Author Archives: taekk

What obstacles in online colloboration?

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I had a couple online lessons during the weekend as well as one face-to-face.

The online lessons went amazingly well except for when my stupid, stupid Comcast connection died and didn’t come back for 10 minutes. I would even venture to say it worked out better than the real-life meeting because the place we had arranged to meet had already closed. (What kind of large coffee chain closes at 7pm??)

We have the technology

Here’s the technology I used to set this up, in case anybody is curious.

Skype with webcam: Of course you need some kind of chat program. One person suggested MSN Live Messenger, which I will try out but Skype with video works amazingly well. It’s almost as good as talking face-to-face!

Drupal: I use Drupal to manage my lessons, conversation notes, and any other content related to the lessons. If you’re not familiar with Content Management Systems (CMS), it’s a generic platform to manage content in different formats whether it’s a blog, online book, forum, etc. This was used to setup the main lesson site.

Google Calendar: I added a new calendar on my Gmail account to manage my lesson calendar. You can embed the calendar for others to share and sync as I have done in this page.

Yuuguu: I researched around for screen sharing apps and this was the first one I tried. It was very simple to use and works great so I’ve stuck with it. At least, it seems to work great for me since I’m the one sharing the screen. I don’t know how slow it is on the other end but so far, there seems to be little trouble following along. I can run Google searches and show how to find interesting information pertaining to your interests in Japanese.

I have screen sharing on my laptop and I converse on Skype through my desktop. I have the laptop on the side for demonstration mostly because my desktop monitor resolution is far too large for sharing.

Lang-8: I setup a separate account on Lang-8 exclusively to correct my student’s writing. I ask them to setup their own account and add me as a friend. This way, I can easily correct their writing and also allows them to find additional friends and input from the awesome Lang-8 community.

Google Checkout: I haven’t tried this out yet but it allows sending out email invoices so you don’t even need a website with a shopping cart. You can however easily embed one in your website if you so choose. I plan to send emails out at the end of every month for lessons already done to save myself the trouble of tracking amount purchased, amount remaining, and all that junk. The transaction fee is 2% and $0.20. Not bad at all!

Synopsis

Drupal is great if you already pay for a domain name and have a provider with PHP and database support. But you could probably do most of what you need with a free blog from blogger. So really, there is no overhead cost at all except for your internet connection which I assume you already have since you’re reading this.

My setup probably isn’t going to work for most people. If you need help finding students or don’t want to bother with managing billing and payment, you’ll probably just want to pay the 15% and go with eduFire. But I doubt their flash app can beat having screen sharing where you can show the student whatever you want, whether it’s the lesson, searching for their favorite author’s works in Japanese on Amazon.co.jp or showing them show to use wwwjdic to find example sentences of something they just learned during the course of the conversation. You can even give them control briefly so they can have their hand at it.

Update: I’ve been checking out some videos and it does look like eduFire has screen sharing as well so it’s actually a really impressive little app they’ve developed.

Update 2: Actually, the app I think is from Adobe so it’s a nice big app that they’ve licensed or bought.

Next time, I’ll talk about the most important part which are the actual lessons themselves.

Non-existance is so unfair!

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Trying to finish up some of my unfinished drafts again. God, this is the SECOND TIME stupid WP published my post without my permission! I hate this new interface!

It seems every language has different ideas of what it means to be something. Spanish has ser vs estar, Chinese has 是，在，有，and of course nothing. (It seems anything and everything in Chinese can be omitted and implied.) Japanese also has a distinction between properties of the thing itself （implied、だ、です） versus where it exists （ある、いる）.

The verb 「ある」 can be used in some interesting ways to define existence in a way that’s not entirely obvious, hence this post.

If you define all the normal, common activities and occurrences that exist in the whole world, nay the whole universe, if you do something that doesn’t exist in this realm, it can mean that it’s grossly unfair.

A) 晩御飯は全部、あたし一人で作ったから、全部自分で食べちゃうよ。
– Because I made all the dinner by myself, I’m going to eat it all.

