#hard to put things on repeat when i'm not really relistening to things

[joanofarc]

i have been challenged by @crewneck to put my on repeat playlist on shuffle, give you the ten songs it finds, and tag ten people!! i think i will do that

one. squittest by the farmer's boys. two. down by the racetrack by gbv. three. shake by kasenetz-katz super circus. four. heavy weather by atjazz. five. i got it bad for you by kasenetz-katz super circus. six. saturday mansions by doleful lions. seven. n.y. woman by kasenetz-katz super circus. eight. watching you go by helvetia. nine. i think i need help by the farmer's boys. ten. 8 a.m. all day by chisel.

ok i assign @apexpoet @irisveil @kodachromism @schalotte @inima @chalet2000 @pitchthebabie @mme-patate @edgewatch @velvetun and literally anyone who sees this here post

[vidavalor]

Hi long time reader!

Sooooo I have a query. Here’s a piece of chocolate pie with meringue to help get through the back story.

I was watching season 1 again as I do weekly, but this time on my phone. I was on episode one right when Crowley delivers Adam to Tadfield Manor. Usually at this point when Crowley exits the car I’m usually watch the charming snake walk, this time I couldn’t see him as my picture was poor on my phone, but I was able to listen to Background noises.

Have you noticed that Crowley was listening to Save Me by Queen as he pulled up to Tadfield Manor? I find it fascinating considering what he just went through, and what he’s about to do.

Hi there! Mmmchocolatepie. I never mind backstory. 😊 Thanks for the ask and the dessert. 💕 I pulled up that scene and relistened because it's hard to hear since the sound is mixed low because of The Voice of God speaking at the same time. I can see why you'd hear "Save Me" as it sounds a bit like this part of this song but it's actually "It's a Hard Life", which also repeats a few minutes later when we come back to Crowley driving away from Tadfield. Both songs are very appropriate for this night, though. "Save Me" could have easily been played during the rest of the ride back.

Some thoughts on the significance of the choice of "It's a Hard Life" and very Aziraphale-ish aria that inspired it.

TW: Satan's attacks on Crowley.

"It's a Hard Life" by Queen is nearly over when Crowley pulls up to Tadfield Manor to deliver Lovely Little Tosie-Wozies to the satanic nuns. If you really crank it, you can hear this bit of the song:

"Yes, it's a hard life In a world that's filled with sorrow There are people searching for love in every way"

Arthur then tells Crowley that he left his lights on and Crowley flicks the power off of the car, shutting off the music and the lights, right at what would have been the "it's a long, hard fight" lyrics.

The song is about 90% over at this point. When we come back to Crowley driving away from Tadfield on the other side of the whole baby swap sequence, though, the beginning of "It's a Hard Life" is now playing.

We hear the lyrics more clearly now around Crowley's dialogue, when he tells his phone to call Aziraphale and then realizes all the mobile lines are busy because he brought them down earlier in the evening. As others have pointed out, the "you win/you lose/it's a chance you have to take with love" bit is playing when we come into the scene and when the phone is calling Aziraphale, the lyrics "oh yeah/I fell in love" are heard. (The very appropriate "And now you say it's over/And I'm falling apart" is then what is playing when Crowley can't get through to talk to Aziraphale.)

The song starting over in the next scene implies that Crowley is playing "It's a Hard Life" on repeat in the car during the drive back from Tadfield. It's actually the second song in the evening to play this way-- the first being "Bohemian Rhapsody." When Crowley rolled up to the graveyard, the song was in one spot before Crowley cuts the engine but when Crowley is attacked by Satan later on, he's played the song again since on the drive, as we are now at the "I see a little silhouetto of a man" part. Like we looked at in another meta, "Bohemian Rhapsody" winds up scoring the assault. The same song that's a genuinely hilarious choice for when Crowley rolls up to Hastur and Ligur takes on a nightmarish tone the second time we hear it.

After that? You wouldn't blame Crowley for putting on literally any other band on the planet for the rest of the drive, right? But he doesn't. He changes the song but not the band and the song he switches it to is "It's a Hard Life." And that's a good thing to not let Queen be taken from him but the song he chooses is kind of brutal in its own right, especially with regards to its origins. It ties to what I believe you are alluding in your Ask in a similar way to "Save Me."

