Improve Your Japanese Reading Skills through Instant Messaging

In my previous post, How Long It Took Me to Learn to Read and Write Japanese, I briefly touched the subject of using online chatting as a means to improve your Japanese literacy skills. Today I would like to expand on that idea.

Instant messaging, or IM in short, is an easy way to get in touch with people from around the world, so why not use it as a supplementary platform in your Japanese studies? You can quickly find people on the interwebs who are looking for buddies to chat with. In instant messaging you exchange typed messages in real time; so whenever someone submits text, it (almost) instantly appears on your screen. IM conversations involve two or more people.

Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Skype are some of the instant messengers that I have used to connect with Japanese people.

You might be thinking, Then why not use Facebook? After all, it's the most popular social network in the world... You're right, it does have a lot of potential, but there are two things that retard the learning process:

1. Friend invites. On Facebook, we must first become "friends" with people that we want to exchange messages with. If we're just looking for people to have casual conversations with, I'm sorry but we don't want to waste time waiting for the other party to accept our friend request. And if the person happens to be a total freakshow, we've just wasted even more time that we could have invested in chatting with people via IM.


2. Latency. While Facebook does have a built-in IM feature, it's not their main focus (I've turned mine off). Facebook is based on micro-blogging—posting updates, in the form of text, pictures, and multimedia, that appear to other friends when they log in. Micro-blogging is real-time messaging, but shooting updates back and forth would be viewed as flooding. Facebook's updates are NOT comparable to instant messages—that's like exchanging voice mails with your friends instead of calling them.

If you find a Japanese-speaking IM buddy, you can instantly start improving your reading skills. It will become a dynamic training ground for you where you can learn to recognize commonly used kanji, compound characters, and all in all condition your brain to work in Japanese mode.

I noticed that when I was learning to read Japanese, it was impossible to read hiragana and katakana at natural speed. Many of us are used to seeing Latin characters everywhere, but the shift from Latin to Japanese is a big step for our brains. We need a lot of repetitive practice to get used to recognize strings of text written in a foreign system. Chatting with people online will provide you with the appropriate conditioning to eventually make your brain conform to Japanese text.

You will need to devote some time to this to get substantial results, but you will quickly start to feel the improvements kicking in.
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The Most Difficult Chopstick Food

What is the reaction of a Japanese person at the sight of pickled plum? His tongue gets stimulated by the thought of this sour delicacy called umeboshi, and starts releasing gallons of spit. This is an effect to which outlanders with no former experience of pickled plum are immune.

My reaction to seeing a bowl of miso soup with cubes of raw tofu is nothing other than panic: I'm sitting in this fancy restaurant with all these erudite intellectuals, and the waiter brings us a mighty block of tofu on a bamboo tray... and all I've got is a pair of enamel chopsticks!

I have been actively using chopsticks for well over ten years now, but not even the wisdom in Sun Tzu's Art of War has been able to enlighten me on how to maintain tofu between these twiggy utensils. My miso soup always ends up looking like a cup of spit in a Middle Eastern den of thieves.

Anyone else with similar experiences?
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My Cat Pees on the Futon

I just finished washing my semi-double futon in the bath tub because it stank of cat urine! The mattress was blotted with two big patches of yellow fluid...

Kai, our younger cat, has been guilty of passing water on various materials such as blankets, backpacks, mats, pillows, and futons ever since she was neutered a year ago.

We have done numerous things to prevent her peeing on our stuff, but she doesn't seem to want to change the stinky habit.

We even took her to a hospital, but they couldn't find anything wrong with her.

The litter box is always clean and odorless, and their dining area is also located far from the toilet.

What is wrong with this little monster?
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How Long It Took Me to Learn to Read and Write Japanese

Photo: Shugatastic

Kids in Japan learn a minimum of 1945 Chinese characters. The characters are learned in two phases: the first 1006 kanji are introduced in elementary school, and the remaining 939 in middle school and high school. The Japanese kanji curriculum, therefore, spans over 12 academic years. Does this mean that foreigners too must devote 12 years to learning Chinese characters to become literate in Japanese?

When, in the fall of 2006, I decided to enroll in the exchange program and go to Japan, I knew that I had less than a year to get ready, so I made a big commitment to learn two to five new characters every day in addition to going over previously learned kanji. At the time I could only ready hiragana, katakana, and about fifty kanji.

So I salvaged an old, tattered kanji book (printed in the 1970s) and started memorizing several Chinese characters every day. I would review the ones I had already mastered before tackling new ones. I decided that I wouldn't press on until I had hardwired all the previous characters into my head. This became a daily routine of mine, and I ended up spending an hour each day on studying kanji. My goal was to achieve a level of proficiency so I could read and write Japanese well enough to join the advanced Japanese class for foreign students. I had less than a year to accomplish the task.

To augment my studies I started to read Japanese blogs and chat with Japanese friends on MSN. Blogs and instant messaging are outstanding supplements to your kanji studies because you keep constantly bumping into the same words and phrases, which lets you get used to recognizing commonly used kanji.

