Merry New Year! with Ramlösa bilberry-lemon chuhai

It's a new year in Japan now, at least. I am currently in Sweden, having spent Christmas and now New Year here for the first time in three years. Three years ago there wasn't much snow and cold, which kind of defeats the purpose of going to Sweden in the winter in my opinion, and impairs the Christmas feeling.

You don't have to be Jesus to walk on water when it's frozen!

This year however awards us with a great cold and snowy winter. Yesterday morning when I was still up at my grandmother's place in the village of Vittangi, outside Kiruna, a good couple of 150 km or so north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn't rise for a month during the winter, we went for a walk with the dog in -29℃. My beard froze to ice from the water vapor in my breath, but the dog doesn't mind the cold at all.

It's been an eventful year for me, with some turbulence and good stuff, but also a lot of tiredness. In the end I find myself in a better position than a year ago, all things taken together. Tomorrow we're getting on the plane home to Tokyo, via Amsterdam, including a 6 hour visit to Korea where we plan to stop to have some spicy barbecued meat and kimchi on the way.

Right now I'm in Uppsala, the old university town north of Stockholm - also, conveniently, the city closest to Arlanda airport. We had sushi with miso soup for lunch today at Yukikos sushi, the new one in the market hall (Saluhallen) in the center of the city. Quite good, especially - as expected - the fresh salmon.

Swedish sushi.

The second, and more interesting, experiment in merging Swedish and Japanese culinary cultures today is this Ramlösa chūhai that I made as an apéritif before New Year's dinner. Chūhai, for those not in the know, is a simple drink made by mixing barley shōchū (a Japanese spirit, not to be confused with rise wine) with soda and some fruit flavoring, usually some citrus fruit in a highball glass, on ice.

One thing that Sweden has right is the ubiquity of tasty carbonated water. These are often flavored in very imaginative ways. Since my mom happened to have a small bottle of Iichiko shōchū (one of the best when making chūhai) in the fridge (!), I bought some Ramlösa, the king of Swedish carbonated waters, with blåbär ("blueberry", a delicious type of bilberry) flavor, and also one with pear and lemon balm flavor, and mixed these together with a slice of lime. Here's to a happy 2010!

The ingredients.

Finished Ramlösa chūhai.

Surprisingly, the bilberry one tasted better than the pear and lemon balm one. Actually, the bilberry-lemon chūhai was one of the best drinks I've ever had. The contrasting tastes of bilberry and lemon complement each other superbly!

Revised JLPT N3 textbooks

I noticed that lately many people find my blog with search queries such as "jlpt revised n3", "text books for jlpt N3", "prepare for N3 jlpt", "jlpt n3 books", etc. This makes a lot of sense, since the last of the old format JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) examinations was conducted last Sunday, the 6th of December, 2009.

Starting next year the JLPT will be replaced by the revised format, which is essentially the same as the old one, except that the first (vocabulary and characters) and third (reading and grammar) sections are merged into one big one (with no pause? that'll be tough!). And, of course, the introduction of the new N3 level, which is between the old levels 2 (new level N2) and 3 (new level N4). The gap between the old levels 3 and 2 was indeed rather large, jumping from beginner's book to serious hobby level with a 300% increase in vocabulary required, for instance.

And with the introduction of the N3 level, a whole new market for textbooks and study aids specifically targeting JLPT N3 opens up, and you'd expect the publishers to rejoice and then hurry to be the first one to the market with such a book, wouldn't you? So last time I went by the big Kinokuniya book store in Yoyogi, out of curiosity of just how difficult/easy the new level n3 was I had a look at the old JLPT bookshelf (where I used to hang out, before I graduated from the JLPT). And lo and behold there were none! None study books targeting JLPT N3, that is! Lots of books and flash cards and stuff targeting the other, old levels, still though. A search on Amazon has the same result: no JLPT n3 books.

The bookshelf with textbooks for JLPT level N3.

So where are these books? Did the book writers/publishers not realize that there was going to be a guaranteed demand for them? Or are they hoping people will buy the remaining old format JLPT books before they introduce new once to the market? Because surely the demand for old ones will drop significantly once new ones are introduced, especially for the old levels 2 and 3, I would presume. Anyway, as soon as they're out and I've had some time to evaluate them, I'll update my Best Books for Learning Japanese page with recommendations on JLPT N3 books as well.

Efficient Chinese study methods

So after my first Chinese conversation lesson, I realized that I had to make some changes to my Chinese studies:

• Practice more simple sentences and basic vocabulary. The kind of stuff people usually start off with. I have a tendency to go for more advanced grammar and vocabulary immediately, which isn't bad in itself but leaves a big hole where elementary expressions and vocabulary should have gone. It's hard to do conversation when you can't even introduce yourself...
  
