Remembering

To say my days and nights have been given over to self-improvement and less to entertainments would be an understatement. Though I'd like to watch or read a lot of things, largely it's thrown into a mental pile of something I may or may not touch. If I'm not exercising, I'm likely studying Japanese and attempting to learn around 2,000 characters.

I'm fairly obsessed and often wonder if the exercise and this sudden fascination with Japanese study is a redirection of my sexual energies. Let's face it people, that well's been dry for awhile. Ah, but fear not for me. There are hopeful signs. But that's a post of its own.

For the course of my two and a half years here, my acquisition of Japanese has been fairly piecemeal. At the moment I attribute this to trying to learn primarily through a textbook, which has had varying degrees of success. No, it sucked. Never liked it. Never took to it. After I arrived back in Japan in January, I gave it a final shot and studied from the textbook more heartily. I still found it lacking, so I decided to try something different, and I abandoned the textbooks with blah-blah grammar points. I switched instead to the Heisig method, with the eventual goal (soon to be upon me) of almost complete immersion. It takes a lot of time--imagine learning an alphabet of 2,000 as opposed to 26--and you only learn a core meaning of each character and how to write it. However, I wish I'd known about it when I first came to Japan. It's likely I'd be fluent by now. Losing the weight I have in the last year reveals a certain amount of how things can improve by just sitting down and doing what you need to do everyday. Looking back, I feel little worms of regret about the time I wasted.

The method requires you to make little stories for about 2,000 of the most commonly used characters. Heisig gets you started and then gradually has you constructing your own stories. This can become tiring after awhile, and there've been times I had to reconstruct stories simply because at the time I was feeling uncreative when a stubborn one presented itself. That said, it does have a certain effect on your imagination. It's been knocked up a notch, I'd wager. I often listen to Harry Potter or other audio books when I'm out exercising (I find a narrative more engrossing than music during a workout) and lately they've been more vivid.

The "end" of the character study is in sight, since I have about five hundred more to go, and hopefully I can finish in the next couple weeks. Once that is done with, I can move on to picking apart sentences and see if that aids me any better in learning as opposed to straight textbook learning. I have about three months to see where it gets me. Japan has become a great part of my life, and I want to carry it with me.

Ernie Pyle died on my island, Ie-jima, on April 18th, 1945. This is but a small memorial for him, and there are surely others who can attest better than I his contributions.

But cheers to you, Ernie. You're remembered still.