yatta. sort of.

Well, I can let out 1/2 of a sigh. I made it through the initial screening phase, and will be going to San Francisco next week to take a test and get interviewed. They may also pull up my upper lip to see if I have healthy gums. I'm sort of worried about that last one... I think it's too late to start flossing.

But in all seriousness...

There is ALWAYS a "but" with me. This time the "but" is: the interview is scheduled for 2:25 on Friday, just about an hour after my plane to Japan leaves. According to some early calculations that I scratched out just now, that's not gonna work. Indeed, my algorithm suggests that "something has got to give".
Hopefully what "gives" is their side. That doesn't feel likely.

UPDATE: Everything is cool as cucumber. Now it's just a matter of impressing them.

6 months on, the winter's gone... retaking practice tests.

It's been almost six months now since I studied my eyes out, and got a passing score on the jlpt. To be honest, not much has happened in the meantime. Fear of the future has grown heavier and heavier as August nears. I've done a bunch of poorly directed work toward the scholarship. And sadly, I've sort of come to terms with the idea of teaching children for a while longer if need be.

I've also continued to study a whole lot. Which is why I thought it would be a lark to pick up one of the old JLPT practice tests that I took in October, and give it another go. I was expecting it to give me sort of a boost, in showing how much better I am now than I was back then. It didnt really happen that way. I just finished the kanji and vocabulary segment, the hardest part for me. On the real test, I got a 63% on this section. Add to that 6 months of off and on studying, but generally pretty serious attention to kanji and vocabulary and you get 71.1%. I'll solve for X for you... 8.1%.
In the last six months, I've only improved by that slim margin, despite the fact that I wound up improving about 15 percent (of total score) in the 6 WEEKS before the test.

So, I'm not sure what to make of that. I'm thinking about taking the rest of the test, but the grammar part is probably gonna be worse than my test score.

Allow me to bend over backward to justify what happened there (in a way I won't believe myself). No doubt, I've gotten to be a much much better speaker, and my vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds since then. I can understand almost everything that crops up even on the NHK news. I've increased my reading speed and read about 1000 pages worth of book. Anyone who talks or works with me at all, has seen me get a lot better, but this score hasn't really changed. What gives? At that point in time, I was studying for the test. I was studying test words, in a test-oriented way. At that point in time, I couldn't speak for shit, and was glad to work with exactly what the test prep books suggested.
Since then, I've actually learned Japanese. Maybe.

a couple of words.

Its been a long time since I last updated... and I have nothing to say. please enjoy my current itunes shortlist (in alphabetical order):

continuation john vanderslice
Corkscrew King momus
Everlasting Love (someone from the Katamari Damacy 2 sdtk)
Frienger Otsuka Ai
Go Go Gadget Gospel Gnarls Barkley
Hoist That Rag Tom Waits
Kana asa chang and junray
Mushaboom Feist
The Wings (whoever plays the brokeback mountain sountrack)
Vitamin C Can

Urgent update:
Ｐｏｐ’ｎ　Ｘｍａｓ　２００４〜電子ノウタゴエ〜 Strawberry Bariums

cossacks are charging in

the trees have regrouped. run.
Originally uploaded by notnato.

(a scary looking picture I took)

photos.

Wanting to brighten this place up a bit, I decided to put a flickr badge up there. Click on any of those pictures to see it a little bigger at my flickr site. I hope you like it.
Now let me qualify that first sentence. I wound up putting a flickr badge up there. I had sort of an idea what I wanted to have at the top and spent about an hour fiddling around with the code to put it there, only to realize that flickr does something fairly similar and quite simply with their "badges". So I threw out my vision and did what was easier.

(hear the crowd chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!)

what you really want to know.

I've been "running sprints" for a good part of the day today (sprints in the sense of timing my reading speed over a stretch of 2 minutes). The time I'm gauging is probably far far to short to give an accurate picture of how I can read over a 40 minute stretch, and the material will almost certainly be harder and take more consideration than the semi-popular fiction that I've been working on, but I'm proud to have a just put a pretty big milestone behind me.

I read 500 characters in 2 minutes... 250 characters a minute. 1/2 the pace of an average Japanese reader.... for two whole minutes!

If we wanted to be really fair, I've only really been exposed to the Japanese language for about 4 years, so I can only legitimately be compared with a 4 year old japanese child... a child whose ass I would soundly kick.

I'll be finishing the second of the three books of the Wind Up Bird Chronicles in just a few minutes as well, opening the door to the last 509 pages worth of ねじまき鳥goodness. If I can get my average reading pace up to around 300 characters per minute, that's only about 1018 minutes worth of reading time!

