of the lyrics except “Snoopy” and “Red Baron”, I had no hope of finding it again.

Today, I took the time to look through my “stream” in Google+, the social network for Google users. I have only a few people there who could reasonably be called friends, and who I try to keep updated on. But sometimes I have the time to read acquaintances with similar interests (many of them writers, published or otherwise). One of these semi-friends happened to post, on this particular day and time, a link to a YouTube video with the song: Snoopy’s Christmas.

I thanked her profusely, of course. I was kind of touched by this unexpected reunion between a boy and his favorite song after decades of separation. The truth is that I remember very little from my childhood, only a few glints here and there like fireflies in a dark valley. So I kind of value the remaining memories. My family may disagree, but I will happily promise not to play this song for them on a cheap xylophone ever again. ^_^

Won NaNoWriMo!

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Every day, every passing day, for hours and hours I wrote about other people playing Go. And other vaguely Japanese-inspired things. 

This morning, I had 50800 words of continuous fiction written in November! So that was a total NaNoWriMo win. In all fairness, I had taken the month off. And also, there was no new awesome computer game this fall. (It may be said with some grain of truth that I lost to Skyrim last year. I am ashamed of this now.)

More surprising, I felt the urge to write a couple thousand more words after I had “won”, even though I have no plans to publish my novel. Maybe I will put it up on the Net, I have not decided yet. But basically, it has begun to become interesting again toward the end. I am only writing the things that interest me now. I was thinking of dragging out the angst about losing his girlfriend a bit more, but seriously he was never that into her in the first place. Playing Go was more interesting. Not that this book is autobiographical or anything. I think it is hard to imagine for the ordinary reader how non-autobiographical it is. ^_^

My arm hurts almost like in the old days, and I have dictated a few paragraphs; that is all my throat can take, given how rarely I speak these years. It has been raining a lot this month and this has kept me from exercising as normal, even though my pulse has gone back down to normal levels (for me, not for ordinary humans). According to my doctor, an hour of exercise each day is necessary to keep my arm from growing stiff and sore when I write a lot, and it seems he was right.

But today, there is no pressure. I have already won. ^_^

I hate people like me

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There are those who surpassed despair and still failed to reach their goal! You’ll find lots of them on the NaNoWriMo forums, particularly in the forum called “NaNoWriMo ate my soul”. And people like me are not making them feel any better. Not sure what to do about that, given that I have been there myself. Many times. Years in a row sometimes.

Still talking about the National Novel Writing Month. I hate it when there are overachievers who finish in a week, or ten days, or two weeks, while ordinary people struggle to get to 50 000 in 30 days. These speed writers make the rest of us look bad. This year, I am well on my way to hating myself. 42717 words as of day 10.

I would have felt better about it if the story was coherent and without boring parts. But hey, at least there are vague traces of the vague plot I had when I started. I thought for sure it gave up the ghost after the first week or so, but there is a ghost of sorts in it now, so that is good, I guess.

Still NaNoWriMo

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I have been writing quite a bit. Not just the fiction, but some entries too. I just don’t upload them. I think they may be too good for me. I have to take care. When the Christian Bible says that “Not many of you become teachers, since we know that we shall receive that much more severe judgment”, I don’t think it only refers to the afterlife or our judgment day. That too, probably. But I have seen things during my lifetime that makes me believe Boris Mouravieff is right when he says, those who talk about the spiritual Truth will wake the General Law, will draw it’s attention, and it will begin to react against them. Kind of like naming the Dark One in the Wheel of Time books or in the Lord of the Rings. There are forces whose attention you don’t want to attract when you are a newbie.

The novel kind of lost the plot too, halfway through. I am still writing though. At the current pace I should finish around the middle of the month. Unless I give up, which would be a reasonable thing to do without my plot. I am reading back issues of Happy Science Monthly to find inspiration. Trying to imagine how the teachings of Happy Science must look to a high school freshman with little more than average intelligence and no religious or spiritual experience or upbringing.

NaNoWriMo is here

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Hopefully some people will read my story because it has Go references in it.

It is the month formerly known as November! For the last decade, its name has been NaNoWriMo.