The intro to "It's a Hard Life" is inspired by "Vesti la giubba", the aria that closes the first act of the opera, 'Pagliacci'. During this aria, the main character-- who, like a certain angel we know, performs on stage as an entertainer-- has to go on stage just after discovering that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Just to be really clear here: rape is not infidelity and I'm not saying it is. I'm also not saying that Aziraphale would ever see it that way, either, but I think Crowley might.

People who have a partner and are assaulted by someone who isn't that partner sometimes have, in the understandable mess of their emotions over it, the feeling that they've betrayed their partner. Crowley has a whole mess of feelings over his fall still and Satan's harm of him is obviously related to his fall. These conflicts over his fall are in large part because he seems to believe in an interpretation of the "there and all the kingdoms thereof" idea of God that he references in the St. James' Park scene later in the same episode. That is a paraphrased quote from David in The Bible and refers to the idea that God is in everything.

The idea is that since God is God, She could intervene and right any injustice that She sees fit to right; so, if there is no intervention, then the interpretation must be that God must see what has happened as fitting. I think this is at the root of Crowley still believing that maybe he's not the most evil being who ever existed but that he did deserve to fall-- something that, ironically, Aziraphale often seems more inclined to disagree with. Aziraphale's conflict over viewing God in this way-- which he kind of does or at least thinks he ought to-- is that he genuinely doesn't believe that God is infallible. Aziraphale believes in Her less than Crowley does, even if Crowley's the one who fell. He's angry with her over what She's let happen to Crowley (and to countless others, in different ways) and he's confused and troubled by why She still sees him as an angel when he's arguably gone against her more than Crowley ever did.

In reality, God in GO in S1 is heavily suggesting that She views the universe as the dominion of Her creations-- it's their world. If She were to intervene, She'd be undermining their free will. God doesn't seek to oppress them and She doesn't demand their subservience-- She roots for their freedom and happiness. Falling is political. Crowley and Aziraphale get that on some level but they still think that God has a hand in it. She does not. She's not really behind The Metatron. If She were, it would go against Her own ideas of her creations being autonomous individuals who can make their own choices and seek their own happiness.

Crowley actually has it totally right here:

But he tends to think (and there likely is) a little element of determinism mixed in with that free will, as he's a romantic. We see at other times that he has believes God made he and Aziraphale for each other.

As a less-operatic-but-Good-Omens-related song puts it: "but somewhere in my wicked, miserable past/I must have done something good", right?

"Vesti la giubba", though, is a whole song about the pain living beneath a happy exterior-- the tears beneath the smile of the entertainer and the pain behind a "the show must go on" sort of attitude. It's very Aziraphale. The story makes it clear that Aziraphale is aware of what being a demon involves for Crowley and while Aziraphale has a steely strength to him that a lot of people don't see (but that Crowley does), he's also, as we know, tender-hearted. All of this has been crushing him for more years than either of them can count.

Aziraphale puts on a brave face and makes and acts as a safe haven but imagine how powerless all of this would make him feel...

I see evidence that Aziraphale didn't totally believe "The Metatron" in 2.06 (or was fully convinced that it actually was The Metatron) but part of him wants it to be true because he thinks it would solve problems he feels helpless to solve. I see a lot of people say it's because he needs Crowley to be an angel-- it's not. Aziraphale already thinks Crowley is an angel, more than he himself is. It's because they promised him the power to make sure that Crowley would be safe forever and even though it's not the life either of them want, it tempts Aziraphale because he feels like he has never been able to fully give Crowley that himself.

With "It's a Hard Life" on repeat, they have Crowley driving around in the middle of the night in 2008 listening to a song inspired by Aziraphale: The Aria that's about a loving relationship running out of time, all after having to meet Hell in a graveyard (worse after S2 when you factor in 1827) and after being hand-picked to start the end of the world by his rapist, who assaults him while he's driving, nearly causes him to kill a human in an oncoming truck-- and all while he was supposed to be having dinner and a night ironically inspired by Rome with Aziraphale.

"It's a Hard Life" is also so Crowley, too, though... the droll-in-the-face-of-misery "this is a tricky situation" at the start, the romantic and determined "I'll say I did it for love" at the end...

...but also the "and I've only myself to blame."