(I look forward to a day when I don't have to crunch meaningless numbers to give myself a sense of progress toward an important goal)

platinum cats.

blue, salt-flavored chocolate.

(another shocking fact about aomori, according to that manufacturer's page, it arrived here 2 months later than in kansai and shikoku... curiously it was also released late in kantou (tokyo et al)).

japan sinks again.

So, they've remade 日本沈没, Japan Sinks. It's part of a really big nostalgia kick that the media is on, as all the aging salarymen of Japan's "greatest generation" are leaving the workplace to a new, worthless generation of spoiled brats who haven't know a moment's want since birth...

but I digress.

There's a commercial featuring a clip from the movie, with a reporter explaining that everyone's got to hightail it out of Japan because she is 'a' sink-ing. Cut to two men on the couch watching the report. One turns to the other and say "I wish I'd gone to Nova sooner". Another clip of the movie, and the nova logo play, then an announcer's voice says, "Nova, before japan sinks."

33:43 and law school.

33:43 is the amount of time it took me to read 10 pages worth of Murakami Haruki... or roughly 6000 characters of straightforward, sparsely decorated japanese. 178 characters a minute, if you wanna get exact on it. According to this japanese speed reading website, the average speed is something like 500 characters a minute. If I want to pass the reading comprehension portion of the big test on June 11, I've got to get my pace up to around 400 hundred characters a minute... in the original terms, I need to reduce my 10 page reading time to about 15 minutes. at least down to 20 minutes anyway.

In case you're just tuning in, I like standardized tests, and I like incremental preparations, and concrete goals. I spent most of november posting similar stuff about practice tests for the JLPT.

This test is a bit heavier than the JLPT though. This is the Japanese equivalent of the LSAT, and I'll be taking it alongside all the japanese law school hopefuls. If I nail this one, or even do "pretty good", I think I've got a really strong shot at getting into one of the schools I'm shooting for next April.

The new Japanese "law school" system was put into place in 2004 to combat the present and future shortage of legal professionals in Japan. It's just another part of the permanent revolution that the Koizumi government has instated, and like a lot of other aspects of the broad stroke reform policy, it's modeled on the US (a country with NO shortage of lawyers). Like the US law school systems, students untrained in law are very welcome. Likewise, the admissions system relies heavily on an LSAT clone test, a test not of legal knowledge, but reasoning and academic ability.
That's my in. If I can throw down on this test, like I throw down on others, I can make a big splash in the early phases, and then figure out how to back it up after the fact. I'll have to figure out something to back it up, because there are still interviews and a timed essay test to worry about. Still, the test lets me really put my best foot forward.

I have a lot of thoughts about the current legal reform movement underway right now, but it can all be summed up in one question, to which I already know the answer:

Why the hell would you choose the US for your new legal model?
(a: american laws and the american legal system are held by a certain class of legal scholars to be a big part of the broad economic success of american corporations. [likewise the similar legal system of the uk and it's corporations])

if you're lucky, this phase is mercifully short.

I just wanna say something about this video from the perspective of learning language. If you take the time to watch it, you'll see the Rick character be immensely proud of his limited language ability. He uses one and two word snippets of japanese as though they had opened the gates of this culture wide just for him.
I'm not sure I was ever quite so impressed with myself for such a limited ability, but this phase is sort of the model for what a language learner needs to always run from: premature pride. The truth is that pride in your language ability is almost inevitably premature. You're really no good at a language until you start taking your ability completely for granted.
The video brought back a internal montage of (now) embarrasing moments in the past... like reading a romanized text of the local dialect in front of almost all the city English teachers (not my choosing)... or falling (halfway) victim to a internet scam...

If you're gonna really learn, pride is the first thing that's got to go.

may 2, the last day of this phase...

So, things didn't really go as planned with the application form. I had to revise it a million times, and spent most of the last two days in the office fixing things up, despite being on vacation. This part of the tour really is almost over though. After 3 months of talking about it, the application is ready to fly over the ocean now (or should be within the next 20 minutes). I could only make the complete application when I had built up enough ability and surplus gumption to try and write 2000 characters worth of straight-faced Japanese. No big surprise that it was a real herculean effort, but I am pleasantly surprised to find that the characters really do flow pretty well when I'm writing.

What remains to be seen is how well and how long I can keep up the good work. If the next twelve months are anything like the last, I'll...

*****(stopped writing, picking up 3 days later)****

(ahem) if the next twelve months are anything like the last, I should really get a grip on this language. Though the earliest indicators seem to say that it's not gonna be so simple keeping my resolve.
The good weather yesterday (best so far this year) was irresistable... so was the desire to clean my desk. All of the studying I got done was finished by 10am. Today's a holiday too, Childrens Day to be exact. Maybe it will be a better day for studying.