So, the weather wasn’t really that great today and we slept in kind of late, so we decided to just gorogoro suru (laze around) today and it was great. We went to a cafe, where it was great to have coffee, but it was so smoky! Many cafes and karaoke places and whatnot are very smoky here, because people smoke a lot more than in the US or NZ, but more importantly because they haven’t banned indoor smoking. It’s one of those things where I never realized how nice it was to have smoke-free places until I came to a place where they don’t have them. It’s really annoying, and it gets stuck in your clothes and you smell like an ashtray for days.
We also watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, which I had never seen before, and it was very cute. I love how Jack is all excited about his Christmas plans, and then he fails horribly, and he’s just like “oh well, that was so much fun, and I don’t care that I failed, it was a great experience and now I’m excited to go do things I’m good at!” I hope I can follow his example and have such a positive attitude!
In the evening, we watched this programme called “kasou taishou” while we ate a delicious dinner. It’s a really cool programme they do I think two times a year where amateurs perform skits involving interesting costumes and props. Some of them are really good and really creative. I think the Zumbyes could get a lot of inspiration for our own skits from watching it.
Today I had a strong urge to quantify/analyze data since I’ve come to Japan, like tracking the number of kanji I’ve learnt over time, or my weight, and my spending, and even see if any of them correlate. I actually didn’t have the motivation to do it, but I think I might try once I’m back in Kyoto. It is nearing the point where I get my second lump sum Fellowship payment, so I think it’d be good to take a look at how I’ve been spending my money and think about if and how I should adjust that for the rest of the year.
Just to update, I put on a little weight since I dropped 9kgs (I think I was especially skinny then because I had been sick and didn’t have much appetite), so now I’m back to 74/75kgs – about the weight I was four years ago when I left NZ, 5 kgs lighter than when I came to Japan, but 4kgs heavier than my skinniest point in Japan a month or two ago.
Also, I did finally count the number of kanji I know the other day. I know (or should know with a little revision) 1362 kanji out of the 1945 jouyou kanji (those officially approved by the Ministry of Education as the ones people should know, after which people should put furigana above the kanji to make the reading clear). It took me 1900 words on my own study list to reach this, so given that I started methodically at kanji #342 (after shoring that up with 192 supplementary words), it works out that learning five words on my list on average translates to learning roughly three kanji ((1900-192)/(1362-342)) = 1708/1020 = 1.7 : 1. Based on this figure, I went back and calculated my progress learning kanji since I started my current program with Tawa-sensei 1st semester of my senior year. Here’s the resulting graph:
For some reason it was surprisingly fun to do graphs and numbers again.
Hopefully sometime soon I’ll get the chance to analyze my finances so far.
Anyway, tomorrow we’re actually gonna try to go to Kamakura, so I’m gonna get some sleep. Oyasumi!
January 9, 2008 at 2:54 am
Hi Pat,
I can’t resist the temptation to analyse a graph! It looks to me like you had your biggest jump when you were home with us. Probably you had more time studying then. You were also excited about learning as much as you could before going to Japan, and motivated to study hard. The slopes on the other parts of the graph look about the same to me, so it looks like you’re learning at the same rate now as at Amherst. That’s a pretty good accomplishment considering that you were being graded at Amherst and not now.
But, how do you know when you learned which Kanji? I guess you must be keeping track of the dates? That’s what I call organisation!
Love,
Mum