最近、自分のスケジュールをよく見て、運動する時間がまったくないことに気づいた。体重が本当にやばくなっているので、仕方なく、運動の優先度を上げることにした。でも、今のスケジュールに入る余地もない。こうなったら、睡眠時間を削るしかないと、そういう結論にたどり着いて、朝６時に起きてジョギングを始めた。
６時起床は、２日連続で、まだ死んでいないから、とりあえず可能だということがわかった。しかし、早起きが苦手で有名な私は、いつまでこんなことを続けられるかは不明。昨晩は、８時に倒れて１１時まで寝たら、朝３時まで眠れなくなっちゃった。
う～、１日の時間を増やせないかな？火星では、１日には２４時間＋３９分があるらしい。火星植民地化はいつごろできるんだろう？あんまり期待しない方がいいか。
Wow, I haven’t posted in a while.
This post is about schedule management. I’ve had many personal projects I’ve wanted to do. The latest is my private Japanese lessons, which, in my opinion are going VERY well. (My students may or may not agree, hehe.)
I’m learning a lot and it’s very interesting to see the various strengths and weakness people have. The most enlightening part is how everybody can quickly pick up and learn Japanese, even the parts that are supposed to be “hard”.
Personally, I’ve totally debunked the “Japanese is hard” myth not only for myself but for everybody I’ve had a chance to tutor so far.
Anyway, one of the original hopes of teaching lessons was to get some inspiration and additional material for my textbook project. This really didn’t pan out as I had hoped. This is a mistake I and I’m sure many of you make; that is to magically hope that you can do more in the same amount of time.
So let’s do some simple math, shall we?
Hours in a Week: 168
Constant
Day Job with commute: 50
Sleep: 63
Preparing Food+Eating: ~12
Variable
Spending time with Family (Wife+dog): ~30
Japanese Lessons: ~4
Errands: ~5
Total time left: 4 hours.
If you add in new things that I’ve started such as yard work, my pool of free time rapidly dries up. It’s no wonder I don’t have time to work on other projects such as updating this blog or learning Mandarin. Compare this to list of responsibilities when I originally wrote the Grammar Guide.
Classes + Homework (except for Spring/Winter/Summer breaks) + Eating.
The rest of the week was just drinking and goofing off.
Based on current trends, once I have kids, you can expect to never hear from me again.
Update: Wow, I suck at math.
新しい車を買う時、車に貼ってあるステッカーにその車のパーツが作製された場所がちゃんと書いている。車達を見て、Hondaは、日本の会社だけど、エンジンや色んなパーツがアメリカで作成されているとわかった。でも、私の車は違う。エンジン、トランスミッション、すべてのパーツが日本で作製された。私の車は、三重県鈴鹿市で生まれたらしい。おそらく、「本田研究工業鈴鹿製作所」でしょう。
アメリカでは、運転手が左側に座るから、日本版と逆だけど、それ以外、インテリアは全く一緒。特に、ラジオが同じだと思う。なのに、iPodを繋げて、日本の曲名やアーティスト名を見ようとしたら、「—–」って文字化けする。なんでや！あんた、日本からきたでしょう？！日本が好きでしょう？バックミラーにケロロとギロロが飾ってあるし。あんた、日本で生まれたんだから、日本語頑張って！
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。
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.
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.
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.
It’s election day. If you’re not rich like most of us, you should be voting for Obama. But I’m guessing most US citizens who read this blog will vote for Obama anyhow so I guess I’m preaching to the choir.
Personally, I wish Ron Paul could have been president. Oh well…
Ok, I have to vent a little bit here on something that’s been annoying me lately.
Dear Internet,
Please stop using Snap Shots for your links. When I’m moving my mouse cursor over a link, it’s because I want to actually click on the damn thing. I do not want an annoying pop-up preview box that is completely useless to me and too small to actually see anything. What is the preview box for? So that I can admire the general theme and color scheme of the website?
Also, do you know why the CSS tool tips built in most browsers wait until you hover a bit before showing up? It’s to prevent them from ambushing your cursor when it’s trying to go somewhere else!
Internet, people built pop-up blockers for a very good reason and I don’t think it was so we could descend to the level of mini pop-ups that jump out as you’re trying to move your damn mouse!
Regards,
Tae Kim
I can’t believe anyone would voluntarily install this thing on their site. Is there some kind of ad/affiliate revenue generating scheme in there somewhere I’m not aware of?
I don’t know when this was released (couldn’t find any announcement on the Google Japan Blog) but it looks like Google finally introduced street view for Japan. I suppose it was only a matter of time once they figured out how to censor people’s faces automatically. They covered an amazing range of streets for Osaka and Tokyo and partial areas near there such as Kyoto, Saitama, and Chiba. Smaller areas are also viewable in Sendai, Hakodate, and Sapporo. I can’t even imagine how many hours it took to drive through all those tiny little streets!
Hopefully, with the ability to actually see where you want to go, this will become another tool in our arsenal to navigate the crazy no-name streets of Japan. Although without any street names, it’s almost impossible to even know where to put the little yellow guy. But with a little bit of searching, you can at least use it to show your family where you lived or are living in Japan!
For instance, if you work for Hitachi, you might end up in their 第二志村寮 like I did. And here’s the crappy old building I used to work at before they moved their headquarters to the fancy and new ダイビル in 秋葉原. Before that, I worked briefly at the ironically named 新丸の内ビル near Tokyo station just before it was torn down to be rebuilt. (I wonder if it’s already been rebuilt and reopened?)
If you have never been to Tokyo or Osaka before, the first thing you’ll probably notice is the never-ending spans of concrete with the occasional tree or bush here and there. It gets pretty hot once all that concrete and metal starts baking in the summer. Who says we need nature? Ha!
