What a long, strange trip it's been

I've come a long, long way since I began in late August of last year. I'm cruising along quite comfortably now, but it hasn't always been this way. I've written in detail about my trials and errors and I've extensively gotten my hands dirty and tested new things in order to figure out exactly what worked best for me, and what did not; that's simply the kind of learner I am. If there's a different way to do something, you'd better believe I'm gonna give it a try. This is sometimes met with success... and sometimes not. Mileage varies, to be sure, but one important fact remains above all else: no matter what I end up doing, I'm still learning Japanese. 

The method is only a minor detail in the grand scheme of things - the most important thing of all is enjoying the ride, because it's gonna be a very, very long one.

So, what have I learned throughout my trial and error? Well, I'll tell you. The following should not be taken as gospel, as there is no such thing when it comes to language acquisition - if it works for you, do it. If it doesn't, change it. I hope that by sharing my experiences and opinions, I can help others discover and form their own.

• Music

If makes plenty of sense that music is a recommended tool for language acquisition. Repetitive choruses, catchy hooks and common thematic elements should be quite easy to pick up in music, right? But it just doesn't seem to do a whole lot for me.

You know, maybe it's just the way I listen to music in general, but I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to the lyrics. Perhaps it's the kind of music I listen to, which is often very melodic, heavy and... well, loud. Lyrics are great and some of my favorite music is absolutely brilliant and poetic in its lyrical content, but it's not something I actively pay attention to - if I can clearly hear and interpret the lyrics, I'll do so. Pop, folk and country music are examples of genres where lyrics are prominently featured and quite difficult to miss. Meanwhile, I doubt you're gonna care nearly as much about lyrics in, say, death metal or shoegaze where they tend to take the back seat to the much more powerful instrumental elements.

Maybe the solution is more Japanese country music.

Whatever the case may be, I don't find myself learning very much from listening to music. YMMV.

• Subbed material

One of the most prevalent doctrines I've come across is the principle that subbed material is detrimental to the learning process of a language. For the most part, I agree: consider the massive popularity of fansubbed anime, for instance, and that most fans know only the most common of words and phrases. This is no slight against them, because most anime fans have no (or little) desire to learn the language; they simply want to enjoy the show in a language they understand. In that case, of course, subs aren't going to go very far where language learning is concerned.

Conversely, if one is actively working to acquire a language, they'll presumably be paying far more attention to the spoken language than the typical sub watcher. Assuming the subtitles are fairly accurate, a learner with basic knowledge of the language should be able to very easily pick out spoken words to match with subtitles. Without the aid of subs, the watcher is left entirely to context, which may be confusingly ambiguous given the situation, and may be passed up entirely.

In my experience, this has been the case. I certainly pick up plenty of goodies when I watch raw material, but at the point I'm currently at in my "journey", I find myself soaking up a heck of a lot more vocabulary from subtitled stuff. But don't get me wrong - this is not a case of which is better for learning, but a case of two entirely different methods with very different kinds of learning. Whereas one picks up on patterns and words through repetition and context from raw material, one has a more direct, unambiguous link via subtitles, and I believe the brain handles either instance differently.

I must note that subbed material still makes up only a very small portion of what I watch. Ultimately, however, I've found that subbed material is most definitely not the scaly, fire breathing devil it's demonized as by the community at large. Give it a try and see if you get anything out of it - see if you can follow the spoken dialogue and subs at the same time and keep a good dictionary handy (preferably going J-J, if you're manly enough!).

• Monolingual dictionaries and J-J in general

Ahh yes, the much feared concept of J-J, which even many advanced-level Japanese learners still avoid! The basic idea is that looking up words in a Japanese to Japanese dictionary will give you the most accurate definition in the context of - surprise, surprise! - Japanese, without the many ambiguities and inaccuracies of Japanese to English, all the while giving you crucial exposure to the language and building a familiarity with the way a J-dic works.

It's easy to understand why people might get a little nervous at the prospect of looking an unknown word in a largely unknown language, for obvious reasons which I need not elaborate upon. It's not uncommon for me having to look up words within definitions within definitions, sometimes up to half a dozen or more generations. This can indeed quickly get tiring, but considering how much you've just learned by leaping from word to word, the benefit is right there in plain sight.

