Nihongo no benkyō

I’ve been taking Japanese classes for a year and a half now (to be more accurate, I’m almost 2 terms through my second 3-term year). They’re at the Japan Foundation, and I’ve really been enjoying them (highly recommended!). I’ve had the same teacher the whole time, who I really like; and though my classmates have fluctuated a little bit, there are some of us who have taken all 5 terms together, and another bunch I met in September when two classes merged. We have a Facebook group where we post about Japan-related subjects, and it’s a fun class environment.

After the fall term this year I was a little less excited than normal about signing up for the term starting in January, but I did anyway because I didn’t really take the time to sit down and think about it. Now that this term is drawing to a close (our final test is April 7), I still haven’t shaken that feeling, so I’m finally sitting down and thinking about WHY I feel that way.

I’m still committed to learning Japanese - I feel like I still have a long way to go, and Countermeasure will definitely be going back to Japan in the near future, so I’d love to improve enough to be able to converse with people there. However, I feel that while I’m learning a lot in class, I’m beginning to thing it’s not the most effective way for me to be learning right now.

By far my biggest weakness in Japanese is conversation. My listening is poor - it takes me long enough to translate that I get lost very quickly, and I’m bad at recovering - and I’m slow to come up with responses. All the grammar I’ve learned goes out the window when I didn’t fully understand the question and am scrambling for a response. In class I’m continuing to learn new grammar and vocabulary, but I feel like my conversation skills are not progressing very quickly. We do practice conversation in class, but it’s usually very specific conversation related to the topic at hand, so I can follow fairly easily since I know what to expect and have clear guidelines on how to respond. I’m trying to watch some anime and listen to Japanese podcasts in the meantime to improve my listening but I don’t have a ton of time to devote to that (see my last blog post).

I’ve also been pretty busy lately, and have been letting slide the ~15 minutes of practice/homework every day that I did for my first year of classes. Instead I find myself having to do a big chunk of work on Sunday or Monday before my Tuesday class to catch up, which isn’t the most effective way to absorb the information. Classes take up about four hours of my time between class time and commute, and homework an additional few hours, and I’m beginning to resent that time a little which could be put towards other interests. Having two weekly evening commitments is kind of the maximum I feel comfortable with, and (since Countermeasure is non-negotiable) it’d be nice to put that second slot towards something else after spending a year and a half on this.

Given all that, I haven’t decided 100% yet but I’m leaning heavily towards quitting my class after this term. I feel like I’m letting my teacher and classmates down somehow, and I’m sad that if I restart I’ll have to wait until this time next year, and likely have a different teacher and definitely different classmates. But I think it’s not the most effective way for me to be learning right now. Instead, I’d like to contact some of my Japanese-speaking friends and see if they’d mind getting together once in awhile to just chat in Japanese so I can practice listening and responding. If I can do that on a regular basis, supplemented with Duolingo, other apps, and the Japanese club at work (which is basically a study group), hopefully I won’t lose everything I’ve learned and can start to strengthen those weak areas.

Free Time Management

I’m fairly good at managing my time in a professional setting and when I have a list of things that really need to be done, but I feel like I’m really bad at managing my free time. So many people I know have time to watch all sorts of shows, read all sorts of books, listen to all sorts of podcasts, and play all sorts of video games in their free time, and I have no idea how they manage it. I almost never watch TV - Sam and I are watching the new Drive to Survive, but it’s going slowly. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t finished a book since last summer. I’ve been playing a lot more video games in the last half year or so, but it takes a long time to get through a single game. At least I’m getting more time to listen to music, which is nice - my work no longer requires listening 100% of the the time so I can often put on background music, and I have a 25-minute commute during which I can listen to stuff that requires more concentration, like podcasts - but the idea of starting a new one that will take me forever to catch up on is daunting. A lot of people I know even take on side work projects, and I recently turned down one that I was really interested in because I thought it would stress me out too much.

There are definitely a few reasons I can identify that are contributing to the feeling I don’t get anything done in my free time:

1. I AM fairly busy - I have class once a week, rehearsal once a week, and I have homework associated with the former and practice associated with the latter. I play trivia every other week, I run the social media for Countermeasure, and usually have a number of other commitments in the space of a week.

2. I’m a completionist - I like to finish one game/show/book before I start the next, and the current game I’m playing is a long one. I feel like maybe a lot of people who seem to play a wide variety of video games jump from game to game without necessarily finishing them first. Same with TV shows, I’d rather finish one before starting a new one, and if a show is more than a few seasons long it really factors against choosing to watch it.

3. I don’t get to spend as much time with Sam as I would like, so if, say, HE’S playing video games, I’d rather sit beside him on the couch and work on homework or something rather than go into another room and read or do something on my own.

4. This is probably the biggest reason - I spend too much time on my phone. I play a lot of silly phone games and scroll through social media. I’m reluctant to call it WASTING time, because I find it relaxing and a good way to rest my brain a bit after a work day, but it certainly doesn’t feel productive. I’ve thought about this a bit, and for awhile I was thinking that I don’t NEED to feel productive in my free time and if something is relaxing, that’s good; but presumably if I cut back on my aimless phone usage, whatever I fill my time with will likely feel more rewarding.

However, that being said, I still can’t see myself freeing up the kind of time it would take to binge watch a TV show or catch up on a podcast that’s hundreds of episodes long. How do people do it?

