How Do You Translate 'Wa'?

I remember talking with Billy, a guy from Vancouver who married a Japanese girl and was living in Fukushima. His son was a few years older than mine, and had so far survived what concerned me now about my two-year-old speaking much more Japanese, at a higher level, than English. Yes, he was only two, but this was the kind of thing I’d rather tackle sooner than later.

‘Kids pick up on these things,’ he assured me. ‘The pronunciation, the details.’ But what he said next gave me pause. ‘They say a kid will keep developing that language base until he’s ten or twelve years old.’ Which made me wonder: first, what if all of a sudden I turn around and my son is a teenager and doesn’t have that solid English foundation? And second, are we still going to be living in Japan ten years down the road?

This was in October. In December I brought my family to the States for Christmas, and after four weeks my son returned to Japan speaking better English than Japanese. It didn’t take long for his Japanese to catch up again, and I redoubled my efforts to not only keep him speaking English but to constantly add new words and expressions to his repertoire. (After years of teaching English as a foreign language it is too easy to fall into the habit of slowing down, and dumbing down, one’s own speech.)

This Spring we spent three months in the US, and in September we moved here for good (for now). Naturally, ironically, my concerns have shifted from my son’s English capacity to his ability not just to hang on to his Japanese but to continue advancing it.

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National Novel Writing Month

I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I'm way behind, and participating to begin with was stupid considering how busy and uncompensated I am, but I figure it's time to try being sloppy. Anyways, here's a randomly-and-hastily-assembled excerpt from the 5,000 or so totally unpolished and vomitous words I have so far:

It was always thought that time travel would be a quantitative thing; whether or not scientists thought of it that way, certainly the culture did. I guess in retrospect, it became clear around the early 2000s that time travel would take on a qualitatively different character than dude gets in machine and goes somewhere, and it was obvious even before that if you were one of those rare people who sits around all day thinking about the future of personal electronic devices or fab labs or harvesting trillion-dollar asteroids.  

I remember my own childhood when a family friend who worked for the air force came by to talk physics: we would spend hours discussing the potential pitfalls of travel through time or at the speed of light – radicals in space hitting the ship hull at super-high effective speeds and gradually poking little holes in the hulls until one day all of a sudden you’re very far from home with a very serious air leak, whether time travel would involve actually going back (or forward) and screwing up things or creating alternate realities, and would these alternate realities by super-focused, i.e. holding everything but properties relevant to some particular goal as constant. Anyways, we’d have these conversations, imagining these wildly different possibilities for future technologies that none of the science fiction writers or Time journalists had been anywhere near.

Well it turns out that out of the ashes of the first genomic revolution back just after the human genome was decoded came the phoenix of realizing that all of that genetic noise as it was called then – or the stuff that they didn’t really understand – was actually a very, very detailed record of the past for that particular individual’s genome; and it was this, combined with increasingly larger processing power and the new emergent engineering that started coming out of Stanford around 2030 or so, plus the entrepreneurial vigor of the Bay Area’s young residents, plus the new propensity for the public to voluntarily upload all sorts of intimate personal details onto the Internet, plus neuroscience shit, plus some other stuff which I’m probably leaving out and advanced mathematical techniques, and social forces pushing towards cooperation – am I getting too preachy?

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Haboobs in Arizona

Oh serendipity! I may not be able to bear it if this is not the zenith of Islamic attempts to take over Arizona!

Those Arizonians are right to oppose the linguistification of jihadism. From the most humble zero to the highest admiral, we as Americans and English speakers must resist this assassination of our sacred language!

Perhaps we should respond with tariffs on all Arab nations? Or simply bleed them scarlet. I am so distressed that I’m frantically searching for an algorithm to make myself feel better. It may not be enough to relax on my sofa with some candy, coffee, soda, or alcohol with plenty of sugary syrup!