At first you can quickly absorb a lot of kanji, but I noticed that at 500-600 my pace slowed down drastically. Many characters slipped into oblivion, and it became harder to memorize radicals and complex kanji. I could feel the presence of the inevitable wall closing in... At this point (after studying for six months) I chose to shift my focus on revision and to only incorporate new characters whenever my brain would let me.

This sixth month milestone was also the point in time when I could say that I became a lot more comfortable with reading Japanese. I could read most of the content on Japanese blogs, and communicating in Japanese text also felt far less frustrating as I didn't have to consult the dictionary as frequently as before. The 600 characters I learned during the first six months are the ones I find most important. Believe me, things start to make a lot more sense after half a year.
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Butakimudon (Pork Kimchi Domburi)

I'm proud to present my first recipe ever: ぶたきむ丼!

I have a confession to make... Before coming to Japan I wasn't able to cook anything except rice. But after starting to live in a gaijin house, I couldn't keep eating only bento (Japanese boxed lunch), so I had to finally ignite the gas cooker and devise something to nourish myself with.

I experimented a lot with rice and various ingredients, but what I really wanted to do was come up with something quick and easy to make.

A friend of mine told me that buta-kimchi is easy to prepare, so I thought I'd give it a shot. To be honest, I didn't have any idea what it was like so I improvised—I was also too lazy to look it up on the Internet. I coated the frying pan with sesame oil, fried some shreds of pork in it, and emptied a pack of kimchi into it. Finally, I laid the concoction as topping on rice.

Ingredients:

• kimchi (sweet and preferably not too sour)
  
• pork
  
• leek
  
• sesame oil
  
• rice
  
  

Preparation:

1. Cook rice.
   
2. Pour the sesame oil into a frying pan.
   
3. Cut the pork in small shreds, and fry them in the pan.
   
4. Cut the leek in short strips, and put them into the pan along with the kimchi.
   
5. Fry for a minute or two at medium heat.
   
6. Put rice into a bowl and lay the contents of the frying pan on top of the rice. Eat.

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How to Read Japanese Menu Prices

Japan is a country where you'll get stuck sometimes for not being able to make sense of the local orthography. While the more important signs in the bigger cities are presented bilingually, you might have trouble understanding the restaurant menus even in central Tokyo.

Even if you're just a traveler wanting to go for a slurp in the local noodle shop, you might want to learn the Chinese numerals, because (1) they're still widely used in Japan, and (2) most restaurants don't have English menus. Where's Google Translate when we REALLY need it!?

While it is usually safe to order without knowing the contents of a dish, it will become a much greater problem if you fail to heed the price on the dish! So at least learn the numbers!

Here they are:

〇 zero (零 for zero isn't typically used on menus)
一 one
二 two
三 three
四 four
五 five
六 six
七 seven
八 eight
九 nine
十 ten
百 hundred
千 thousand
万 ten-thousand

and 円 denotes yen (¥)

So how do we combine these characters to express larger numbers like 860? It's easy. Numbers in Chinese/Japanese follow a very logical rule. Ten is ten (十), 11 is ten-one (十一), 39 is three-ten-nine (三十九), 512 is five-hundred-ten-two (五百十二), et cetera.

However, Japanese menus will usually display the prices in a simpler fashion.

If a plate of salmon nigirizushi costs ¥120 it will be displayed as 一二〇円 (one-two-zero yen). Familiar? Yup, the number composition is very Western. 一... 二... 〇; 1... 2... 0!

QUIZ TIME! Decipher the following prices:

1. 串カツ　三〇〇円
   
2. 豚骨醤油ラーメン　七八〇円
   
3. てっさ　五九〇〇円
   
4. 唐揚げ　二一〇円
   
5. 生ビール　四〇〇円
   

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3 Bothersome Facts about Japanese Dorms

To supplement my gaijin house post I wrote three weeks ago, I'd like to tell you something about Japanese dorms. I have never stayed in one but some of my friends have, and I heard their horror stories...

1. 11 o'clock curfew. As far as I know, all college dormitories in Japan have curfews. They require the occupants to drag their asses back to their cubicles by 11 p.m. (the exact limit may vary from dorm to dorm). Unless you submit a slip to the owner beforehand stating that you will spend the night out, you will most likely get into trouble for not returning to the dorm. The manager sounds the alarm every night at 11 p.m., and if someone is missing in action, the dorm police will investigate what's going on in the idle room.


2. You have no freedom over when to have breakfast and supper. Even on weekends and national holidays, you must abide by the dorm rules that require you to receive meals at the scheduled times. This means that you have to be ready every morning at 8 a.m., and be back for supper.


3. Now, if you want to be exluded from getting served breakfast or supper, you have to tell the dorm manager in advance. If not, the kitchen staff will get furious and do all sorts of nasty things to your drying underwear...

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