Healthy Habits

Back in September, Sam and I started a new workout tactic. Most of 2019 I was working from home and found it difficult to keep up with exercise. The idea was to not make unrealistic goals that we’d have trouble meeting, but to create healthy habits that we could hopefully continue long-term. The secret: stickers.

Each month I make a new schedule that outlines goals for each week (decorated with cute washi tape from Japan!) These goals are purposefully vague, giving us the freedom to go about them in different ways if we’re getting bored. They’re also unqualified - though we’ve kind of made little rules about what counts or not - because the goal is more to get into the habit of fitness, not to be in fantastic shape. The categories are:

1. Cardio. This could be anything from running to cycling to a good long walk.

2. Weights. Any kind of strength training - body weight exercises, free weights, etc.

3. Stretches. Working on flexibility, because neither of us are flexible to start with and that’s only going to get worse as we get older.

If we hit our goal for the week for a category, we get a little sticker. And if we hit all THREE goals, then we get a big sticker.

You’d be surprised at how effective sticker rewards are for adults.

Anyway, we started strong in the fall, and got worse as the fall went on (harder to do cardio in colder weather). December in particular was a bit of a mess for me because I’d started a new job (and had really early mornings for a week and a half), then got sick, and then was out of town for a week. But we started the new year determined to get back on board and January has been much better so far. And the best thing is, it’s starting to feel more like habit and less like a chore.

As a result, I’ve been feeling pretty good lately. I’m in the best shape I’ve been in in awhile - not as good as when I rode 10km each way to work and back multiple times a week, but better than most of 2019. I’m also the strongest I’ve been in awhile - not as strong as when I could do three sets of 25 pushups ten years ago, but I’m getting better. And I’m possibly more flexible than I’ve ever been.

Work is actually helping, now that I’m getting settled in there. It’s a 20-25 minute walk each way, which is great on its own (I’m counting those as mini cardios - I still have to do two REAL cardios in a week). And there’s a guy who comes around every morning and afternoon to rally people for a short workout challenge, so that’s an easy way to get some weights out of the way. And I joined the hockey club, so have played shinny at the rink around the corner at lunchtimes a couple of times now, which is great exercise.

I doubt I’ll ever be like my mother and be running marathons or doing (half-)Ironmans, but I’m pleased that my solution to re-introduce regular exercise into my daily routine after losing my serious bike commute has been working. Feels good. 💪

New Year, New Blog

Someone once told me that instead of making new year’s resolutions, they choose a word that they use as their mantra for the year. I’ve decided to adapt that and instead of choosing something very broad (like that) or something very specific (like a resolution), I’ve come up with some short, directive maxims that will be my inspirations for the year. I feel that they are interrelated but distinct, and so far I feel like this strategy will be an effective one for me. Already I’m more inspired by the possibilities, while less tied down by rules.

1. Find Balance.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a good work-life balance. I left my old job, almost a year ago, because I was working too much overtime with not enough to show for it. The past year I’ve been mostly freelancing, which, if I’m honest, usually involved more of the “life” part than the “work” part (and was not, ultimately, sustainable for that reason). At the end of November I started at Ubisoft, a company at which there seems to be the possibility for reasonable work hours. So a big goal for this year is to just settle in and find a good routine of work, sleep, exercise, and fun.

2. Create More.

I was actually reasonably creative in 2019, but there are a few specific things I’d like to focus on. One of those is writing - hence setting up this blog - and the other is photography. I’ve learned about myself that to be inspired to create, I need to have a place to put my creation so that it will be seen. Maybe that’s not ideal - cue the lectures that I should be creating for myself, not other people - but whatever the reason, that’s how I operate. My music and arranging has actually been moderately fruitful because I’ve started posting to Youtube and have gotten some great feedback. I used to write all the time in my LiveJournal, but that community has disappeared, and there doesn’t seem to be a good replacement. I’m hoping that keeping this blog here on my website will be a reasonable alternative. Similarly, Facebook isn’t really a great place to put photos, and it takes so many steps to get photos from my camera to Instagram. But I’m working on optimizing that, and my parents gifted me a year’s subscription to my favourite photo editing software, and I’ve already taken more pictures on my good camera since Christmas than I have in the rest of 2019. I’ve decided to think of this blog as “some views” - that covers posting pictures AND writing. Hopefully by having this system for posting in place, it will pave the way for me to Create More.

3. Strengthen Foundations.

I am an ambitious person. I like to be good at things, and thus I sometimes jump a little farther ahead than I really have the capabilities for. For example, I was taking singing lessons a year ago with the goal of being able to sing beautifully on my own rather than as a background harmony part - but really, my tuning is not consistently accurate and that’s a much more basic skill that I should improve before worrying about being flashy. Similarly, I spent a lot of time in the fall working on memorizing and writing Japanese kanji, but my weakest skill is being able to understand simple Japanese when it is spoken to me, and that’s a much more rudimentary proficiency that it would make sense to practice first. This last goal is just a reminder to slow down, take stock, and make sure I have foundations in place that I can build on in the future.

Already I’m glad that I sat down and took the time to write out my thoughts. I haven’t quite figured out how I will let you know when I have an update here, but I do hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it, and that you’ll continue to follow along. :)