| Nihon-ni ikimasu! |
[Jul. 22nd, 2006|04:25 pm]
Scott
|
I went to Japan yesterday. It looked a lot like the United States, but that's probably to be expected since it was just the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. Hey, it's technically Japanese territory! Isn't it? Or is that just embassies? Whatever.
My parents were totally right that driving in Los Angeles might well have killed me. Not because I'm a bad driver; just because the streets of Los Angeles are full of death-traps. I can't imagine how any LA residents survive more than three or four weeks; maybe they don't, and are replaced by Mexican immigrants who take their identities. That would be a very Californian way of handling the problem.
My experience at the consulate itself went pretty well. I needed to hand them some documents to get a visa. I basically just rang the little bell, a guy showed up immediately, I handed him my documents, and he smiled and said "Thank you, we'll have your visa in the mail within two business days". Considering what I had to go through to get my Irish garda card, that's amazing. If the whole country runs this efficiently, I'm going have an awesome year.
It's all starting to come together. I bought my ticket to Osaka yesterday too - it set me back six hundred dollars, but hopefully I'll make the money back pretty quickly once I'm there. I'm going to be flying into that nifty airport on the poorly-built artificial island, so that will be an experience. I just hope it doesn't choose August 24th to sink back into the sea.
I have a new hero: James Heisig, professor of religion and author of "Remembering the Kanji". Kanji are the Chinese-style characters that make up most Japanese words. Even though I'm learning the spoken language, I've got to get the Kanji down completely separately, and so on a recommendation from a website on StumbleUpon, I tried Heisig's book. Apparently his tactics involve weirding you out enough that it just sticks in your brain.
The idea of the book is that you take a Japanese character, look at it, make out a couple of recognizable shapes, and make up a story for why those shapes would be there. The sections all say stuff like "This character, meaning 'revenge', resembles like a shellfish wearing a top hat standing on a table brandishing a spear. Remember this character by telling yourself that the shellfish, who is wearing the top hat because he is a fan of Abraham Lincoln, is thrusting the spear into the table to get revenge for the time it killed his grandmother." This sounds like it would never work, but, surprisingly, it works better than any other method of learning anything I have ever encountered. I'm getting through up to forty kanji a day with good long-term retention.
The book's also great just because of its erudition and its randomness. At one point, Heisig gives a character meaning "ten-day period" and tells us to remember it because it looks like a certain scene from Boccaccio's Decameron, whose title of course means "ten-day period" in Greek. I think I can honestly say that we need more Japanese courses that refer to works of medieval Italian literature with Greek titles. The randomness mostly comes in with his choice of which characters to learn in what order. Last night I learned the characters for "mother" and "child", which make sense, and then the next two characters were "eventide" and "nitrate". Which will be useful indeed, just in case I need to communicate with any Japanese elvish chemists.
The heat index in Irvine reached 110 degrees today. AYEEE! |
|
confused