Learning Kanji - The Poodle's Core and Regarding Methodology

The other day I wrote a somewhat obstinate piece on why learning kanji thoroughly is important for the learner of the Japanese language, accidentally calling myself, and possibly you - my apologies for that - a dumbass in the process. Now that I've gotten that off my heart, I'd like to touch upon the much more difficult and substantial topic of how to learn those kanji. I do not mean this to be a definite and final guide in any way, but rather I hope to share my experience and thoughts regarding the most efficient way(s) to kanji fluency.

First of all: my kanji level is already pretty high. I can read books and (somewhat) newspapers in Japanese. Secondly: I find kanji quite easy to learn. I know a lot of people who think studying kanji is worse than being eaten alive by killer ants (I just saw the movie "The Hive", so please excuse the analogy), but for me learning kanji has always been very enjoyable. Intelligence tests have shown (as I already suspected) that my intellect is based around spatial/visual understanding of concepts, and perhaps kanji just happen to be my calling in this world... Or maybe I've found fun interesting and stumulating ways of studying kanji, which I hope - and actually think - is the case, because that means you can find it just as fun as I do!

Thirdly: I still have a lot of learning to do. I estimate I know about two thirds of the kanji I need to know now. So there's still a lot "in it" for myself to refine my study methods as well.


Anyway nuf of me jabberin bout myself. Please let me tell you what I think is the poodle's core of kanji, and the key to the successful learning of which:

KANJI ARE (MOSTLY) PHONETIC

It's true! Kanji, to the Japanese, is just the character set you use to write Japanese. Japanese is a natural language and thus it's primarily spoken. Kanji might not be the most efficient way of transcribing spoken word into writing, but it is nevertheless how it's done in Japanese. And efficiency aside - it's a very charismatic method!

Now, there are people - such as my arch nemesis Dr. Heisig - who want you to believe stories such as: Japanese is very easy for Chinese people to learn because they already "know" the characters, so the best way for a Western fatass such as myself to learn kanji must be to first remember their shapes and compositions and associate them to some stupid keyword. Then I'll be on a par with the Chinese and can start learning the Japanese readings and the words they're used in - not to mention trying to forget all the erroneous and stupid keywords I was made to believe to be actually useful.

Well people, I don't want to go through the process of becoming Chinese in order to become Japanese, nor do I want to spend substantial time memorizing misinformation, as the keywords are often not very related to the actual usage of the kanji. I want to learn Japanese kanji; their meanings, writings, usages, and - most of all - pronunciations.

Kanji are the characters used to write words, and thus it is essential to learn their phonetic values as well as practical usages in writing vocabulary words. Concepts such as "meanings" or "keywords" for kanji are constructed and construed.

I do believe kanji have meanings though, and I'd like to recommend a good book for learning them. It's the book called "A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters" by Kenneth G. Henshall. First of all I'd like to raise my two major complaints about that book, that are essentially the same: the title and the "mnemonics" thing. I will go ahead and blame that -again! - mainly on my arch nemesis Dr. Heisig. It's all Heisig's fault! Everyone seems to think you need some magic mnemonic formula to magically "remember" the kanji... It makes me sick!

But Henshall's book - besides the name and the stupid "mnemonics" thing attached to each entry - is actually nothing more and nothing less than a simple etymological kanji dictionary! There are many of these in Japanese, and I strongly recommend you to upgrade to a Japanese one as soon as you're fairly comfortable with it, but until then Henshall's book is superb.

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Anyway, no book is the solution to learning the kanji. I believe everyday practical tricks are the key to that. More about that in the next post...

家に帰らない男たち - Guys Who Don't Go Home

Owing perhaps to what seems like a strong strain of introspectiveness, there are a lot of books in Japanese about what it means to be Japanese. They don't get translated and seldom get any attention outside Japan though. Since I'm interested in both Japanese society and the language this suits me well. Anyway, I thought I'd do my part and write something about one of these books.


It's called 家に帰らない男たち (Guys Who Don't Go Home, roughly) by 松井 計 (Kei Matsui). The book is about men who don't return home after work, many of them having a family that they only see on weekends.

The book has six chapters, each chapter focusing on one particular man and his situation. Following is an outline of the chapters:

1. A Guy Who Don't Go Home? A Guy Who Can't Go Home?
   44 y.o. advertising agency worker
   Started not going home just after getting married and changed jobs, because he had to work late and the commute too long. Got divorced but still maintains the mostly unused house in the suburbs, two-and-a-half hours from his workplace. Sleeps in capsule hotels and likes to go out drinking on weekdays after work. Sees his kids on the weekends but always brings them to his parents home instead of the house they grew up in. The reason why he retains the house is something of a mystery.
   
   
2. A Dreamless Person Chasing Dreams
   22 y.o. guy who does day jobs for dispatch companies
   Came to Tokyo to get "big", but can't really define what that means. Won't return home until he's "made it" in Tokyo. Says it's important to be independent and take care of himself but still lets his parents pay the mobile phone bill. Sleeps at net/manga cafes. Seems generally quite stupid to me but the author stresses that he is at least polite.
   
   
3. Going Home Is Scary
   43 y.o. salaryman
   Came from the countryside and made it as a sales guy in Tokyo. Has a home in the suburbs and a family. Gets on the train home every day, but when nearing his station, feels scared and gets on to the backwards-bound train into the city again. Says he doesn't want to ruin the perfect balance of his home, which he thinks is what would happen if he was there on weekdays, but enjoys spending perfect weekends with his wife and kids. Sleeps at capsule hotels or saunas or, to save money, at the office.
   