It all really adds weight, though, to how, eleven years later, it's only at Tadfield Manor and on the dark road around Tadfield at night in The Bentley-- this time with Aziraphale-- that Crowley's emotions spill over as he's thinking of 2008 and Aziraphale is hit by waves of love.

"It's a long hard fight/To learn to care for each other/To trust in one another right from the start/When you're in love..."

[shine-reblogs]

He compartido 4086 publicaciones este 2022

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He etiquetado 1008 publicaciones en 2022

#tma: 216 publicaciones

#the magnus archives: 38 publicaciones

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Longest Tag: 139 characters

#but people always assume i'm spanish because i was born in spain and live in spain and always have and spanish is the language i always use

Mis publicaciones más populares este 2022:

5

Yoo! I've been tagged by @randomfae (except tumblr is broken and it didn't really tag me/I didn't get a notif, so we all lucky I saw it xD) to post the top 4 songs I've been listening to recently, so let's a gooo!

I should note that I usually listen to music while drawing and play whole albums, so this list is not gonna be super accurate in order to not make it 4 songs from the same album xD

The Breach, by Starset- (from their last album, Horizons, which I've been listening to obsessively for the last several weeks. I don't know what is it about this song but I really love it and makes me want to siiiing! A song I actually put on listen-on-repeat, which I rarely use)

Boundary (VY1V4), by Youtube user Heartbreaker- (I recently rescued this one from my Vocaloid obsession period, which was, pffft, like 6-7 years ago? I didn't remember the title or artist so it was really hard to find again. It just has like, a lot of emotion to it? A song that doesn't bring me down when in a good mood but that resonates with me when in a bad mood. Nevermind the lyrics because I)

DLH Afrodita, by Pascu y Rodri- (look, this song is very catchy, very fun, and about greek mythology, so what else could I ask for? xD Oh, yeah! It's also in my first language so that means I can actually catch onto the lyrics easily! :D)

And I'm gonna leave it at three songs because otherwise it's just the rest of Starset's Horizons album, lol! I tag @ineverpostmydoodles and anyone else who wants to join! ^^

1 nota. Fecha de publicación: 17 de febrero de 2022

4

This must be the messiest drawing of jon ever known, but I saw this post and I needed to doodle it real quick xD

4 notas. Fecha de publicación: 30 de septiembre de 2022

3

So, I'm relistening to TMA (for the first time, so there's a lot of things that I didn't remember) and just- just- MAG83:

ARCHIVIST Look, Georgie, it’s not… You don’t need to worry. I mean, I’m not, I’m not on drugs or anything. [GEORGIE LAUGHS DISBELIEVINGLY] What? … I could be on drugs!

Jon is so dumb, I swear, bless him xD ❤

11 notas. Fecha de publicación: 1 de noviembre de 2022

2

I don't know if anybody else has made an OT3 version of the 'understand my ship in 5 minutes' before, but anyway, here's my edit of it in case someone wants to use it

Original template by: gibslythe

Edited for OT3 by me (aka Shine-Reblogs)

97 notas. Fecha de publicación: 1 de junio de 2022

Mi publicación más popular de 2022

I'm relistening to S3 of TMA and needed to do this, it's probably been done before, but I don't care xD

158 notas. Fecha de publicación: 8 de diciembre de 2022

Descubre tu resumen del 2022 en Tumblr →

[ohsweetflips]

Is it dumb that I keep putting off finishing Taz balance? I love it so much but I've never got past the end of petals to the metal because I get scared I'm not appreciating it enough or that I'm not ready for the really emotional stuff coming up so I relisten to everything up until then and the cycle repeats. You only get to hear it for the first time once y'know? And I want to finish it, but I don't want it to be finished and I feel like I'm overthinking it but I can't help it. Any thoughts?

oh anon, i understand you completely

first, let me tell you that one of my best friends started listening to taz over the summer, like, back in august, maaaaybe the end of july. after hearing him talk abt it, he was part of the reason i started listening to it in november. when im abt to start the finale abt two weeks later, i text him and find out that he’s relistened to the show three times and still hadn’t gotten through the finale bc he didn’t want it to end, and finally listened to it only bc i was, too. so, trust me, you’re not alone in not wanting it to end!!!