B) それはないよ。
– That’s not fair. (That doesn’t exist.)

A) じゃ、次はちょっと手伝ってみたらどうよ？！
– Then how about helping me next time?!

Here’s another example of using 「ない」 for what one expects to be an uncommon scenario.

A) 彼氏が今晩のデートで大事な話があるってよ。
– My boyfriend said he had something important to say on tonight’s date.

B) そう？
– Is that so?

A） もしかして、立派な婚約指輪を持ってプロポーズしたりして！
– Maybe he’ll bring a gorgeous engagement ring and propose.

A) う～ん、それはないんじゃない？
– Umm, I don’t think that’s likely.

You can even erase things that happen in the past and treat it like it never happened. Water under the bridge and all that.

A） 昼ごはんをおごってくれたら、昨日最後のチョコを許可なく食べたのをなかったことにしてあげるよ。
– If you buy me lunch, I’ll forget that you ate the last chocolate yesterday without my permission.

B) そのチョコは俺が買ったんだろうが！
– But I bought that chocolate!

Finally, my favorite ボケツッコミ combo.

A) 日本では、なぜかセーラー服やメード服など、制服がものすごくはやっていてね。街で散歩したら、制服を着ている女の子をよく見かけるわけよ。
– In Japan, for some reason uniforms like sailor uniforms and maid uniforms are really popular. If you walk around town, you’ll often see girls wearing uniforms.

B) あるある。
– That happens, that happens.

A) 最近、おばさんまで、普通にメード服着ているし。
– Even grandmas are wearing maid uniforms normally.

B） あるある・・・ねーよ！
– That happens, that happens… no it doesn’t!

As you can see, as is often the case, humor translates horribly. I hope to cover the different aspects of ボケ and ツッコミ and its importance in understanding Japanese humor but that’s another post that will probably sit in my draft folder for another couple years. Feel free to share your own corny jokes in the comments.

Here ya go, another resource for y’all

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Oops! This was published by accident before I was even halfway done!

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll already know that I’m a major advocate of primary materials. This includes reading actual novels and other reading material that regular people read. I learned a whole bunch of stuff as a boy reading the Hardy Boys, Hercule Poirot, Chronicles of Narnia, and even (I’m ashamed to admit) Piers Anthony novels. Unfortunately, as an adult learning the a foreign language, a lot of the easier literature are geared for an audience of which you’re no longer a member of. While Agatha Christie is always good, I would hardly be able to stand the Hardy Boys now. And personally, reading children’s books in Japanese doesn’t really entertain me. Unfortunately, the adult books which are interesting are way too difficult to read for most people who are new to the language. So it’s nearly impossible to find reading materials with the right mix of difficulty and interest level. Don’t even get me started on the fake dialogues and boring readings in Japanese textbooks.

So I figured I’d try to write more stuff in Japanese to maybe fill in some of the gap. I can’t promise it’ll be interesting but I don’t think it’ll be any less interesting than the stuff in textbooks. I always feel some trepidation when I write in Japanese but I haven’t heard any crazy complaints and have received even some comments that it reads like a native wrote it. So I think it’s in pretty good shape. Even so, I can still use a lot more writing practice so it’s like killing two birds with one stone. Corrections are always welcome as always. Enjoy!

このブログをよく読んでいただいている方は、もうご存知だと思いますが、私は、外国語を勉強する時は、原文を読むことを強くお勧めしています。私自身も、「Hardy Boys」、「Hercule Poirot」、「Chronicles of Narnia」、 「Piers Anthony」など、色んな本を読んで非常にいい英語の勉強になりました。ただし、もう既に大人になってから外国語を勉強することになると、子供向けの作品は面白くなくなってしまいます。「Agatha Christie」の作品は大人向けなので、まだいいんですが、「Hardy Boys」は大人として読むのはちょっと辛いでしょう。それと同じように日本語で書かれている童話などは、個人的に興味ありません。しかし、大人向けの小説は、外国語を勉強している方には、たいてい難しすぎるのです。度々単語を調べないといけないのに、単語の漢字すら知らないし、熟語の読み方も当てなければいけない。単語ひとつだけを調べるのに何分かかってもおかしくないというのに、知らない単語だらけの文章を見ると、さすがに諦めたくなります。日本語学習者向けに適切な難易度で、かつ面白い読み物が少ないのが大きな問題だと思います。日本語学習者向けの読み物といえば、たいてい教科書に載っているわざとらしい会話やつまらない読み物ばかりです。

