works of wanderlust

Tag: japan

  • urban sketch, four

    I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

    Two things have emerged from that effort:

    First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

    Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

    My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.

  • japanese, part three

    I am approaching fifty, but attending an introductory language class kinda makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten again. We count in unison, ask each other our names and ages, play games identifying colours, and get stickers for good work. 

    I also have the least interesting origin story of the bunch, I’ve concluded. Everyone else seems to have a much better reason to be learning a challenging new language than my “I just decided to learn something new” one day reply. 

    One guy has family in Japan and he’s trying to learn how to talk to his grandmother. He already seems to know quite a lot and jumps to answer almost every question before my brain can even start to do the back and forth translation and get words to my mouth.

    Another guy is trying to immigrate there and wants some basic proficiency under his belt before he leaves. He spent the break yesterday getting help from the teaching assistant proofreading an email he needed to send about his immigration process or something—I only half listened from across the room.

    I was chatting with another dude after class and he had apparently grown up in Japan because his parents were working there when he was very young, and was fluent in Japanese at one point. There were recordings of himself speaking as a kid and he decided he wanted to be able to understand what his younger self was saying so… language classes.

    And me. Just interested. Lifelong learner, I reply. I dabble—I am just in a phase. Will I still be poking at this in a year? It would seem a bit of a waste, otherwise, right?

    In a month or so we’ll be in Japan. Immersed. 

    I’ve got a few basic phrases locked into my brain, but the daily drilling of new ones goes in fits and starts and I’m not as consistent as I need to be with the effort. Also, my brain is not as young and spongelike as it used to be. In one ear and out the other, is how the phrase goes.  I can say it twenty times in class and seem to have it just right, but then—out of context, perhaps—I can’t seem to latch back onto it again.

    Learning languages is not for everyone. It seems like some people just get it—or at least they are faking it way better than I am. I persevere, but am humbled by the effort.

  • japanese, part one-ish

    I have written here previously about a couple of my self-study efforts to start learning Japanese, in part for our upcoming trip to Tokyo, but also just as—well—something interesting to pursue. Skills, languages, all that stuff—it broadens the mind, right?

    I figured I would make my updates a bit more formal because as of last week I signed up for actual in-person lessons. Right-o. Things are getting a bit more serious all of a sudden. The local Japanese Society, a cultural organization made up of and supporting Japanese immigrants happens to have a series of courses to teach the language to anyone interested in learning.

    The first class of my introduction to Japanese is tomorrow evening.

    We have a homework, tests, and cultural things to do in between classes.

    I just passed something like day 175 in Duolingo, and my hiragana and katakana skills are starting to settle into a comfortable familiarity—by which I mean I have about fifty percent recognition of the characters and their sounds. This is probably more-so with the hiragana, for now, but I’m starting to be able to look at characters when I see them out in the wild and sound things out. I mean, I usually don’t have the vocabulary to know what the word means, but I can sound it out—which is a great start, I think.

    I also bought myself a dictionary. That’s it. Nothing special to add about it, other than like any time I bought a translation dictionary it is a fun time looking up words and just flipping around through the pages looking for curiosities. 

    And, less useful but maybe interesting as the project progresses, our next door neighbours are hosting an exchange student from Japan for the year and she has already poked her nose over the fence to say hi (mostly to meet the dog, of course) and maybe there will be some opportunities to speak to her in Japanese when I get some lessons (and verbal confidence) under my belt.

    But the core of it, really, I think is the lessons. Eight weeks of three hour focused instruction before we go, and then I can try the test for the second level course and keep going in the new year and when we’re back from our vacation. By next summer I suppose I could have some serious progress.

  • hiragana two

    Our plans to leap over the Pacific are become more real with each passing day, and my progress in dabbling in acquiring at least some Japanese language prior to that trip is progressing with promise.

    Sorta.

    Fluency? Heck no.

    But I am hopeful that I won’t be completely overwhelmed by even simple basics in a radically foreign country (for us, anyhow) by the time we step off that plane.