   
4. Weekend Marriage
   38 y.o. high-earning IT industry salaryman
   Spends only the weekends in the house with wife and daughter. Used to rent an apartment between the office and the house, but left it after realizing it was more fun to spend the night at saunas where he could chat with others. The weekend marriage is by mutual consent with the wife, whom the author also met and interviewed. Both enjoy this lifestyle, but are prepared to change it once the kid grows up and maybe starts thinking it's odd.
   
   
5. Has Everything, No Problems
   50 y.o. salaryman-turned-self-employed
   Formerly a salaryman who was stationed all around the country by his company, and even in the Middle East for a few years, but grew tired of that and started his own company with a friend. Lives quite close to the office, but still started to think it's unnecessary to go home in the evening. Enjoys the communal aspect of staying at saunas. Kid has moved out. Returns home occasionally. Wife doesn't seem bothered.
   
   
6. A Double Life
   46 y.o. designer
   Grew up in the sticks where everyone was expected to become a factory worker/engineer, but went to Tokyo to go into design instead. Has wife and kids, but shares an apartment with his 21 y.o. hostess girlfriend during the weeks. Wife thinks he is working hard, or at least that's what he thinks. Loves his family and realizes this can't go on forever. The girlfriend is also interviewed and she seems to enjoy the situation. The girlfriend is otherwise the female equivalent of the guy from chapter 2.
   

Matsui frequently makes a point of having interviewed many people as material for this book. I think the men that this book centers around are all quite stereotypical and easily imaginable - but all with some disturbed psychological twist in their heads. I'm not sure if that's because he incorporates material from other interviewees into these men, thus making them somewhat generic, or because he hasn't actually interviewed many people at all, but just invented most of it. In any case, it's an interesting read, not an academic paper.

From my own experience, I have heard Japanese coworkers say things like "the office/train is where I can relax", claiming their houses (with wive, kids, and parents) are stressful. It's not uncommon for Japanese office workers to spend all night at the office - it seems to give them credibility and respect among their peers too (despite being completely unproductive the following day). This book sheds some light on why. Saunas' communal aspect, with people napping in reclining chairs in a common area, is one thing.

The language is quite simple: Not much specialized vocabulary outside of society-related concepts such as 脱サラ (quit working as a salaryman) and プータロー (loser). Grammar is about between JLPT level 2 and level 1. The author uses quite a lot of non-general use kanji, though, as well as kanji for words usually written in hiragana, and there is almost no furigana. Not because the vocabulary requires it, but because he just likes to, I suppose. That's good for learning a little extra that probably won't show up on a JLPT exam.

Anyway, this is the first of Matsui's books that I read but it is unlikely to be the last. If you don't know who he is, he's famous for having been homeless, but he then wrote a book about being homeless and now he's a successful author, writing mostly about typical Japanese social phenomena.

Jumbo Jets vs Embedded Software

A while ago I bought a book called 747: Creating the World's First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation by Joe Sutter. Actually I bought it at Hong Kong airport to read on the way home - ironically not by 747 (I don't know what kind of plane it was - so no, I'm not an airplane geek). I bought the book because I was curious to see if the reaction I'd get was "Oh, that's exactly like in embedded software!" or "Oh, so that's how they do it in aeronautical engineering!". It turned out to be the former.

Joe Sutter, the author of the book (although he probably had a lot of help writing it), lead the engineering effort to design the plane, which does seem like the most interesting point of view to me. Beside the main story of how the 747's design came to be, he also tells some quite interesting tidbits from the history of aviation and from the aviation industry. These fit in nicely and makes the pages fly by. Unfortunately, there are a few too many autobiographical digressions that I didn't like, and also the literary quality of the book is very poor, with many repetitions, and sometimes even contradictions. Anyway, not bad for an engineer.

So yes, designing and delivering jumbo jets seems to be very similar to designing and delivering embedded software. The scales are, of course, completely different though. Not only physical scales - where they measure time in months and years, we measure in hours and days - and costs are similarly orders of magnitude higher in aviation.

What struck me as the biggest difference though, when I was sitting on a modern airliner somewhere over the South China Sea while reading the book's introductory chapters on aviation history, was that the jet airplanes he described in the early 1950s (such as the Dash 80), are exactly the same as the jet airplanes now, 50 years later! They fly at the same speed, same altitude, and use basically the same engines. That's really terrible! Commercial aviation has surely come a long way since the Wright Brothers flew, but it did so in the first 50 years of its history. I'm glad I work with software.


Even more sad is that even if you double the speed of an airplane, it would hardly make any difference today anyway. The Americans (I didn't know that before reading the book), Europeans, and Russians all had their fun trying to make realistic supersonic commercial airplanes. But even if they had succeeded, how much of the total time spent traveling is really spent in the air, at cruise speed, anyway?

For example: from my home in central Tokyo to somewhere in central Hong Kong, which seems like a fairly typical scenario, the flight time is on average about 4 hours. Say you have to be at the airport 1.5 h before the flight, and it takes 1 h to get from the airplane out of the airport, 1.5 h for me to go to Narita airport, and 30 min to get to/from Hong Kong airport, and an extra 15 min in either end to go between stations/taxis etc - that's 5 hours! So even if the speed of the airplane doubled, you'd only get between where you are and where you want to go 20% faster. No, if anything close to aviation, I'd like to be an airport architect, city planner, and anti-anti-terrorist consultant. That would speed things up.


PS. I always thought of the Jumbo Jet as the airplane with two floors, but a significant part of the book is spent revealing how it came to be that the 747 ended up basically not having two floors! How strange.