robbieinjapan.com

So, I did pretty well on the test overall. I was able to study for almost all of the different sections. There was, however, one section that I did not study for because I did not realize it would be on the test. That particular section involved a part where they take example sentences from our grammar explanations, remove one word from each sentence and jumble those words up at the bottom in a word box. We then have to fill in the blanks left by the missing words.

Luckily though, this is where my studying and general living outside of class came into play. The words that they put in the word box are always the most obscure, rare words from the sentences because they really want us to study them. However, I knew most of the words from outside of class anyway.

For example, they had the word ??(yudan) which means “unpreparedness, negligence”. I remember that when I was back home in America over the two month long break they had here, I was playing someone on MSN Messenger in a game. When I won, I was teasing her and she kept saying ????? which means something like “I was unprepared” or “I wasn’t ready”.

There was also the phrase ??????(saizen wo tsukusu) which means “to do one’s best” or “to do something to the best of one’s ability”. I came across this word in a manga (Japanese comic book) that I’ve been reading recently. One of the characters is studying for the entrance exam to the prestigious ???? (Tokyo University). He says some phrase like… if no matter if he succeeds or fails in the test, as long as he did his best, that’s what counts. So I learned that phrase from there.

And another example comes from even more recently. If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I’ve been doing translation work. One word that keeps popping up all the time in my translation is the word ??(kaizen) which means “betterment, improvement”. Actually my online dictionary says it could even mean “incremental and continuous improvement”. In any case, I’m translating my boss’s presentation and papers about the research he’s been doing to improve the system at a Japanese hospital in Tokyo for ordering, mixing and administrating injections to patients. So, obviously, the word for “improvement” is going to come up a lot.

I’m glad to see that my interaction with Japanese outside of class was able to come in and save me during the test, lol. None of those three words/phrases are particularly common. I actually know at least three or four other ways to say “improvement” in Japanese that are a lot more common than the one I described in the preceding paragraph. So, my work/reading/talking outside of class does actually help me learn Japanese, it seems. Of course, I didn’t just see these words in my conversations/manga/translation once and then learn them. I put them into my notecard program on my computer (Mnemosyne) and learned them by having the program flash me those notecards repeatedly over a long period of time. In any case, I’m glad my vocabulary has improved greatly!

Took my Japanese test today. I’ll write about that tomorrow since it’s too late now to write too much.

Class for me started at 9 and ended at 6 today. At 6:30 or so though, I went to a Chinese restaurant with my classmates and my teacher from my Economics class. My teacher was kind enough to pay for all of us.

This is a cultural thing in Japan. I remember when I was in high school, taking Saturday Japanese classes, they had a bazaar of sorts one weekend. Our teacher wanted to buy us a certain kind of ice cream there but we tried to decline since we didn’t feel comfortable that our teacher would be paying for all of us, since, hey, she’s our teacher. In any case though, she stopped us and told us that in Japan, it’s rude not to accept. In the end, she paid for our ice cream, lol.

My Economics class is in English, so there are quite a few international students there. The people who were able to go to dinner afterwards were me, a Turkish girl, a guy from the Dominican Republic and a Japanese guy. When our teacher told us that she was going to pay for all of us, the guy from the Dominican Republic and the Turkish girl started to protest. I didn’t say anything because I remembered my past experience in high school, lol. Our teacher, in response, just said something like, “No… I’ll pay, this is how we do things in Japan. Just ask him” and she pointed to the Japanese guy and he was like “yeah”.

So, all in all, I got a free dinner. It was a pretty nice restaurant though very small… there were only a few tables I think. I still wonder how all these small places are able to make enough money to support the workers and also stay open. In any case, I had ramen and gyoza there, both of which were very good.