I may have to go full bore and partake of a fine meal with apricots and artichokes, tuna, spinach, oranges, lemons or limes; then huddle in the fetal position beneath my soft mohair and muslin sheets. I may have to surround myself with the sweet scents of camphor or jasmine, or play some guitar music, to send this Islamofacism to its just nadir. I could distract myself from the Muslim takeover by reading a magazine about the safari!

Is there any elixir or gauze that can ease my pain?

(Perhaps there is some hashish in a jar somewhere under my mattress.)

h/t Russell Saunders

Punctuated Equilibrium

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4/11/2011 - Christopher Carr to William, Robert, Becca, Kevin, Kevin, Adam, Caitlin, Joseph, Julie, Dmitri

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Hey guys,

Wondering what you thought about this cover letter:

Here’s the job description:

Title: Junior Digital Video Production Assistant II
Location(s): Cambridge MA
PT/FT: Full Time
Pos. Number: S7658763b37bh-S7
Dept.: Center for Biomedical Science Journalism
Payroll Category: T
Work Shift Code: S09-0401

JUNIOR DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCTION ASSISTANT II, Center for Biomedical Science Journalism, to assist director, multimedia leader, and web architect with a wide range of tasks related to CBSJ’s web presence and overall goals.  Responsibilities include designing content; creating content; maintaining content; directing content; managing video content; overseeing user databases and internal documentation protocols; assisting web and video production managers in marketing web materials using P2P and web 2.0 technology, social media, and other outreach methodologies to gather more professional and lay public users; assisting with special projects such as live video conferencing or implementation of online training content and facilitation of transference of deliverables; uploading video, audio, and print content to website and other venues; liaisoning with end-user content manager and user experience designers/architects; and monitor server connections, data backup, etc.  Film CBSJ seminars and other press conferences and then download, edit, and upload video using Final Cut Pro or Premier; maintain digital media archives; handle other administrative duties such as equipment inventories, camera maintenance, assisting with administrative data entry; assisting with CBSJ social media presence; placement of audio wave reception devices during production phase; duplication and distribution of internal documents; facilitation of delivery of caffeinated potables; and perform other duties as needed.

REQUIREMENTS: three(3)+ years of professional experience; proven track record of broad technical proficiency and aptitude; technical orientation towards work environment; experience with one or more post-production tool; i.e., Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier or Audition, or Avid Pro Tools; and a “can-do” attitude.  Experience maintaining content on websites or (web) databases strongly desired; Joomla experience; experience with Adobe Photoshop or Bridge or WordPress.  Social media, search engine optimization (SEO), SEM, and online marketing experience a plus.  Proficiency with PowerPoint, Mastery of Word, Excel, and Notepad (html); and an interest in science, biology, medicine, and/or journalism are also strongly desired.  S7658763b37bh-S7

Occasional early morning, evening, or weekend work may be required.  Travel 15% of the time.  Remote work possible 13.5% of the time.

Two-year appointment with the possibility of renewal.  This is a full-time position.

And here’s my cover letter:

Dear :

I am very interested in the Junior Digital Video Production Assistant II position at the Center for Biomedical Science Journalism.  The CBSJ is an institution for which I hold the utmost respect and which must play an increasingly important role in the future of our technological civilization.  I would like to participate in the efforts undertaken by the Center for Biomedical Science Journalism to more effectively communicate the immensely important discoveries of modern science to the public.  The position of Junior Digital Video Production Assistant II is an uncanny match for my experience, acquired skills, and personal interests.

The Center for Biomedical Science Journalism is at the forefront of a necessary sea change in how the public perceives science and technology.  I am particularly interested in continuing some of the work the center has done on the neurodiversity movement and punctuated equilibrium.  Compared to other kinds of journalism, science journalism is often lazy, reductionist, off-putting, poorly written, and even dangerous.  The other edge of this sword is the fact that at no other time in human history has the effective communication of scientific concepts to the general public been more important, as crucial technologies – thanks largely to technological evangelism originating at the Center for Biomedical Science Journalism – assume bottom-up and decentralized (as opposed to top-down and corporate-controlled) structures.