だから、その穴を少しだけ埋めるためにこのブログに日本語でもっと書こうと思います。面白さは保証できませんが、少なくても教科書に載っている物よりましかと思います。私ももっと書く練習をする必要があるので、一石二鳥です。訂正することろがあったら、ご遠慮なく教えてください。

The opposite of polite… rude? Not really.

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As most of you know, Japanese has a separate way of speaking to show politeness. This way of speaking is called 「敬語」 as a whole and is split into two levels: 1) Polite – 丁寧語, and 2) Honorific/Humble – 尊敬語／謙譲語. However, I’ve never really seen a neat term to describe the non-polite way of speaking in English or Japanese. Some might think that the opposite of polite is rude but the level I’m looking for is between the two. Slang is a little different too. What I’m referring to is a neutral way of speaking with equals. I’ve usually just called it “casual” or “dictionary form”. However, 「普通の話し方」 is rather unwieldy and 「辞書形」 is a term for conjugation, not a politeness level. I’m not aware of any formal term in Japanese which is a pain when making Japanese lessons so I looked up 「丁寧語の反対」 in Google and found my exact question on Yahoo!知恵袋. Say what you want about Yahoo and it’s past blunders with Microsoft but Yahoo Answers is really cool and turns up useful answers all the time.

I’ve decided to use the term 「タメ口」 based on this rather confident answer.

普通に敬語の反対は「ため口」ですよね。
昔は「敬語」と「普通の言葉」だったのが、今は「敬語」と「タメ語」になっている。敬語とは上下関係を示すものではなく、相手との距離を示すものなのである。親しい関係かそうでないかを示すものである。

Any native speakers have any reservations with that term? Here’s a list of terms I tried to sort in order of politeness. Any additions, suggestions, or corrections appreciated.

尊敬語／謙譲語
丁寧語
タメ口
俗語

By the way, I hope to use a screen sharing app during my lessons to show how to do this type of research using Japanese and the internet on your own.

WordPress 2.7 First Impressions

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Finally, threaded comments supported out of the box! The plugins available to do this were incredibly difficult to setup and changed the database more than I was comfortable with. Of course, my theme doesn’t work with this new feature so I’m back to the default theme for now. The default theme is horrible and really needs an update. This is important since your favorite themes are often unmaintained and will not support newer features. I’ll be hunting for another one in the coming days.

As for the new admin interface, it’s OK but I don’t really care too much as long as I can get stuff done. The old one worked and so does the new one. It’s more customizable, which is cool. I don’t like the bulk action dropdown since I’m forced to choose an action instead of just hitting the appropriate button. It adds two more clicks: 1 to click the dropdown and 1 to select the action.

Time will tell whether the automatic upgrading will work ok without having to fudge around with chmod and directory permissions.

Link: WordPress 2.7 Demo Site

Update: Couldn’t stand the default theme anymore. I don’t really much like this one either but it seems to work. I hate fixed-width, it’s such a waste of valuable screen space. The theme search continues…

Update 2: I’ve decided to drop the threaded comments stuff. Personally, I don’t like how it’s difficult to figure out which comments are new since it’s no longer sorted by oldest first. Can’t do much about the fixed-width. It seems to be all the rage with the better looking themes.

The crappiest video game ever

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Yay, it’s analogy time!

Ok, let’s say you bought the hottest and coolest RGP such as Final Fantasy Millennium or Dragon Quest MMMCMXLIX but the game designers got a little too creative. The game is supposed to take 70-100 hours to beat but it’s networked and you play with 19 other people. The only catch is, you only get to play a couple minutes at a time. The rest of the time you’re watching the other 18 people take turns playing exactly same thing. Now, lets say the game was something else like Final Fantasy 8-2 and it’s not that much fun to begin with. And you don’t even get to play that much because 80% of the game is filled with cut scenes that are kind of boring and lecturing. To further spice it up, let’s say the game is supposed to take several years to finish. Congratulations, you’ve decided to take Japanese language classes!