Even more profound is the fact that, even if a definition contains several words you don't understand, you can still quite likely get a very good idea of what the word means by the other words in the definition that you can understand. You'll realize this more as you get comfortable to the layout of the dictionary. It's quite a powerful thing, and it gives you access to a huge world of language acquisition at your finger tips.

One thing I've struggled a bit on, however, has been adding J-J definitions to my SRS. For the most part, I found that it's simply too time consuming, tedious and generally not beneficial enough to warrant all the extra typing and copy-pasting - at least not unless the unknown word or words are really tricky ones. Besides, my sentence decks are already, for the most part, monolingual. If the source sentence comes with a translation, I'll paste that too, but I have to highlight it with my mouse in order to make it show up (thanks to some very simple HTML tagging in Anki).

Check out Alyks's awesome post on monolingual dictionaries for more details.

• One deck to rule them all?

Some months ago, I consolidated my good ol' RTK deck with my growing sentences deck. At the time, it was the best solution to tackle my growing problem of reviewing two relatively beefy decks at the same time, and it worked pretty well. Though I find reviewing RTK cards quite dull, this sorta forced me to get them out of the way before sinking my teeth into the sweet, cream-filled center of the sentences within - gotta eat the vegetables before getting to the dessert, basically.

But boy, did that deck start getting messy and disorganized quickly. I don't keep much of anything meticulous and perfectly arranged, but talk about a bunch of bloat. This wasn't particularly the fault of a consolidated deck as it was my own overzealous experimentation with importing material from spreadsheets and iKnow, resulting in more bloat than Windows Vista and Rush Limbaugh combined. I kept up the reviews regardless.

Recently, I made a brand new deck as something of a supplement, and something of a "fresh start" - that meticulous, clean deck I've sorta always wanted (which, of course, would build up its own clutter over time as well), focusing on NukeMarine and co's awesome 2001KO lists on Smart.fm, vocabulary and onyomi in general. It was then that I realized once again the benefit of having multiple decks - more focused and flexible reviewing.

When it came time to back up Anki for my reformat last week to give Windows 7 a try (pretty slick OS, by the way!), I made the decision to split these two decks into three: RTK would become its own deck once again, as would all my 900~ grammar sentences, and my new, growing vocabulary/onyomi deck. I've been quite happy with this setup. Sure, it means more neglecting my RTK deck while I focus on the two others, but as I've said in the past... I don't think anything can make reviewing that deck any less dull. Luckily, the writing I do when I review sentences goes a long way in reinforcing my mnemonics, so perhaps I can soon retire that poor ol' bag of bones? We'll see... At any rate, I'm back to multiple decks and quite comfortable.

• Importing SRS material

Letting a spreadsheet or Anki plugin do the hard work and injecting slews of new material into your deck. This is a very tempting proposition, especially considering how much time it takes to enter hundreds, thousands of your own sentences. In some cases, it tends to work out quite well, too - Tae Kim's grammar guide comes to mind.

However, assume you import one thousand new sentences from Smart.fm, each containing a new word you're not familiar with. Will the plugin even import the image and audio along with it? Will it import the kana correctly? If you're like me and prefer to break up kana with spaces and highlight key vocabulary, you're pretty much S.O.L. there, too.

But most of all, doesn't this sort of go against the whole idea of the SRS, where you're technically meant to "learn" the sentence first, before throwing it into the thing? Or, at the very least, having a vague familiarity with the sentence. In my experience, it's that complete unfamiliarity that completely ruins the process of importing material, causing me to spend significantly more time reviewing and frustratingly failing cards, without any sense of association between image, audio, kanji and the sentence itself. 

Allowing yourself time to build those associations beforehand seems like a very important step, which is why I do almost all of my adding by hand. It takes time, to be sure, but my brain thanks me later when I don't have to strain during the already intensive reviewing process to make sense of all this junk! Besides, I can also ensure that I have everything in place the way I want it (as I outlined above) with no unwanted surprises, no B.S., nothing that will slow me down or distract me.

• Distractions and Concentration

If there's anything more detrimental to progress than distraction, I sure don't want to be on the receiving end of it. I'm sure this is something that everyone is more than a little familiar with, in any line of study or work or what have you: you're chugging along on a project when, suddenly, something inexplicably distracts you from your work and completely derails your concentration. If you're anything like me, it takes time to regain that state of concentration and focus. Whatever that distraction may be - instant messages, door bell from the mail man, booty call on the telephone, dog on fire, fire alarm from the dog on fire, building burning down around you - you can be certain that your focus will be left in shambles after some amount of (or magnitude of) distractions.