I have extensive experience that makes me the ideal candidate for your position.  First, as a refuge from the confusing and panic-inducing nuclear meltdown in Fukushima Japan, I know how lay scientific knowledge and science journalism must be improved in kind if humanity is to progress.  I am currently working on a book about my experience with my wife and children fleeing the leaking Fukushima Daiichi reactor with only iPhone Internet access to inform my decisions.  In addition to this formative experience, I am unusually qualified to work at the intersection of education, science, technology, digital video production, and journalism.  The wide range of tasks under the Junior Digital Video Production Assistant II job description suits the broad knowledge I have acquired as a self-employed provider of a wide range of services in English and technical writer in Japan over the last four years.  I have extensive experience explaining difficult technical concepts to a lay or linguistically-challenged audience.  I also have extensive experience with both Adobe Premier and Final Cut Pro (hundreds of hours as a film/video/digital/documentary studies student) in addition to web design and marketing in a variety of media.

Attached is a copy of my resume, which more fully details my qualifications for the position.  I look forward to talking with you regarding the Junior Digital Video Production Assistant II position at the Center for Biomedical Science Journalism.  Thank you very kindly for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Christopher Carr

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Rhetoric Revolutionized: How Twitter, Facebook, and Text Messaging Can Save Argument

<This guest post is contributed by Leslie Johnson, who writes about health, green living, and parenting at masters in health administration.>

   

the structural transformation of the public phereIt has been said time and time again: the internet has revolutionized the world in many ways.  The World Wide Web has unquestionably changed the way we live our lives, providing a means for instant information, endless conversation, and worthless entertainment.  While several aspects of our world have been altered by the internet, the way in which we communicate with one another is perhaps what has been the most altered.  With the advent of text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter comes a new discourse environment and a new rhetoric.  While critics endlessly condemn social media as a destructor of verbal language, when used to its fullest capacity social media has the potential to promote public discourse and constructive argument.

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The Last Taboo

I've come across the topic of vulgarity vis-a-vis HBO's new fantasy series, Game of Thrones, twice now.  The first time was in a thread at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen: I compared Game of Thrones to Deadwood:

I watched Game of Thrones a bit, and I was actually surprised you didn’t mention the foul language in Deadwood for comparison purposes. Both shows try so hard to beat the viewer over the head with the fact that they are for adults for adults for adults that even a small amount of reflection fosters the realization that they are quite oviously for men between 20 and 35. As a man between 20 and 35, I’d feel uncomfortable watching either show with someone not of that demographic.

The second was from this Daily Beast article, on the plethora of dick-shots in today's Hollywood films:    

No aspect of the minotaur’s penis was left to chance in the recently released Your Highness,

The fearsome appendage, which is revealed at a key moment in April’s medieval stoner comedy, came courtesy of extensive internal debates within and outside the film’s distributor Universal Pictures. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic member? How big the balls? The penis’ startling physical dimensions, the state of its, ahem, romantic rectitude—all were subject to boardroom discussions between filmmakers, concept artists and studio executives, resulting in a breakthrough for the R-rated action farce.

“When we filmed it, the creature’s manhood is swinging back and forth between his legs,” said Your Highness director David Gordon Green. “It was actually the head of the studio who had the idea to give him a boner.

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Memory, Memory, Mnemonics, Metacognition, Systemization, Learning, Postmodernism, and Memory

Appropriately, this is the second time for me to write this post.  I don't know whether to blame my mother-in-law's computer or Squarespace (or myself) for ironically erasing a post about memory.  I'll try to fight back impatience and frustration and craft a cogent argument.

I often play Memory in my kids classes.  This is the game where players turn over cards and try to match them from memory.  I usually play with a set of cards depicting colors and shapes (such as yellow octagon) or a set of cards depicting letters and animals (such as G, Goat).  When I first started playing Memory in my classes, I used only twenty cards arranged in a four by five matrix.  I found that such games typically lasted between five and ten minutes, and students very seldom forgot the positions and identities of any of the cards.  If there were four players, the final score would be something like 4-2-2-2.  Whoever went first or whoever was lucky enough to be last when there was only a few pairs left would often be the winner.  This unfairness usually didn't bother me, since the primary goal of the activity was to memorize English objects, and the beneficiary of structural unfairness - that is to say the winner - seemed to rotate each class in random, egalitarian fashion.

