Investment

I was browsing Gaijinpot the other day and found plenty of English teaching jobs. Plenty of them. Most of them were asking what JLPT level I was or what English certification I had or what degree I had. Trouble is, I don’t have any of these. And I’m not sure I want them.

The JLPT: I think it might help me get my foot in the door somewhere, but I tend to think that speaking fluently is a more valuable goal. If I aim for fluency and pick up the JLPT1 along the way, that’s icing, but I need to focus on the cake.

I would like to work in Japan, but I think English teaching is the pits. If I were ten years younger and single, it would be the ideal thing, but I have a family to support now, so I need something that will make money. For that I’ll need a real job. For the real job I need fluency.

The college degree would be nice. I’m almost to an associates degree (two years), but it’s tough to invest the classroom and study time when you’re working full time and have a family. Besides, it’s in English, which cuts into my immersion time. Jury’s still out there, obviously.

I think the best investment of my time right now will be towards fluency. If you speak the language, you can talk your way into a job that you might not normally qualify for. If you don’t speak the language…well, you have to beg for whatever you can get. Personally, I’d rather be in the asking category than the begging category.

I think that along with my Japanese RTK deck I will try to add as much vocabulary as I can. Right now I’m struggling primarily because I don’t know enough words. I think if I know what the words mean, I can figure out everything else. I am hearing the grammar patterns and sentence structure, but I need to know what all the words mean. Perhaps getting a JLPT word list would be the right thing. I’ll take a look.

Progress

I was depressed last week because of my lack of progress. Today I realized that I am getting somewhere.

1. I told a joke in Japanese and made a Japanese person laugh.
2. Two people asked me questions in Japanese, and I understood them. To one I had to respond in English, but it’s a start.

Kanji helps. I am still trying to figure out how exactly to approach my JRTK deck. At first it was simply one or two Japanese words in hiragana, and the answer field had the target kanji, the full words in kanji, and pictures corresponding to the Japanese words so I could link a Japanese word to the concept and not a keyword.

Then I added sentences, thinking that it’d be nice if I did two decks at one time. This only lasted about a week, because my progress slowed to an abysmal crawl.

I think I will put the example sentences in the question field with all of the kanji except the one target character, which I will write in hiragana, then put the hiragana and translation in the answer field. This will be a complete bonus. If I can read the whole sentence using only the kanji, it’s cake. If I can’t, no big deal. I don’t fail the card, because I got the kanji right according to the Japanese keyword.

If only the Nintendo DS screen was larger. I think for Christmas I might invest in a Japanese DSi LL. No, it’s not an iPhone or iPod Touch, so no iAnki. But I still have a built-in stylus for writing practice, and you don’t. :)

Weird? Who Cares?

Capture

I took out my Nintendo DS during a quiet moment backstage this morning. Other people were chatting about this, that and the other. I chose to go through my JRTK deck. Did I care? I decided not to.

What would it be like?

What’s this?

Here’s a couple of pictures. Can you guess what they’re for?

chant

oldentimes

Answer tomorrow.

How to Japanize your VLC Media Player Viewing Experience

One of the annoying things about VLC Media Player is that it assumes that you automatically want the default language (English) and if you’re playing an .mkv file, it will automatically turn the subtitles on, whether you like it or not. I am definitely one of the ‘or not’ types, so here’s how to keep the audio Japanese, keep the subtitles off, and keep your mind working hard at the 日本語:

Default to Japanese audio:

1) Go to Tools -> Preferences (or Ctrl-P).
2) Click Audio.
3) Under ‘Preferred audio language’, enter ‘jpn’. (I had ‘jp’ in there at first but that didn’t work.)
4) Save and done.

Turning the subtitles off is a little trickier since there’s no useful options under the Simple settings. I found the solution after a little digging:

1) Go to Tools -> Preferences (or Ctrl-P).
2) Where it says “show settings” at the bottom left, check ALL.
3) Click on the Input/Codecs tab.
4) Where it says “Subtitle Track” (under Audio Track, the 9th box down from the top)…set that number to 99. (This will get rid of .MKV embedded subtitles. Since VLC will be unable to find a track on stream 99, it will be disabled by default.)
5) Click on the Video tab, then drop it down and click Subtitles/OSD.
6) Under Subtitles, uncheck the box ‘Autodetect subtitle files’. (This will prevent external subtitle files like .srt from displaying.)
7) Save and done.

Tried it and it worked like a charm. Now I can watch Ranma get pissed at Genma…

ranma

…in Japanese, the way she should…er, he should…er…whatever. The way things should be.