If there's a way to prevent this broken focus, I sure haven't found it yet. It helps me to quiet my mind and meditate for a short period of time, certainly, but this is only one step of many back to the path of concentration. The trick is, of course, to prevent these distractions entirely... but that's easier said than done.

One of the tools I sometimes use is SimplyNoise.com, which is just that - simply white/pink/brown noise in the most literal sense, which is actually quite soothing to listening to and does a great job in muffling nearby sounds. The side effect is that this could just as easily muffle any audio cards, but I haven't really had this problem (I do wear headphones often, though).

Another solution for avoiding distraction is finding the best times in the day when possible distractions are kept to the bare minimum. Again, easier said than done, especially for the more busy and active among us. Personally, the early afternoon works well for me, when I can comfortably invest a good hour of uninterrupted SRS review time. When it comes time to add more sentences, distractions aren't as big a deal since that process is a little more mechanical and doesn't require as many mental cogs working in tandem. 

Your mileage, once again, may vary. Sometimes, I just have days where I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and can't seem to focus at all, distractions or none. In those cases I just have to suck it up and do the best I can, which is really the only thing I can do. Other times, I'll go for a week straight with my mind blazing, plowing through anything thrown at me with ease and a pristine clarity. Man, I wish I had those more often.

• Video games: not just for antisocial kids!

Looking back, as a jaded 20-something, it's easy to grimace at all the time I wasted on video games since a very early age. At the same time, they've undoubtedly helped shape me into who I am today (ahem, for better or worse!), and the experiences have stuck with me quite profoundly. It was largely the classic RPGs of the early 90s that influenced my greatest interests and hobbies (writing, Japanese culture and language, etc), so I can't regret those countless spent hours.

Lucky for me, they'd serve another, far more practical purpose further down the road. I've begun replaying many of them in Japanese, of course, and since I know a great deal of the dialogue by heart, I've found it incredibly easy to adapt to the Japanese script and pick up phrases and words. 

The most recent example is Final Fantasy 6 (classically known as Final Fantasy 3 here in the USA), a game I've probably played to completion a dozen times since its release in 1994. It still ranks as one of my favorite games of all time, and my very favorite Final Fantasy game along with 4. A memorable cast of many, an epic struggle versus an oppressive, power hungry empire (hey now, it was one of the first RPGs to do it, practically!) and dark, thematic elements I had never seen in a game before (many of which were, in fact, censored from the original SNES release). It seemed like the perfect choice of a game to replay, and now a few hours in, I'm sure I made the right choice. Loads of text and a story I already know like the back of my hand makes for some highly effective language learning.

Another example was Cave Story, which was actually only recently released, in 2004. I discovered it about two years ago and loved it to pieces, got the itch to play it again recently, and of course did so in Japanese (this time completing the insane difficulty "hell mode", to boot!).

Even if your past experience with RPGs (and any other text heavy game with a Japanese release, really) is nonexistent, I highly recommend picking up a few. I can hardly imagine a more fun language learning activity, personally.

That covers most of the bases for the time being. Needless to say, I've gotten my hands dirty in the brief time I've spent so far, and yet, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. There's much experimentation, trial and error ahead, and much to learn. Never a dull moment, that's for sure, but considering how long the road to fluency is, this is nothing but a good thing.

Games: 洞窟物語 (Cave Story)

Developed entirely by one talented individual known as Pixel over the span of five years and released for free on the Internet is perhaps the finest freeware indie game ever made, entitled 洞窟物語 (Doukutsu Monogatari), better known as Cave Story.

In Cave Story, you play the role of an android named Quote as you awaken in a strange village of rabbit-like anthropomorphic creatures called Mimiga. You quickly discover that all is not right in this odd land where the Mimiga are being terrorized and kidnapped by an enigmatic figure known only as "The Doctor" and his henchmen. Of course, saving them all from certain doom is your job.

Gameplay in Cave Story is rather similar to the Metroid series, giving you a modest variety of weaponry and tools to overcome obstacles and enemies. The potency and power of weapons can be increased by collecting the shards dropped by enemies, capable of leveling most items up through four tiers, with level 1 being relatively weak and maxed level 3 quite destructive by comparison.