I had no morning classes today since it’s Thursday so i was able to sleep in So far, I’m on track with my translation of the new document. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it all done by Sunday in order for a Japanese friend to proof-read it to make sure my Japanese is not too crazy. Then I’ll give it to my boss by the Monday deadline. Speaking of which, my boss and co-worker will be coming into Tokyo very soon and will be starting their meetings/presentations next week I think. They’re still working out their schedule but I’m pretty excited to see how things go. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend some of the meetings and presentations.

As for class, tomorrow is the second big test of the semester! I’ve been busy studying the reading, grammar and vocabulary today. Hopefully I’ll do well tomorrow. For now, I’m going to get ready for sleep since it’s almost 1am.

Another late night… it seems I have another translation project, even longer than the last one and due by Monday. At least this time, it’s an article so I get to translate full sentences in paragraph form rather than phrases and statements here and there (I’ve mostly translated PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets for my work).

It will take quite a bit of time though. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it done in time! My boss and worker begin making presentations this coming Monday I believe.

Anyway, today, I went to the Friday’s in Shinagawa. Today was one of my Japanese friend’s, Taro’s, birthday. I love eating at Friday’s and this was the first time I had ever been to the Friday’s in Shinagawa so it was an interesting experience… I always go to the one in Shibuya. It was actually pretty nice, perhaps nicer than the one in Shibuya since we were sitting at a table right by these huge floor to ceiling windows that looked out upon a nice grassy, leafy area (amazingly non-concrete).

When we were returning from Friday’s to Shinagawa Station, we were standing by the entrance/exit saying our last goodbyes when a woman came up to us and asked “Do you speak English?”, when I said “yeah”, she said something like “oh thank god” and started telling me something about how she was looking for her hotel. She seemed pretty lost and slightly desperate. lol, I can’t blame her… Japan can be really difficult if you can’t read or speak Japanese. Not only is Tokyo a huge and confusing city, but people don’t speak English very well and all of the writing is in Japanese characters so it poses some problems to foreigners. Luckily, my friend Taro lives in Shinagawa and he speaks English pretty well so he was able to show the woman where her hotel was.

I, on the other hand, was able to escape and go through the ticket gates returning home with some of my friends. Tomorrow will be another day of class and translation.

Unfortunately it’s late again and I have class tomorrow so I must go to sleep but at least I did get one good thing done by staying up… I finished the translation of the presentation that my boss and fellow worker will do when they come to Tokyo. I still haven’t talked about what my work is exactly but I’ll do that in an upcoming blog entry.

In other news, a friend of mine from Middlebury came to Tokyo recently and I went with him and another Middlebury friend to a Mexican restaurant. Surprising that they have Mexican food all the way over here in Tokyo, Japan. It was actually pretty good… and I don’t even like Mexican food that much, lol.

When I was walking back to my dorm today I saw a Japanese guy wearing a yellow t-shirt with big, black print letters. The message on the t-shirt read: “BIG BLACK PRINT LETTERS ON A YELLOW TEE”.

I also tend to see a lot of shirts here which have English messages on them that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. I suppose it’s similar to how in America people used to get tattoos of Japanese/Chinese characters that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I even remember seeing a photograph online once of a guy’s tattoo where the Japanese characters were actually reversed, lol.

I also see a lot of t-shirts from places I know. I’ve seen Penn State t-shirts (my home state’s university). I even saw a Philadelphia Freedom shirt. The Philadelphia Freedom were a soccer team for a league that shut down in 1997. I went to quite a few of their games with my Dad and my brother sometimes, too, I think. But, how one of their t-shirts ended up on the other side of the world is beyond me. I’m pretty sure the people who wear these shirts have no real connection to the places either.

It sort of reminds me of one time when I was in Vermont at my college, Middlebury College. I went with some friends to the nearby grocery store and when we were leaving I saw a guy standing there with a Penn State hat on. So I went over to him and asked him about the hat to see if he was from Pennsylvania or if he went to the university or something.