i was the same way too, tbh. by the time i got the “crystal kingdom” and heard griffin actually say, “oh yeah, we’re halfway done,” i was actually really sad about that, you know? which was weird, bc never have i actually been sad knowing that something’s gonna come to an end? like, yeah, finales or final books or whatever tend to get me emotional, but i tend to not think abt it? so taz was different in that, too, and i understand not wanting it to end. like, hell, im mad excited to listen to amnesty, but i had to listen to taz balance again bc i wasn’t ready for it to be over

and with the not appreciating it thing, i also completely get that. going into listening to taz, i knew that some pretty big and emotional things were gonna happen, so i’d be listening to, like, “murder on the rockport limited” and be thinking in the back of my head, “but, wait, what if i’m not appreciating this obscure dialogue exchange enough and and and-” and, honestly, not only did it make it hard to focus, but it, ironically, made it hard to appreciate it??? like, let me tell you that, as you progress further in the story, you’re just gonna Start appreciating it. not saying that you aren’t now!!! but that “appreciating” when you sit back in your chair and just go “holy shit” while listening to it.

like, don’t get me wrong, i loved listening to taz balance the entire time!! i thought “here there be gerblins” and “murder on the rockport limited” were hysterical (and cried laughing many times) and i really liked the racing aspect of “petals to the metal” and spent a lot of it on the edge of my seat, but, honestly, it wasn’t until the end of “petals to the metal” that i was invested bc, w/ that ending, i finally had that “holy shit” moment

like, trust me, i get what you’re saying bc i was the same way. i was nervous that i wasn’t appreciating it enough bc i heard everyone talking abt how moving the story was and how emotional it made them and i was like, “what if this random moment in “rockport limited” is one of those moments???” but like, just let the podcast happen!! like, w/out spoilers, there’s this Thing that happens in the last lunar interlude that, in my opinion, is one of the most shocking “holy shit” moments of the entire story. like, when i first heard it, i was on a bus going home from a swim meet and i had to cover my mouth to stop from losing my shit in front of my team mates omg. so, like, obvi it was a moment i wouldn’t forget. so, two or three days ago, i’m relistening to that same episode while im driving around the beach and i Know it’s happening and i Know it’s coming and, when it happened, i still freaked out and shouted abt it (alone in my car lmao) and hit my steering wheel a couple times bc of how much i fucking love that moment

so, like, trust me, where you’re at, you’re good to continue on bc you’re naturally gonna start getting so much more invested than you already are (please don’t think im “bashing” the first couple arcs, i think the entire show is amazing) and it’s gonna get very emotionally-inducing and, like, my advice is to finish it bc Holy Shit like not many stories have hit me like taz has........ like ngl, it’s on the same level as the song of achilles for me (which, idk if you know me, but that’s a pretty big deal) and like, for once, i don’t think this is just my “this is my current obsession so of course i think it’s amazing” thing, taz balance is an Actually Amazing And Breathtaking Story

also yeah the emotions get Heavy at the end. im a very emotional person in general but i don’t think i necessarily cry easily, or at least it takes a lot for a piece of media to make me cry (like, A Lot), and i cried throughout the final 20 minutes of the taz balance finale and then another 15 minutes afterwards and that was only bc i actively worked to calm myself down lmao

oh my god this got so long im so sorry, i just talk A Lot

basically, moral of my ted talk: i get what you’re saying, you’re gonna naturally start getting more and more invested and “appreciating” it more, and the emotions get heavy, but it’s so fucking good and beautiful and i 10/10 recommend finishing it

[shysweetthing]

Hi I really loved your YOI fic "Call Everything on the Ice"! I was also just wondering, though, how long have you been studying Japanese? Could you give some advice or resources how you're learning? I'm planning on going to Japan for my Asian Studies degree and hope to learn Japanese (or at least get a head start) before taking that leap. Hope this isn't a bother!!! Thank you if you have the time to answer!!!

Okay, so perhaps people have noticed that I tend to overanswer things? Yes, yes, that happens.

Me: Maybe only explain this a little bit.Me to me: Who are we kidding? Have five, count ‘em, five separate numbered lists.

Answer to question #1: I’m at about *glances at watch* four and a half months of studying Japanese, and while I’ve been spending about 3-4 hours a day on this, I’m still really new. This means that I am inevitably doing something inefficiently and so you should take everything I say with a grain of salt. I haven’t been doing this very long and other people are much better resources!