Be careful, though - Cave Story's difficulty can be quite harsh, and indeed, within the first minutes of the game you'll likely meet an untimely demise, even if you're careful. Quote begins the game with very few hit points, making even a few hits (or one gentle poke from a spike) quite deadly. Additionally, Quote's currently equipped weapon loses quite a bit of its "EXP" whenever he takes damage, so you'll want to take care to keep your weapons maintained and maxed out whenever possible to maximize your damage output.

As if the main portion of the game wasn't tricky enough, the game contains a few hidden challenges with absolutely demonic difficulty for those masochists among us.

Coding, artwork and graphics, music and sounds - everything in Cave Story was built from the ground up by one man. The amount of time, effort, sweat and blood that's gone into this game is nothing short of amazing, and every ounce of it shows from beginning to end. Whereas many games of today are backed by tens of millions of dollars and dozens, if not hundreds of developers and still turn out mediocre, at best, it's an inspiring thing to see the work of one man take fruition and excel so far - and for such a low price, all the while.

Of course, the game has been entirely translated into English (as well as other languages), but you'll download the Japanese client, won't you?

RevTK stories and political correctness

This is quite a peeve of mine that stretches back to when I first began RTK in late August of last year.

I stumbled upon the rich resource of creative, helpful RTK mnemonic stories in RevTK rather quickly, which served incredibly beneficial over the next few months as I worked my way through. What I quickly noticed, however, were the amount of "reports" against stories with anything remotely related to race, gender, sex and sexuality and so forth. In my mind, I began to imagine that every single user of this site must be a prude of enormous magnitude to be offended by such trivial things - things which Mr. Heisig himself would probably give a polite nod to, as he originally recommended the use of extremely exaggerated, even shocking mnemonics, as an effective memory tool.

Of course, after becoming more involved with the community, I discovered that most users were mature and rational enough to either understand the usefulness of shocking, vulgar stories, or ignore them and move on. After all, the entire Heisig process is a very personal one, and one mnemonic story may be useless for one person, whereas it sticks immediately for another, so some amount of variety, even vulgar, is surely beneficial.

But as I poked through the threads, I'd come across calls to delete specific stories which were supposedly vile, disgusting or immoral. Almost always the same kind of thread, really - someone, somehow, gets their feelings hurt by a funky little two sentence story meant to aid in the recollection of a Chinese character, and demands that it's removed. Rarely are these stories removed (I can't recall a specific incident, anyway).

It boggles my mind that intelligent adults such as these can get so wound up on something so trivial and meaningless, when it's so easy to turn the other way. When one can instead use rational thought to understand the existance and usefulness of such things, of counter-points and opinions, rather than crying foul and demanding censorship which benefits no one. 

Political correctness is a disease I'd rather stay far, far away from; it's an impossibility to satisfy everyone, it's impossible not to offend or upset someone by means of simple words. So what do we do? We censor ourselves, the way we speak and our opinions. We make up new terms and phrases to mask the original, offending ones. Where does it end? Who's to say what's offensive and what's acceptable?

My ol' buddy George Carlin sums it up in his skit titled "Euphemisms" better than anyone:

We have no more deaf people in this country. Hearing impaired. No more blind people. Partially sighted or visually impaired. No more stupid people, everyone has a learning disorder. Or he's minimally exceptional. How would you like to told that about your child? 'He's minimally exceptional.' Psychologists have actually started calling ugly people those with severe appearance deficits. It's getting so bad that any day now I expect to hear a rape victim referred to as an unwilling sperm recipient!

And we have no more old people in this country. No more old people. We shipped them all away and we brought in these senior citizens. Isn't that a typically American twentieth century phrase? Bloodless. Lifeless. No pulse in one of them. A senior citizen. But I've accepted that one. I've come to terms with it. I know it's here to stay. We'll never get rid of it. But the one I do resist, the one I keep resisting, is when they look at an old guy and say, "Look at him Dan, he's ninety years young." Imagine the fear of aging that reveals. To not even be able to use the word old to describe someone. To have to use an antonym.

And fear of aging is natural. It's universal, isn't it? We all have that. No one wants to get old. No one wants to die. But we do. So we bullshit ourselves. I started bullshitting myself when I got in my forties. I'd look in the mirror and say, "Well...I guess I'm getting ...older." Older sounds a little better than old, doesn't it? Sounds like it might even last a little longer. Bullshit, I'm getting old. And it's okay. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won't have to die. I'll pass away. Or I'll expire, like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they'll call it a terminal episode. The insurance company will refer to it as negative patient care outcome. And if it's the result of malpractice they'll say it was a therapeutic misadventure.