He didn’t respond. I realized that, under his hat, he looked sort of Mexican so I asked him in Spanish if he spoke Spanish and he responded back in Spanish, yes. So I asked him if he knew what his hat meant and he said he had no idea. I explained to him that it was a Penn State hat which was the university in my home state and I asked him some other questions about what he was doing in Vermont, etc. He didn’t say too much. I think either he was surprised that an American was speaking to him in Spanish (not too many people up in Vermont can speak Spanish) or more likely, he was an illegal immigrant and was nervous that some white stranger was asking him questions about what he was doing for work and when he came to Vermont and so on.

Even my non-Japanese friends in my classes at Keio University fall into this sometimes. I remember my German friend who came in wearing a “Hershey Park” t-shirt. Hershey Park is a small amusement park in Pennsylvania, a couple of hours away from where I live. It’s also the place where Hershey’s Chocolate started, I believe. I asked him if he had ever been there and he said “no”, so I asked him how he got the shirt and he said he bought it in Thailand. lol, Thailand?? The shirt looked like it was made in the 80s, too. Maybe someone got a hold of an old design and started mass producing them there.

My other friend, although he grew up in America and speaks English perfectly well, often wears Japanese t-shirts with non-sensical English written on them. Why he does this, I’m not completely sure. In any case, my friend Matt often makes fun of him for it.

Well, tomorrow is my first full day of classes since we got vacation for the measles outbreak. I’m off to sleep!

Something I forgot to mention yesterday… I was on TV!

I don’t normally watch TV these days because it’s sort of a waste of time. I could say it’s good Japanese listening practice but even then, most of the time I get bored with the programming and I start doing things on my computer so the TV just becomes noise in the background. I only watch a couple of particular shows each week.

Anyway, I decided to get a pizza for dinner from Pizza Hut because it had been a while since I had last eaten pizza. Because I need both hands to eat pizza, I can’t really use the computer, so I decided to turn on the TV. For some reason, I stopped at channel 6 (I think), and after a few seconds, they started doing a news story about Keio University so I kept watching.

They started talking about how Keio had reopened for its classes after a week of closing due to the measle outbreak. This was Saturday which is a pretty unpopular day for people coming to classes anyway. To be honest, I think only foreigners come to class on Saturday because we have no control of when our morning classes are and we have strict attendance rules. Japanese students have more control over their classes and can miss many more classes than us so they never come on Saturdays.

Anyway, on TV, as they were talking about how Keio had reopened, I saw myself!

That morning, I had been walking with a friend of mine to class and we saw a guy standing at the gate holding a large camera pointed right at us. My friend waved at the guy and we both laughed and walked past him. I completely forgot about it after that. I suppose the guy liked my friend’s wave, because he followed us with his camera as we walked past him and into the university building. As they talked about Keio’s reopening, that video section of us walking was shown.

Also, there was another shot with my Middlebury College friend Tyler walking with another guy from our dorm. It’s curious that they included so many foreigners in their shots. Either it’s because it seemed interesting to them or more likely, because foreigners were the only ones going to class on a Saturday.

Furthermore, that was the day of the Keio-Waseda baseball game. Since Keio University and Waseda University are such rivals, we had all classes cancelled after the 1st period. This gave even more incentive not to show up. I would have skipped but I have already skipped Saturday classes twice this semester. Technically, I can skip two more times but… I suppose I’d rather save them.

In any case, it’s pretty remarkable that I haven’t really watched TV for the past couple of weeks and the one time that I turn it on, I not only turn it on 30 seconds before the one minute clip comes up about Keio, but I also happen to change to the right channel at just the right moment.

If I had never ordered that pizza… I would have never known.

Yesterday I got another e-mail from my boss back in the United States. He had another translation project for me. This time, though, it’s not Japanese to English. It’s English to Japanese. Oh, the horror.

Translating from Japanese to English is fine enough since I can write natural sounding English pretty well. Going from English to Japanese, however, is a whole other animal. Not only do I have to deal with the actual process of going from one language to another, but I also have to worry about whether the Japanese I’m rendering sounds natural or if it even makes sense to begin with.