Hallelujah, November is here! It’s not a dream anymore!
Hallelujah, it’s finally here, I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting…
(With apologies to Chris de Burgh. Actually, “Brother John” was the first song I noticed by de Burgh, although it later became one of my least favorite. Go figure.)

Yes, the National Novel Writing Month has started. I am off from work and writing and having a great time. I guess this story won’t, after all, inspire love and courage in generations of young men and women after my passing as I had hoped. Well, it is still a first draft. Also, it is still barely 5000 words.

Go Go Ghosts! A story of anime, Go, Happy Science and the Japan that only exists in our hearts.

Go: Adventures in kifu

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Felt tip coloring pencils are not ideal for writing game records, but they will do in a pinch, at least for short games.

Today’s newbie Go player report is from the mysterious land of “kifu”. The word means a record or map of the game. It is usually drawn on a simple picture of a Go board. On each intersection you write the number of the move. The first move is number 1, the second move is number 2 etc, and you write them on the map where they were played on the board. That way you can easily reconstruct the game later. Seasoned players can even read the game directly from a kifu as if they had watched it, more or less. I am not one of those. Definitely not.

Do you need a kifu? Not if you are just playing for fun. You can play the game and forget about it. Well, you may want to reflect on particularly stupid moves so as to not do those in the future, or on particularly clever moves of the opponent if you can figure them out. But apart from that, it is all water under the bridge.

But if you are studying Go, and want to get better, there are two obvious uses for kifu. You can record your own games so you can reflect on them at your leisure later. Or you can use kifu from better players to replay their games. This is one of the time-proven methods of getting stronger at Go. Even young professionals do it, so I hear. I am definitely not one of them, though.  Still, I wanted to try it.

I did a Google search for “kifu paper”. There are a number of web sites which are eager to tell you to not use the phrase “kifu paper”. It is called “game record form” in English. But that is not a good search term as you will get lots of irrelevant hits. If you search for “kifu paper”, you come straight to the places where these sites tell you not to call it “kifu paper”, which happens to be right where you can download the form as well. ^_^

I picked the one from AllAboutGo.com, it was simple and to the point. Some have circles to write in, but I find it more natural to just write on the intersection. As recommended, I write the black moves in black (blue is fine also) and the white in red. It makes a big difference to how easy it is both to write and read. With this, you will not lose track easily or accidentally write 69 two times in a row. The black numbers are always odd, the red always even. Pure genius.

My first was an attempt to kifu an amateur match between a 9-dan and an 8-dan on the Internet Go Server. When you play yourself on the IGS, you can save a kifu that is made automatically, and download it at your leisure. It is possible you can do this with games you watch too, but the voices in my h… er, I thought it might be a good idea to write it by hand, involving other parts of the body and brain in the process.

I found out that fiber-tip coloring pens are not ideal for writing kifu. Who would have thought it? It worked, for the most part, up to 99. After that things became iffy.

Next out was coloring pencils. These worked well enough, although you may want to have a pencil sharpener around after a while. And who has pencil sharpeners in this age?

Eventually today I caved in and bought a red and a black Pilot V5 Hi-tecpoint 0.5. Because the quality of your Go obviously depends on the quality of your stuff. Well, to humans that may actually be true, since science has proven that people borrowing cheap imitations of brand sunglasses tend to cheat and not act with the dignity of those who borrow the real thing. So it is entirely possible that having an expensive Go board in real kaya wood, and writing your kifu with a quality fountain pen on original printed kifu forms will make you take your Go more seriously. But I like to think I am not like that. I am not saying I am not human (although sometimes I have wondered), but hopefully I am human in a different way than that. Still, a good pen is nice to have around. I haven’t had one in the Chaos Node for years.

So that’s my story. I am kifuing, as I call it, mainly to involve other parts of the body and brain, to improve subconscious learning. But is learning Go a good use of the sunset of your life? The Japanese certainly seem to think so, it is very popular among the elderly there. Millions of Japanese can’t be wrong! OK, they can – millions of Japanese were wrong during World War 2. But not about Go. In fact, if they had come to Pearl Harbor with Go boards, they would probably have won…

#go #igo #baduk #weiqi #kifu