I'm telling ya, some of this language makes me want to vomit. Well, maybe not vomit ...makes me want to engage in an involuntary personal protein spill."

My one and only concern with RevTK's story section would be exposing children, but there are manageable solutions that have been discussed in the past, and will likely be put into place in the future (considering the website is administrated by one busy guy, I can totally sympathize). In the meantime, though - exactly how many children actually use Heisig? Having poked through a few "age threads" out of curiosity, the youngest user I came across was 15, which isn't exactly the most innocent age anymore when it comes to racy, risque or borderline-offensive material. Heisig's method was developed with the adult brain in mind, after all, and while nothing explicitly states that a younger mind can't benefit from visual memory mnemonics, the system is clearly geared toward adults. Somehow, "think of the children" doesn't really seem very relevant.

And with that, I leave you with my first official rant on this blog. 

Ultimately, I don't think the matter is a major one on RevTK considering, as I mentioned above, that the community is largely mature, intelligent and rational enough to either understand the potential benefit of, or turn a blind eye to, potentially offending material. I feel that the ever looming threat of censorship (which includes political correctness, in my mind) is one that must be fought on any front if we, as a global community, are to protect the fundamental rights of expression we're entitled to as a social species.

Anime: Kaiji

It's been quite some time since I've been this hooked on anime series.

The spiritual successor to the ridiculously manly (and equally pointy nosed) mahjong suspense series Akagi, Kaiji returns to the bleak underworld of high-stakes yakuza gambles.

The story takes place in late 90s Japan during the recession and follows a dude by the name of Kaiji who seems to follow a never-ending cycle of unemployment, gambling and cheap pranks. One day, he's visited by a man named Endou who intends on collecting Kaiji's outstanding debt, giving him the option of spending the next ten years working low paying jobs to pay it off, or the unique opportunity of boarding a ship called the Espoir where he and others will gamble for the chance to clear their debt and start anew. Obviously, he chooses the latter, because 26 episodes of watching Kaiji clean windows probably wouldn't make for a very entertaining series. (OR WOULD IT?!)

Whereas Akagi starred a confident, natural genius who'd always seem to pull through with incredible strategies, no matter how dire the situation, Kaiji differs dramatically in that he's really quite an average Joe when all is said and done. Mistakes and misfortune aren't uncommon, and often, the series dives into deep psychological analysis of Kaiji and the other characters, which quickly becomes the most crucial aspect of the entire series as mind games abound in gambles of life and death. He often experiences feelings of doubt, temptation, bewilderment and wild philosophical swings that transform his character dramatically throughout the series, leading to some seriously surprising twists and circumstances.

And Kaiji is full of twists, too. Seldom was I able to successfully predict the outcome of any of the situations Kaiji or his few compansions find themselves in, and more often than not, I was quite shocked with how how things turned out. Cunning, ingenuity, deception and desperation carve the way for some of the most exciting, brilliant, disturbing and all around memorable moments in recent anime memory.

Perhaps most memorable, for me, was just how differently each character behaved, thought, and ultimately viewed the world around them. While Akagi certainly touched on these themes, they really lay at the core of Kaiji, exploring the raw humanity of those in positions of extreme desperation, the rich and powerful elite, and everyone in between along the way. With that having been said, Kaiji never becomes too preachy, never claims one character's philosophical perspective to be correct and, indeed, manages to show the highs and lows of nearly every major character in the process.

The gambles themselves are another matter entirely.
A strategic rock, paper, scissors card game may not sound very exciting on the outside, but things quickly gets crazy, and the penalty for losing is intentionally kept ambiguous, with only the odd whispering of rumor about being sent to foreign countries for manual slave labor or being used as a guinea pig for experimental drugs to strike fear into the contestants.
I won't spoil anything by mentioning the other gambles, but let's just say that the stakes are very, very high.

It's definitely not a series for everyone, though. Although I was hooked by the first episode, I must say that I was pretty surprised by how depressing this series can get. Whereas hopelessness almost always leads to a miraculous outcome in most stories, Kaiji doesn't always play by the rules and hopelessness can easily dig itself deeper and deeper. The worst of man's emotions and behavior strike at the worst possible times, and... and well, you'll just have to watch and see, NOW WON'T YOU? Just be sure to have something a little more cheerful to watch afterward.