Not only that, but what I’m translating isn’t exactly the easiest material. I get to translate things like “Managing Health Care Risk and Hospital Operations Utilizing Real-Time Data Capture Systems” into Japanese.

I haven’t talked about my job yet in this blog. I’d talk about it now but I’m dead tired from the fact that I had to wake up super early (7:20am) to go to class for the first time in more than week. So, I’m going to go to sleep now… but I’ll talk about my job and some more about my translation tomorrow.

Today I finished reading a volume of manga. This is the third book in the series. Manga are basically Japanese comic books. It is worth nothing, however, that they are significantly different from their American counterparts which is why many people use the Japanese word “manga” to describe them rather than the English ”comic book”.

The reason is that American comic books are best known for being about super heroes. Most comic books in the United States are consumed by males, usually young in age.

In Japan, however, manga is consumed greatly by both males and females and a good deal of manga is marketed towards salarymen. I often see salarymen in trains reading manga or I see them in convenience stores reading the manga magazines. Also, the content of Japanese manga is usually not related to super heroes in any way. Often, the content of manga is more similar to real life situations often focusing on relationships or the fight to get into a good university. This is drastically different from flying men in tight suits fighting each other. Of course, Japanese manga has its strange content, too. Giant battling robots. Capturing wild monsters named things like “pikachu” and training them to fight each other. The list goes on.

Another difference is the way in which the two are presented. The stereotypical image of comic books in the United States are fairly large thin booklets that are stapled together. In Japan, manga is bound together like a traditional book and is small and thick like a book.

For me, I’m very happy that I’m at the level in my Japanese studies that I am able to read and enjoy manga. Of course, I use a dictionary from time to time to look up strange words that pop up but for the most part I am able to understand all the grammar and most of the words. Even if I didn’t look up any words, I would understand the story and what the characters were trying to say just fine.

Also, manga differs from normal books in that it is a story presented in drawn pictures focusing on the words and thoughts of its characters. So, it shows more spoken speech than written speech. This is beneficial for me since there is a stark difference in Japanese between spoken language and written language. Of course, this is probably true for most languages… consider the previous sentence, in normal spoken speech, I probably wouldn’t use the words “beneficial” or “stark”. But in any case, I feel that there are a large number of words in Japanese commonly used in written speech but never used in spoken speech and vice versa.

Because my Japanese classes focus heavily on the written speech, I don’t get much of a chance to study spoken speech. Of course, I hear it all the time and use it when I speak to my Japanese friends but that isn’t quite the same as seeing examples of it and studying them. Manga allows me to do this since it features real spoken language written down for me. It is sometimes difficult because a lot of the words are either so new or are slang, so they don’t appear in normal dictionaries and I am forced to ask my Japanese friends to describe their meanings to me.

I remember before I came to Japan, I would often try to read the manga because I figured they would be good practice and a good way to learn more Japanese. Unfortunately though, this proved too difficult since I didn’t know enough grammar or vocabulary to really get through it. Now that I am able to do it, it gives me a sense of actually having progressed in the language. Also, there’s the added benefit that I can now read comic books and consider that “studying”. As always, after I look up the unknown words, I put them into my notecard program (Mnemosyne) in order to memorize them later.

Speaking of which, I now have 3468 entries in that program, which is about 1734 new words tested both ways in Japanese/English. A while ago, I actually lost 800-1200 entries somehow, so I’ve most likely learned over 2000 new vocabulary words on top of my existing vocabulary. I find this pretty impressive that I was able to get this far. I wonder what my English vocabulary would be like if I added 2000 new words?

Anyway, this semester I haven’t been reading manga as much but perhaps I should start a new 30-day challenge (my previous one being writing an entry in this blog everyday). Perhaps my new 30-day challenge should be reading at least one chapter of manga every night. Hmm… I’ll think about it.