That being said, my tendency to overexplain, my general pedantry (own it if you are it, whatever), and my deeply weird overanalytical brain means that maybe something I’ve done in breaking down my experience thus far will be helpful to you.

All five numbered lists below the cut.

Further disclaimers: I know how I learn and what I’m good at, and this means that I am really really good at telling when a course of study is Not Working For Me. This is because I am Relatively Tumblr Old and have learned a variety of relatively complicated things with a high degree of success in my lifetime.

It is very unlikely that your brain works like mine, and so to further qualify this, I’m going to tell you how my brain works.

1. For me, the death of learning is boredom. I cannot, repeat, cannot, do boring things for much longer than about five minutes. You could offer me a half-million dollars a year to do a job that has twenty hours of boring work a week and I would quit in desperation after two weeks. Or, more likely, I’d take the job and stay up nights for months on end automating it and then you’d fire me when you realized that I was now doing nothing at work except reading AO3 articles. This means that time-efficient but boring study methods are completely inaccessible to me. I don’t care how effective it is. If it bores me, it is not getting done.

2. I have an incredibly good recall for sounds, and a basic amount of musical training. One of the ways I used to commit things like relative electronegativity to memory was to make a song, because I could remember the most ridiculously long strings of information that way. Ditto for memorizing monologues in school. (This is relevant).

3. I have an absolutely excellent memory for other things, too, when I’m paying attention. If I’m not paying attention, I will remember nothing. (Yes, I’m on the ADHD spectrum–I hyperfocus like nobody’s business, and if I’m not hyperfocused you might as well fuck off because I’m not paying a lick of attention.) I am much more likely to trigger my hyperfocus with physical activity–either walking or writing things down.

4. I am very goal focused. Give me just about any concrete goal and I will make a spreadsheet detailing how to get from point A to point B with every intermediate step in the way, which I will adjust on a biweekly basis to correspond to my progress and what I learn. My goal in this case was to be able to understand spoken Japanese well enough to get the gist of the raw Yuri on Ice feeds so that I didn’t have to wait 3+ hours for the Crunchyroll translations by the time Season 2 came around.

5. I am the person who will spend 40 hours fixing a persistent problem that takes me one minute of boring work every month. I am so damned impatient that I’ll spend three hours a day every day for two years so that I don’t have to wait three hours. Let’s hear it for the few, the proud, the delightedly inefficient.

6. Along the lines of hating boredom: I absolutely love figuring out how things work, and so I tend to jump onto solutions that prioritize understanding how a system works first and then moving from there to increasing fluency. I will happily spend 10 hours figuring out how something works even if it only saves me an hour of time. You’ll see what I mean a little later.

7. Also along the lines of having ADHD: I need to feel that I am accomplishing things along the way, which means that if I’m taking on a two-year project, I need to be able to point to things that I am accomplishing along the way, or I will get frustrated and give up. In this regard, I am like a small child. If I can’t pinpoint an immediate benefit to something, I get frustrated and give up. From experience, I have gotten very good at pinpointing accomplishments so that I am constantly affixing little medals to my own chest, but it also means that I “waste” (in some senses of the word) time doing things that probably are more about keeping my mental state chugging along.

8. This bears mentioning, but one thing about my being old and being good at fixing persistent problems? I have disposable income, and only about half of it goes toward purchasing Victor nendoroids. Some of the resources I list here cost money. I am naturally cheap–I don’t like spending money if I don’t have to–but I have learned to be cheap with my time, and to value people who provide useful or lovely things.

9. I am deeply introspective. If something is worth analyzing in my mind, it’s worth overanalyzing to death.

Okay, enough about me! Here are my thoughts on what I have done so far to learn Japanese, which I’m going to divide into sections.

Listening to Japanese (with some speaking)

I’m not going to have the temerity to explain spoken Japanese at this point, so google elsewhere. Here are useful resources:

1. JapanesePod101.com: https://www.japanesepod101.com I started a one-week free subscription to this site at the beginning of the year when I knew basically nothing, and then they had a huge membership sale at the beginning of the new year which I glommed onto immediately. I listen to about 4-6 podcasts a day–when I’m driving, when I’m out for a walk, when I’m shopping. I shadow the Japanese parts (this is what shadowing is: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing). I listen. There are criticisms you could make of this podcast, but it’s rarely boring, the people on it are likable, and the lessons once Naomi-sensei gets on board are fantastic.