    For an English-speaking middle-aged guy who was never very good at spoken languages, Japanese has been something of a new yet familiar challenge. I have been using a multi-pronged approach that includes flash cards, Duolingo, online resources and eating large amounts of sushi. The last one probably isn’t helping much, if I’m honest… but I only half contest that because our local sushi place does use hiragana on their menu and it really does lightly boost my confidence as I start to recognize the characters better with each passing visit.

    I also forced myself into a tougher difficulty setting on Duolingo when I just recently realized I could shut off the Romanised hints in the lessons and force myself to start thinking in the hiragana characters and not just the English-like phenomes.

    None of this is an endorsement for Duolingo. I just happened to have an account and I just happened to get it for a student discount because I was registered in University.

    My take on the whole do-it-yourself, language-in-a-can approach is of course, and has always really been, one of cautious skepticism. I’ve generally been poor at languages because ranked in order I would often put my personal verbal communications skills near the bottom of my list, even in English. I won’t say I’m bad at it, but I am much better at writing and visual communication methods. I’m also a bit of an introvert, and as much as I would hesitate to ever use that as an excuse for any kind of failure to participate, I do admit that I am less inclined to strike up conversations in general… and significantly less inclined to strike up conversations in a second language. It’s just a personal quirk that I should probably get over and work on, to be honest. But to that whole point, sitting on the couch and talking to my phone, and getting frustrated because my pronunciation is either wildly off or the speech recognition is weak or maybe I’m just not learning how to talk with Japanese words is something that I do put squarely on my methodology and thus on the effectiveness of these little language lesson services. They are better than nothing, I admit, but by how much I’m yet to be sure.

    That is to say, I could probably learn much better passable Japanese by signing up for a course and being forced to talk to strangers in a classroom a few nights per week than I can ever hope to learn by unlocking little digital badges and gaming the game that I downloaded on my phone.

    And ALL of that is to tell you that what I am actually really feeling good about learning through this app is the written portion of the exam: the hiragana. I probably can’t speak well enough to be understood, and my brain locks up when I try to listen to a spoken phrase and damned if I can remember more than a few dozen words of vocabulary BUT I have started to get my mind around the character set.

    The Wife is in the narrowing of date options phase of trip planning. It may sound slightly insane but our trip window now hinges on the ride maintenance schedule at Tokyo Disneyland. Really. But it seems like we’ll be seeking a pair of seats to Tokyo before the year is out, and that is super-exciting.

    And if nothing else, at least I’ll be able to order us some tea when we arrive.

  • hiragana

    We have loosely settled on a trip across the Pacific.

    Unable to confidently travel southbound across the border for our semi-annual pilgrimage to the house of the mouse in California, my wife has set her sights on the sister park near Tokyo for sometime, hopefully, next year. And of course a couple weeks checking out more than just Disney, too.

    I love the idea of visiting Japan. The art and culture and food and architecture and everything that I feel would be familiar from the exports of media and such in which I partake locally.

    And as is my oft-usual approach to these things, I’ve started to prepare for this still-hypothetical trip by taking language lessons. In other words, I’ve been studying Japanese…for about a month now.

    And while the actual need to speak the language as a European-toned North American tourist has been repeatedly called into question by many friends, many Asian-descended themselves, I can’t help but feel having a basic grasp of how to (at the very, very least) read some of it might come in all too handy.

    I mean, let’s just forget for a moment the academically-rewarding aspect of learning any language, and take that as a given: Learning new languages is simply, well, human.

    But instead picture Brad stumbling through the Tokyo subway system or down a bustling alley and having some basic ability to read the signs for a shop or a washroom or even an exit. In that aforementioned Euro-centric approach I’ve taken to travel, the languages are almost always close enough and use the familiar latin-descended alphabet system. I get by. But arriving in Tokyo I would assume that recognition and some general familiarity with hiragana and katakana script will give me some advantage. And increase my enjoyment and comfort on such a trip, too.

    Thus, I have been learning. Learn slowly, of course, using apps and flashcards and online resources. But learning.

    And that hypothetical concept of a maybe trip to Asia next year seems a little bit more real in the process.