I should also note that this is one of the first subbed anime I've watched in a while. At first, I was disappointed and irritated to discover that, even as an mkv file, the subs were hard encoded in, leaving me without the option of disabling them and unwilling to seek out raws which would take who knows how long to download.

Now, I know that the overwhelming popular opinion around RevTK and AJATT Land is that subtitled material is basically the Antichrist, but I simply don't buy that. Indeed, watching anything in its original language without aid is the best way to learn language naturally, but if you're stuck with subbed material, it's far from the end of the world and you can soak up plenty of useful information without disrupting the delicate balance of bla bla bla. The amount of vocabulary I picked up from these subbed episodes was quite surprising, and probably would have amounted to an otherwise frustrating experience had I seen this series raw. Don't believe the hype, folks. With that having been said, I'd still recommend raw material over subbed, nine out of ten times.

The journey so far

Well, it's been a little over seven months since I began this little "project" of mine, and just about six months since starting this blog. 

It's interesting looking back on my trials and errors up to the point I'm at now - what's worked for me, what hasn't; what I've enjoyed and what I've occasionally downright loathed. If you've been following my verbal spew for a while, you've likely noticed enough trial, error and frequent change in my routines and methodology to drive any sane man to the brink of insanity. It's a good thing I left mine in the gutter years ago! Sanity, that is.

I'm quite happy and comfortable with where I am now, in both my methods and habits and my current Japanese level, to be honest. If I had focused harder and spent more time on my studies (so to speak), I'd probably be a good deal further along, but given the time and energy I've had I believe I've made a significant dent - an ever-growing crack, perhaps - in my ultimate goal of breaking down this language wall for good. 

Besides - all things in moderation... including moderation. I'm in no rush, I know I'll obtain fluency soon enough, and besides, I still have another good 50 years or more of walking this Earth if all goes well!

As any serious language learner can most certainly tell you, though, it's not just the language knowledge that you obtain from an ordeal such as this. Recently, especially, I've noticed some incredible things with my memory which, while usually more akin to a rusty wheel than a workhorse, has been rapidly leaning further toward the latter as time goes on. 

Of course, it could be the fact that I've been out of school for a few years and simply haven't had the mental stimulation and challenge required to keep my memory up to par (until recently with my Japanese studies), but I think it would be a crime to rule out the visual memory, associative memory and mnemonic techniques I've been practicing this past half-year as heavy contributors to my heightened mental prowess. And let's not forget this wonderful, versatile tool known as SRS, the power of which I've fully realized and utilize on a daily basis.

I've noticed that I'm able to pause briefly, reach into my head and pull out any variety of information with very little effort, such as words (in either English or Japanese), people's names (subconsciously associating a name with a face - not much different from associating a reading with a kanji compound), dates (again, associative and visual memory at work) - it's really quite incredible, yet unsurprising in the grand scheme of things.

This has all impacted my language studies significantly as well, of course, as I'm constantly finding that new words stick easier and I'm no longer failing the same card a dozen times over before I have even a chance to remember it (unless, of course, it's a ridiculously boring word that I'd rather forget, in which case it's probably getting deleted from my deck).

I still have a long way to go, but (at risk of sounding arrogant) I've really impressed myself with how far I've come. I know that there's absolutely no possible way I'll stop now, so it's only a matter of time and exposure. I'm curious to see where I'll be another six months down the line, but that's a tale for another day!

Listening spree

I haven't really been updating very often lately, but that's because I haven't felt the need to discuss much - things are really going pretty well and I have very few things to rant or whine about.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been focusing my energy on listening - lots and lots of listening to a variety of material, over and over again. This is something I've tried doing in the past, mostly using KeyholeTV, with... mixed results. (90% of Japanese TV makes me want to tear my hair out - which I suppose is still a significant improvement over American TV) 

I tried again with various Japanese audiobooks, but never really found very much that I cared to hear dozens of times over. (我輩は猫である seemed nice - but the narrator began to grate on me, and the story was far too long for repetitive listening)

Then, recently, I decided to dig up the ol' audio book thread at RevTK, download as much as I could, find a few keepers and then stick with them for a while. It actually didn't take very long for me to find some really fantastic listening material. I must say I'm most partial Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which are exceptionally well narrated and acted, and seem at least a little more appealing to me than something like Little Red Riding Hood - not that there's anything wrong with listening to children's stories! It's actually quite interesting hearing classic lines such as "The better to eat you with" in Japanese - like Khatz says, listening to a translated version of something you're very familiar with and have heard many times before in your native language is really a great way to pick up bits of your second language.