2. Crunchyroll. This is one of those “need accomplishment” things that I use regularly. Some people advocate putting anime on as background and letting your brain cogitate; my brain is EXTREMELY good at not paying attention to things and so I don’t think this would be effective for me. I watch anime. I’ve gone from maybe sometimes hearing a name, to understanding set phrases like Victor saying “Ohayou!” or Yuuri saying “Tadaima” to (at this point) being able to understand the simple sentences, and pick words out of the complex ones. I pause a lot, for instance, when I understand all the words in a sentence but one. I try to sound the word I think I heard out in a Japanese-to-English dictionary (tangorin.com is free, I think?), and if that doesn’t work, in google translate (sometimes it’s two words, and that makes it hard to look up).

3. I try to watch ice skating videos in Japanese. There are some that have subtitles in Japanese and English, too, which is cool.

Independent skills that I have had to actively force myself to learn in order to listen to Japanese properly (still working through this list):

1. Timing things. English (or any of the other languages I’ve studied) isn’t overly concerned with syllable length or breaks between syllables. That makes it hard to distinguish between a two-mora vowel and a one-mora vowel, or to make your mind pay attention to the small-tsu break. You have to really work to pay attention to train your mind that this is important and it needs to stop filtering those things out. It took me probably two months to retrain my mental filters, which I mostly did by banging my head against trying to figure out what words I heard, trying different combinations, and then going back to the word I heard and relistening to it once i figured out what it was, until I was hearing the thing I wasn’t hearing.

2. Vowels. In English, we can mess around with vowels a LOT and it works just fine as long as the consonants are vaguely in the right place. That’s why people can write sentences with misplaced/swapped out vowels and your mind will basically make sense of it anyway–because we use consonants a lot to tag words. This means that a brain fed a diet of mostly English squishes a lot of vowels together into one mushy sounding sound. It’s why some people hear “Hai” as “Hi” and not as a two-mora, two vowel sound. There’s a point at the end of episode 4 where Yuuri says something like “Victor and my season is finally beginning,” and I understood all the words except 'finally,’ so I tried to sound out the word I heard that was probably 'finally’ as an exercise. I tried EVERY FREAKING COMBINATION of “よよ” and “ようよ” and “ようよう” and finally realized that I just wasn’t hearing the two-vowel combination properly: “いよいよ.” Again, the way I dealt with this except to repeatedly force myself to do exercises like this again and again while listening, sounding out what I heard and then listening to it again and again when I was wrong until I could hear the thing I missed.

3. Pitch accent. In English, pitch plays a role in intonation, and there are accepted pitches, but there’s a lot more pitch variation, and we mostly use stress to indicate meaning. In Japanese, pitch is far more important, with relative pitch between words being important, and increasing differences in pitch indicating increasing importance. It took me about a month into trying to learn Japanese to hear the words “pitch accent” and then another month to start really paying attention to words to try and determine the pitch accent, and then only very recently, discovering resources that break down what pitch accent is and what the rules are to it (OMG I didn’t know there were rules, I love rules!) in a way that made me say, yes, this is amazing. You want to visit Dogen’s site for this: https://www.patreon.com/dogen/posts – I found his videos accidentally, but they’re amazing. The first handful are free; the next handful, you need to pledge to his Patreon. Some of the things he says are difficult for English speakers to learn are not difficult for me–I suspect because I have basic musical training, and it turns out that those lessons where I learned to identify intervals taught me to hear pitch changes.

4. Language parsing. The thing I’m working on now is a straight-up language parsing issue. English functions much like a stack: Words go on the stack in the right order, and your brain assigns function and meaning on the basis of where in the stack they land, and improper stacking leads to breakdown. Stack issues in English are why it’s completely fine to say “friendly little brown fluffy Japanese dog” but “Japanese friendly fluffy brown little dog” is just wrong. English is, to use a metaphor that will be almost completely inaccessible to the current generation, rather like the BASIC I used on the Commodore 64–executed in mostly linear fashion with a handful of awkward and inelegant GOTOs that I only learned to cringe at when I took a computer science course many years later. Japanese also has a little bit of a stack issue, but a stack-parsing order is inappropriate. In a sense, it feels closer to a language in which particles function as meta-tags. It feels…more appropriate, I guess? to parse from particle to particle and from conjugation to conjugation. Japanese is closer to Java in many, many ways. I figured out that I needed to parse differently about a month ago, and have been slowly working on upgrading my internal interpreter.