Here’s another analogy. Let’s say you throw that game out the window and buy another one that lets you play all the time by yourself. Awesome! But you find out that the game has a critical bug of never saving your progress correctly. Every time you start playing, you start off at random parts of the game. So most of the time you either have to repeat what you did already or you’re completely lost. The gameplay is also really complicated and there’s no instructions anywhere of how to play. The only way to get any information is to meet up with experts that know the game backwards and forwards. The only problem is that these experts have been playing this game ever since they were a child. It’s so natural to them, they don’t really know how to explain it very well. Also, there’s so much new terminology, you can’t even understand what they’re saying half the time. Congratulations, you’ve decided to study Japanese on your own while meeting up with native speakers!

Why are you messing with that crap? Don’t you want a game that remembers how much you’ve progressed, challenges you at the right level, and can explain to you what required step-by-step as you go? That’s right, you want to partner with a private tutor that knows the language, how to learn the language, and how much you know. So go ahead and send me an email. 🙂

Overcoming obstacles in online colloboration

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No responses yet for my tutoring services despite the ultra-low rate I set (on purpose). According to google analytics, I’ve only had about 50 visitors from Seattle in total to my website after the announcement so this is hardly surprising. Searching google for “seattle japanese private lessons” showed my site at #19 which means it might as well not even be there. You either want to be within the first 3 or #10 which is first on the second page.

So I can either be patient or expand my audience. As I briefly mentioned, I really prefer live meetings over online for a variety of reasons. And by “live” I don’t mean some kind of lame marketing term (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) but the technology platform often referred to in layman terms as “real life”.

Learning language is an interactive process. Personally, I think there’s a huge problem if the speaking ratio between the teacher and student is not near 50%. Unfortunately, almost all language classes consist of the teacher speaking 80%+ percent of the time depending on the class size which is partly the reason why they are so ineffective. So in order to interact with the student, I need a medium where communication can easily flow both ways.

Let’s see if modern technology can work out something for me. I prefer meeting face-to-face because seeing a person’s face and body language is important in language and communication. This is especially important for teaching languages for obvious reasons and is very important to the learning process in conversation practice.

Well, while I haven’t tried it yet, I’ve got a webcam on my monitor so I guess that’s a potentially reasonable solution. I look crazy when I see myself via the webcam but maybe that’s just how I always look. (A scary thought.) So I’ve significantly increased my audience to anybody in the world with a fast internet connection and a webcam of reasonable quality.

Another advantage of real life is that it’s trivially easy to show and share information. All you need is a pen and paper and you could easily write things out, point at them as you explain, and have the other person interact with it in kind. You can even bring your laptop and easily share websites and all sorts of stuff with virtually no hassle.

While I would prefer we write things by hand for kanji and kana writing exercise, I’m willing to compromise with the keyboard if I can share my computer screen somehow with the other person. I know Skype has built-in chat but I really need something where I can point to other stuff to show what I’m talking about and have the other person do the same while adding their own input. While I prefer my hands, I guess a mouse cursor can work. I don’t mind installing an app but would prefer the other person not have to do the same. Hopefully something integrated with the browser.

If I can find such a solution, I’m willing to open up my services to anybody with a webcam and fast internet connection. I might have to beef up my internet connection as well. And I suppose I’ll need to figure something out with Paypal, Google Checkout, or some service of that nature.

Hacked and mangled but still standing

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Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog but what you haven’t seen (or maybe you did briefly) is all the stuff I had to do just to keep it the same.

Some of you may have briefly seen the navigation menu oddly placed. That was because of countless invisible spam links inserted into one of my posts. Since my WordPress installation is always up-to-date, I’m thinking it’s probably a sql injection vulnerability in one of my plugins. I’ve been reactivating them one by one and now I’m reasonably sure which one was the culprit. I might reactivate it and combine it with the bad behavior plugin to see what kind of shady logs I get. Maybe later.