  
• Pinyin is essentially bad - so reduce the reliance on pinyin and look at the characters and memorize their pronunciations by itself (by listening to a tape or the teacher, for example). I thought pinyin was a fairly good way of writing Chinese, but I now realize that down to the monkey's balls it's essentially the same as romaji is for Japanese - i.e. an unnatural way of expressing the language. Not an incorrect way, but very sub-optimal.
  
  
  Kobe Chinatown. Bruce Lee has nothing to do with the content of this post.
  
  
  
• Study hanzi characters and their readings one by one (or short compound words) - starting with simple, frequent characters and moving on from there. Hanzi is how Chinese is written, and as with Japanese, literacy is essential. I have a tendency here too to go for the hard stuff too early, so I need to start over a little and learn from the beginning.

So considering that, the following constitutes my current Chinese study method:

• Using Anki (a spaced repetition system application), I study elementary characters, short words, and simple phrases. With Anki you can download "decks" (sets of "flash cards") made by other people and provided for free. I found one called Chinese Characters (Level 1 and Level 2) apparently based on the book New Practical Chinese Reader. I don't use that book but the deck is very useful in itself. The quality is a bit variable though, but I'm adding and changing things as I go along. Considering it's free and doing it all yourself would take significant time, it's really good value for time.
  
  
• Practice writing hanzi, using some Chinese character writing sheets I found online provided by the University of Vermont (the ones called Practical Chinese Readers Book I and Book II). These are very useful. Again, the quality could be better (readings and stroke orders would be nice, for instance) but for a price of zero, they're extremely good value. I just write and write the character all over many times, and do the same sheets multiple times. It's not the most fun activity nor the most fancy kind of study method out there - but actually when I come home from work and I'm tired, that kind of activity is just about what I am able to manage. And I am certainly seeing good progress!
  
  As an aside: I can read about 2,500 Japanese kanji, so most of the elementary/intermediate Chinese is readable for me already, but I never learned to write kanji by hand... I can only write maybe 100-200 characters. Which isn't a big deal but it's not very good either. So I've decided to use this as an opportunity to learn how to write the simplified Chinese characters, since that will be useful for writing Japanese too (with some exceptions). Since I'm lazy I really prefer the simplified characters. I mean compare 认识 with 認識... I know which one I want to write 100 times on the blackboard.
  
  
• Using the books I bought before, keep studying grammar using the grammar book and vocabulary and pronunciation primarily using the other book. Fairly standard. I study grammar before going to sleep (well it makes me go to sleep), and pronunciation/vocabulary some times in the evenings. I am also hoping to use the vocabulary book at the Chinese conversation lessons, since that book has nice, big illustrations accompanying simple words, it should be suitable for learning the correct Mandarin pronunciation.

It's going well, and it's fun. It's great to be able to apply my experience and knowledge of learning from 5+ years of Japanese studies to Chinese. My study methods are incredibly much more efficient now. I will soon have to set some intermediate goal (the current final goal is to be able to read a book in Chinese within two years), such as passing a particular HSK level next year. I'll have to discuss that with the Chinese school teacher.

Chinese Future

As I wrote about half a year ago, I started studying Chinese. To tell you the truth, that has been going kind of slow. "Slow" is really just an average though; I've studied grammar and the characters (hanzi) quite a lot, i.e. the areas that appeal to me the most, but not vocabulary and pronunciation very much.

That doesn't really work out well for Chinese, though. I think the main reason for that is that - compared to Japanese - pronunciation is very difficult. I don't know about you but I can't remember a word that I can't pronounce. Or rather I can remember it as a (hanzi) character, but I can't connect that to a sound, which makes it semi useless. Of course it would be possible to learn Chinese completely as a written language without ever learning how to pronounce things, but besides that being sub-optimal (it would certainly be very valuable for a deaf person, for instance, though) I also think it would take even longer than it takes to learn Chinese while learning both reading/writing and listening/speaking at the same time (for a non-deaf person).

So what I'm trying to say is that I finally realized that me going all in on hanzi and all out on pronouncing the damned thing was not going to work (obviously!), which is where Chinese Future comes in.


Chinese Future happens to be the portending name of a Chinese language school conveniently located between my office and my home, slightly cheaper than the competitor across the road, and with a name that I think really captures the essence of why learning Chinese is not only a fun activity but also highly rational for anyone with a remaining life expectancy of over 20 years - in a very non-subtle manner!

So yeah, I signed up as a customer-student there and had my first lesson yesterday. It seems like in Japan everyone's going to language schools all the time - it's really the hip thing to do. No one ever seems to learn any language though. In practice that usually means Japanese people going to "learn" English at one of the English conversation "school" chains, which never seems to produce any result. Considering not being able to speak any foreign language being a point of pride for many Japanese individuals, that is hardly surprising.