I also had to weed out some of the more obnoxious material, unfortunately, most of which had irritating background music and/or narration that made me want to punch a puppy. Seriously. I can deal with a little background music if it's relevant to the story, or a tasteful intro ditty... but most of the stories on http://fantajikan.tea-nifty.com/blog/, for example, are just begging for an asskicking. Ah well - something tells me that their target audience isn't the jaded 20-something crowd...

At any rate, I have around 8-9 hours of material which I'm listening to as frequently as I can, mostly passively as I go about my day. I'm probably averaging about 8 hours of listening a day, having listened to most of these stories several times by now, and although I still find it difficult to understand much, I'm really starting to patch things together and understand more and more, without even having consulted transcripts yet. It's really quite impressive how the brain can piece together puzzles such as these on its own, if given enough repetition and time.

Next step will be the transcripts, of course.

I have seen the depths of Hell

...and it came in the form of Takashi Miike films.

Some weeks ago, I was introduced to the existence of some particularly disturbing and controversial movies by a friend of mine, by an incredibly prolific and versatile Japanese director by the name of Takashi Miike. While his portfolio included a wide range of material, including a recent live-action Yatterman (which supposedly followed the original anime quite faithfully), I took a morbid curiosity in his more notorious films - mainly 殺し屋１ (Ichi the Killer) and Visitor Q.

Now, I'm normally not one to take a fascination in the particularly morbid or shocking. In fact, I generally avoid such things unless there's some kind of meaningful underlying artistic message to be conveyed. I love such films as A Clockwork Orange and Oldboy - movies which could easily be described as shocking, and perhaps morbid - but both powerful in their own right and well worth watching. Going into these two Miike films, I really wasn't sure what to expect apart from the over the top "torture porn" and vague recommendations I had been given.

I could tell early on that I would enjoy 殺し屋１. Lots of colorful yakuza language (complete with plenty of deep growls and rolled Rs!) you'd never hear in everyday Japanese, an interesting premise with equally interesting characters (particularly the sadomasochistic Kakihara, pictured above), and a dark sense of humor I could immediately appreciate. Oh yeah, and enough blood and gore to make Kill Bill look like the frolic through Gumdrop Lane it really is by comparison. Make no mistake about it - if you don't have an appreciate for dark humor and a cast iron stomach for buckets of blood, dismemberment, torture, graphic jugular-spraying deaths, violent rape and other such delightful matter I really don't care to go into on this blog, you'll most likely want to pass up this film. For the rest of us - indeed, for the couple dozen of us - 殺し屋１ is a surprisingly enjoyable and well made film that I can highly recommend.

Now, as for Visitor Q... My first impression came from skimming its plot on Wikipedia, which was probably a bad idea, in hindsight, as the more shocking parts of the film stood out against the important subtleties which fill this movie to the brim. As a result, I was put off from watching it until I had manned up and watched 殺し屋１ and craved something more.

At its core, Visitor Q is a comedy. A very, very, very black comedy the likes of which I've never seen before, and most likely never will see again. The premise is rather simple - an intensely dysfunctional family (a runaway prostitute daughter, a bullied son who takes out his frustration on his defenseless, heroin addicted mother, and a father with numerous serious problems) and a mysterious, unknown man (known as Visitor Q, but never named in the film) who quite comically works his way into the household, and the bizarre turn of events that unfolds as a result.

Like 殺し屋１, much of the film can be difficult to watch, but in this case, for entirely different purposes. Visitor Q manages to tackle more social and sexual taboos in its two hours than the whole of Howard Stern's career combined. Much of the imagery is intense and shocking, yet the bits of comedy thrown in manage to lighten the mood, if ever slightly. Speaking of comedy relief, Visitor Q is downright hilarious at times, though you may be laughing it up between visits to the barf bag.

All in all, I'd have to say that Visitor Q was probably one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen, and easily the most disturbing comedy. There's certainly a message to be conveyed beneath it all, though - a message which mocks and satirizes modern society, dysfunctional family matters and numerous taboos. Surprisingly, I enjoyed this film.

I certainly plan to see more Miike films, but I think I'll try and space them out within a span of one month a piece. For obvious reasons.