Or maybe it was a mysql security hole. I haven’t had any more attacks since my provider recently applied a security update to the database. But that somehow managed to mangle all my non-English text so I had to rebuild the blog from scratch with an export from the old database. As a result, you might have experienced a brief period of complete 文字化け.

So I’m finally in the last week of my online class for Project Management and assuming that I pass the final, I’ll be free at last to pursue other interests! I have a special project in mind which I’ll write about very soon.

Juggling Language and Life

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With working on a fairly large project and team (at least for me), moving to a new place, and taking online classes, these last few months have been quite hectic indeed. I’ve moved all my stuff over to the new place (though there’s still unopened boxes everywhere), the project is slowing down, and my online class ends in December, so hopefully in a month or so I’ll finally have some time to devote to Japanese, Chinese, and maybe even relax a little.

If any of you played Sims 2, the accuracy of the game in simulating real life is amazing (and maybe depressing depending on which way you look at it). Depending on your personality and interests, you have a bunch of needs shown in bars that have to be balanced and maintained given a finite amount of time. You also have to maintain your relationships with the people in your life and meet their needs. In these last few months, due to the increasing demand of some of my other bars, my language study, personal projects, diet, and exercise bars have been sorely neglected.

My beer belly, which I just reduced to reasonable levels has come back with a vengeance. In regards to my Chinese and Japanese, while there was certainly no improvement in the least bit, I managed to at least maintain my skills without forgetting too much. Japanese comes back with a little bit of practice and it’s hard to know even less Chinese than what little I started with.

I can appreciate why learning a new language is so difficult for working adults. The basic problem isn’t that the language is hard, it’s just the volume of everything you have to learn (basically, how to express everything you know and understand everybody else). I can conclude from personal experience that the biggest single difficulty of learning a new language for adults with a career, bills, relationships, and responsibilities is the lack of time. I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be if I had kids and a family to care for.

I didn’t know how good I had it in college. I didn’t have to go grocery shopping, run errands, and spend 40 hours a week sitting in a cubicle. I also had easy access to native speakers and teachers on campus without having to drive around and several months a year with absolutely nothing to do. Nothing motivates studying like being bored out of your mind.

So don’t tell me I can master a language by working on it 24×7 and surrounding myself with the language all day because some of us have a life that demands our attention. Also just as impractical is the suggestion to pick up, leave everything I have built up here, and move to that country. Finding a job in a foreign country to learn the native language is one huge Catch-22. You can’t get a good job if you can’t speak the language and you can’t move there to learn the language if you can’t find a good job. And I’m not keen on taking a 2/3 pay cut to switch from my current job to teaching English.

All of those suggestions are great when you’re a student or just starting out as a fresh graduate and I did exactly that with Japanese. However, as I approach 27(!!!), that window of opportunity is closing and I don’t have a similar route for learning Chinese. And once I have kids to take care of, that window can be considered officially closed, locked, and bolted on both sides.

By the way, this is my way of saying to those of you still young to not squander your chance. Learn a foreign language and live abroad while you still can! It’s really going to change your life and mostly all in a good way!

So what’s the solution for learning a language while juggling all the other stuff going on? I don’t know but I’m just going to take it a little-by-little. I know how much work is involved from learning Japanese so I don’t get easily discouraged and take pride in every little improvement. And even though my Chinese is still unusable in a regular conversation, it’s still vastly improved from a year or two ago and I’m happy with that. I think that’s the most important ingredient. Be persistent and don’t worry about when you’re going to “master” everything. That’s a relatively loose term anyway since nobody ever completely “masters” a language. So don’t stress about why it’s taking so long and feel discouraged by what seems like a lack of progress. Just enjoy the journey and the people you’ll meet along the way, however long the road may be. And if you persevere and keep on the lookout, you’ll eventually find some new opportunities opening for you. At least I’m hoping that’s the case for me.