5. Next stages: A lot of Japanese is indirect, and so absorbing indirect equivalents (or where there is none, getting the gist) is probably going to be a lifelong process.

Speaking

1. Some people like talking to other people. I hate it with a burning passion. I prefer people who use pixels. I did try a Japanese Skype conversation partner through italki.com. It was very, very useful. I learned a lot. I hated it so much that I have myself permission to not do it for another few months. (I do use italki to practice the other language I know–where I’m fluent enough that I can have an actual conversation about, like, the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order on immigration, for instance, instead of the name of someone’s rabbit. I don’t particularly hate that.)

2. I talk to myself, out loud, a lot in Japanese, even if I only say very stupid things. I try to express things I don’t know how to say.

3. I give my cat orders in Japanese. He listens to me in Japanese as often as he does in English, so this is a huge success.

4. I am not great at speaking, partially because my goal is not to be able to speak to people.

Reading and Writing

1. You’re gonna have to memorize the Kana. Just do it. I did it, and I hate boring things.

2. I spent some time looking at various speed-Kanji-learning methods, like Remembering the Kana, WaniKani, and Kanji Damage. The most useful thing I got was this description of Kanji from KanjiDamage http://www.kanjidamage.com/introduction and the description of Kanji as an orthography: http://www.kanjidamage.com/kanji_facts. This made me think of Kanji as words composed of radicals laid out on a two-dimensional canvas, as compared to English, where words are are composed of the letters of the alphabet on a one-dimensional canvas. Once I saw that, then you see that some connections and combinations are meaningful in the same way that evocative, advocacy, and vocal are related. Some connections are totally illusory and trying to find meaning or explanation for it is a fool’s game. Having understood that, I tried the basic method behind these and found that it did not work at all for me because it was boring as all get out, and I didn’t feel like I was learning anything (even though I was).

3. My current method is absolutely not the most efficient but I am making headway with it. It goes like this: find really easy reading materials, and learn the words that are in it. It took me about a month before I could read even the most basic of texts. (I started with the graded Japanese readers, level 0). Is this method of learning words scattershot as fuck? YES. ABSOLUTELY. But I feel like I’m accomplishing things because I am reading books, and I am willing to accept substantial amounts of inefficiency if it results in continued motivation.

4. At some point–my guess is somewhere around the one year mark–I’m going to have to transition to something a little more systematic. My hope is that once I reach that point I will have encountered those kanji enough that I will feel like I’m forming connections, not just learning disparate disconnected material, and I will not be bored.

5. Along those lines, Anki is my everything. I do about 20 cards a day, which means I’m learning around 70 words a week. Some of these words are great, like 難しい or 簡単. Some of those words are skating related, like 4回転トエループ. Some of those words are just really random things that showed up in the graded reader and I learned it because I’m stubborn, like 苦汁 (“bittern,” or a concentrated solution of magnesium chloride) or 納豆菌 (bacillus subtilis natto, the bacteria used to ferment soybeans into natto).

6. My Anki vocabulary cards have the English word on the front. On the back, I have the word in either hiragana or katakana, color-coded according to pitch accent, a recording of the word in Japanese, the kanji for the word, and sometimes the stroke order for the kanji. Yes, I write down the kanji–my memory is triggered by using muscles, including a pencil, and so this works for me.

7. This is what one of my Anki cards looks like, minus the spoken recording + stroke order. Blue is low pitch, red is high pitch, and the color of the heart at the end indicates the pitch of the particle at the end. It would be way more efficient to import other people’s Anki decks but I am (in addition to all the stuff mentioned above) deeply demand resistant and I only want to learn things that I have decided I should learn, with the precise information I want, no more, no less. I end up resenting other people’s flashcards so much that I’m stuck wasting time doing my own.

8. I’m also using a textbook (みんなの日本語). My textbook work lags substantially behind my comprehension, as driven by JapanesePod101, mostly because it’s boring until I understand it well enough to not have to stop and check every damned thing all the time. It is good to do exercises, though, and then to use the exercises as templates for saying and writing my own sentences which are of far greater interest.

Um, I think that’s everything I have for now?

Welcome to my brain.