Yamagata City

I just came back from Yamagata City and bought a pair of new silver striped white Nikes. It's nice to have a new pair of shoes after wearing my ratty old K-Swisses for several years. I even got ￥300 for recycling the old ones. That almost paid for the hourly parking in the Nanokamachi Shopping District. I also went to the main store of Hachimonjiya, a popular book store in Yamagata Pref. There I got a copy of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test application. I'm planning on taking Level 2 this year. The levels rank from 1 thru 5, 1 being the hardest. Last year I failed 2 by about 20 pts, (you need like a 66% to pass) so I'm hoping my studying will pay off this year. I have been studying from my pink 1・2 level grammar and vocab book every day I am at the office. I've also been studying kanji (Chinese characters) from James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji and I'm hoping to finish the book (which covers the writings and readings of a little over 2000 kanji) by the end of the Fall. Though the book doesn't tell you how to pronounce the Chinese and Japanese readings of the characters, once you have the shapes down it's easy to add the sounds to it. Then the next step is to learn the vocab and remember which kanji goes in which word (and which part of the word if it's a compound). Needless to say, Japanese is not an easy language to read and write in. In some ways it might be harder to read in Japanese than Chinese as well because even though Chinese uses more characters for mundane writings, the readings are more standardized from what I've heard. The worst thing about kanji is trying to read names, I am so terrible at it. Because Japanese names were assigned characters somewhat arbitrarily there is almost no method to the madness. Because of this the character for one (一) has over two pages of readings. It can be read ichi, kazu, hito, i, etc. Place names are also a bitch too. There's been more than one time that I knew the characters for a place I wanted to go to but couldn
t remember the exact pronunciation so I couldn't look it up on my car GPS. The book store hachimonjiya for example, I thought was hachimojiya since it has the characters 八(eight)文(sentence)字(character)屋(vedor/store). But 文字 together is commonly read as "moji" and means character or symbol. So the whole "n" thrown in there through me off and it took a couple tries before I could find a route to it. There's been times I miss pronounced teacher's names because of arbitrary kanji readings. I read one teacher's name (白石）as Shiroishi when it was Shiraishi. Then thinking, "Oh well maybe as that compound it's always read that way" I stumbled across a sign driving on the highway for a place called 白石 (Shiroishi). Give me a break.

Anyways, as much as I complain about the characters, I feel they really make Japanese a beautiful language. Sometimes writing can feel like drawing a piece of art and I love that feeling. I don't think I ever enjoy writing as much as handwriting something in Japanese.

So though I'm taking level 2 this fall, I am going to start studying for level 1 as soon as I finish my pink book (which I am finishing quickly). Hopefully it will help me get a better score on level 2 and prepare me for taking level 1 next fall (if I pass 2 this year). To prepare for level 1 I bought out the whole series of textbooks for level 1 published by Unicom. I hope I can finish them all before next fall, but I don't see why that would be a problem. In the meantime, I'm trying to watch as much Japanese TV and everyday and read as many Japanese newspaper articles as possible. I am also reading a Japanese novel called 少年H or Shonen H ("The Boy Named H") written by a famous illustrator/writer about his childhood in Kobe that takes place before the end of WWII. The book is written for young adults and has plenty of furigana (phonetic script written alongside kanji) so it is really easy to read and understand even without a dictionary. I have been training myself to read 3 or 4 pages at a time without looking at a dictionary to see how much I can understand. Then after I go back and look up all the words I don't know and confirm the meaning of what I just read, making a long vocab list as I go. So far I'm at about page 35 and the book is going pretty well. The author's friend has just been arrested for being a "red" (communist) and the pace has started to pick up.




Anyways, I'd like to try and read more stuff in Japanese and do little reviews of them to spice up the blog.

My main goal for passing lvl 1 is to use it as a stepping stone to get a good job in Tokyo or some other major city in Japan. Ultimately I want a job using Japanese back in the States and I need to get some experience in a company before I apply to grad school. Lately I've been looking at the Career Forum website, a major poster of Japanese/English bilingual jobs and I've been seeing postings for some financial-related jobs that require less than native-level Japanese and only business level English that pay a few thousand more $ than my yearly salary. Of course I might be using that extra 4 grand on rent if I'm living in or near Tokyo but, I think it would still be worth it.