So color me full of skepticism (as always!) when I went there. But the first lesson is free, after all, so not much to lose anyway. The following 8 lessons are just 3,000 yen a piece - a considerable amount, but not too large to give it a shot. So well, that is my plan at the moment: Try those (in total) nine lessons and see whether or not language conversation school is really the thing for me. I've already got some good conclusions from the first lesson, which I'll summarize in the next blog post. Stay tuned.

Independence Day

Today I celebrate my independence day. Here's an approximation of how it looks inside my head:


It's been two years since I left my first repressive employer, Opera Software, which means that I am finally free of all non-competitive agreements as of today. Of course, disclosing that fact might in itself be against said (or non-said) agreement. So I'm not saying it's the case, just that it might be. Anyway, it's cause for celebration.

I was young and free, still enrolled at university, and eager to put my l33t coding skillz to use so what was I to do? No, looking back I realize - thank Providence - it was a good decision. It kick-started my career and set me off on an an interesting path.

But let me tell you kids: non-competitive agreements and the like are bad. Stay away from them and stay away from companies that will only offer you employment after signing one. I was lucky, but I don't think most people are. Of course, whether or not they're enforceable is another matter, especially when the nationality of the parties and the country where work is carried out are all different. But it smells of bad employment practices.

I was actually contacted a little more than a year ago about an interesting employment opportunity that I would definitely have been interested in if it weren't for said (or non-said) agreement, so it's not just all hypothetical. And regardless of the probability of such an unmentionable agreement being upholdable in court, I am a man of my word when signed in triplicate under witness and after review by lawyers. And specific knowledge of the Opera source code wouldn't have been an advantage either - so it's all just self-flattering from the oppressive party's part.

Not coincidentally, today is also two years since I joined my second repressive employer, Picsel Technologies (also known as Picsel Research, Picsel Malta, Lescip, Picsel Holdings, Lescip H, Picsel Trustees, Lescip Seetrust, not to mention the Geurnsey-based Picsel Group Holdings, and a number of other names). Picsel was fun in many ways. If I get the salary they still owe me it'll seem even funnier. But at least they didn't require me to sign anything oppressive.


If you're interested in understanding what happened to Picsel, a seemingly flourishing mobile software technology company, there's a site for that. Highly recommended reading.

Anyway I'm better off now, thanks largely to these two repressive employers. Happy independence day!

More Dravidian language identification

Lately, What Language Is This?, the web-based language identification tool I'm running, has been getting many hits from Tamil-language sources, probably as a result of being covered in two seemingly popular blogs, techintamil.blogspot.com, and tamilnenjam.com. As another blogger pointed out,

Also this service is very good at identifying indic languages (where as many other services fail to understand).

Well, thanks. And yes, I have been making sure that the languages of the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding areas are thoroughly supported for identification.

But two notable languages have been missing, and I finally got around to adding them. Namely the two Dravidian languages Malayalam (not to be confused with Malay, to which it is unrelated) and Kannada (not to be confused with Canada, to which it is unrelated).

Together with the already supported Tamil and Telugu, this means that all four literary Dravidian languages are supported now! I hope this will be of use to many, and I'd like to thank the Dravidian-speaking bloggers for their support in the form of writing about the site.

Leaving Picsel

So Friday was my last day in the office at Picsel Technologies. Not just because the office is moving, but also because I've resigned. I now have two weeks to get some real programming done before starting my next job on June 1. What that is I'll get back to later.

I've been at Picsel for a little over one and a half years. At many times I have for various reasons not thought that I'd make it to a year there, so I am satisfied with having endured for this long. I've learned a lot, both some good engineering practices and also how not to run a company, which might come in handy some day. (Hint: I'm not a big fan of authoritarian top-down management.) Working with Picsel's excellent technology has been a pleasure. I've seen things done that I wouldn't have thought possible before. I hope the technology ends up somewhere where it can be put to good use.

I consider myself very fortunate to have worked at both Opera Software and Picsel Technologies. On the surface they look very similar (enough so for Opera's lawyer to fedex me a very unfriendly letter when I was leaving) but they're actually complete opposites. By working with similar kinds of projects (mobile applications for Japanese mobile operators and manufacturers) but with completely different approaches, I've gotten unique insights into what works and what doesn't. Balancing the priorities between technology, products, processes, customers, and employees is essential. I'll give it a little more time before I write about it though. I am going to utilize this knowledge in my future career.

Anyway, a company is just a shell with logo and a legal department. What matters are the people in it. And the people are what has been the best part of working at Picsel's Tokyo office. I've met the most incredible, competent, and friendly people at the office. Most of them are not there anymore though, so it doesn't make sense for me to stay either. But the connections I've made at Picsel Tokyo, both personal and professional, is what has really made the time there worth while. I consider myself lucky to have worked at Picsel!