Nevertheless, my class of seven-year-olds soon insisted that we use all the cards.  As a decidedly non-micromanaging, hippy teacher, I complied and began to arrange fifty-four cards in a six by nine matrix.  I found that this bigger version of Memory took anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes to complete and changed the nature of the game completely.  The advantage of going first or last was relatively minimized, and so was the egalitarian distribution of winners.  The same students won every time we played.

In the fifty-four card version of the game, winning seemed to be a function of not raw memory skill but how fundamentally-limited memory capacity was employed.  Of course, in terms of raw memory, some students were superior to others; but for the most part this difference was marginal: Susy could remember eleven cards; Nancy could remember thirteen; Jimmy could remember ten; Johnny could remember twelve.  It couldn't have been this small difference in raw ability that was driving the emergence of lopsided final scores like 15-6-3-2. 

Instead, winning seemed to be based on the approach students took to the game.  Students with no strategy - who drew at random - were at an extreme disadvantage in the fifty-four card array, whereas students who made and followed some sort of rule - whatever it was - always seemed to win.  This rule could be, for example, always drawing new cards from the bottom left of the board, always drawing cards in clockwise order around holes, or always drawing in a counterclockwise spiral from the middle of the array. 

Students who employed some sort of general rule for drawing new cards only had to memorize the rule, the card, and the order - one constant and two variables; students who drew at random had to memorize card, x-position, y-position, and order - four variables.  Efficiency gains resulted in overwhelming victories for rule-following students, since these rules effectively reduced a game played in two-dimensional space to a game played in one neural dimension.

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The Mind of a Child

I had always figured the linguistics literature exaggerated the ability of children to acquire second languages at rates exponentially faster than adults, but watching my stepson not struggle at all with English when immersed has forced me to consider the possibility that this natural ability of children may actually be understated.   

My eleven-year-old stepson has been picking up words and phrases from day one.  Even when he confesses to me in Japanese that he has no idea what the individual words mean, he uses entire phrases correctly, such as "Is it okay if I come?", "Can I put my jacket here?", and "He likes baby toys."  He thoroughly enjoys communication in English it seems, and I cannot detect any self-consciousness or fear of failure.

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On TOEIC and Embracing the Void

This passage comes from a TOEIC prep book I used in a lesson yesterday.  I found myself fighting back vomit as I maintained a requisite, grinning, foreign visage of utter seriousness:

A really good city must have all of the necessary facilities for its citizens.  There must be government offices, which people use to register automobiles, pay taxes, and so on.  There must also be plenty of financial institutions like banks, loan offices, and insurance companies.  Shopping is vital to peoples's lifestyles, so there must be lots of places like shopping malls, clothing shops, and grocery stores where people can buy things.  Citizens also need to enjoy their lives by, for example, seeing a game at a sports stadium, watching a performance at a theater, seeing a movie with friends, or dining at a nice restaurant.

After teaching that class, I blasted Marilyn Manson on my iPod on the way home.

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Guest Post on Kevin Kato's Blog

Kevin Kato, who I often work with, has been gracious enough to let me guest post on his blog, Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.  Kevin is the author of several books.  His latest novel, The Tunge Pit, is a pungent mixture of the American Gothic, ensemble tale, horror nouveau, and pulp suspense genres.  I'm a quarter of the way through it, and it's fascinating so far.  I will be publishing an interview with Kevin here in the near future. 

Anyways, here is my post, cross-posted to Kevin's blog:

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I prefer teaching kids to teaching adults. There are several reasons for this. The first is that our civilization has wildly misunderstood the nature of language learning, and teaching kids doesn't require any unschooling. Adults don't learn second languages easily. There is usually a lot of unfounded, reductionist neurotechnobabble behind this assertion, but in practice it's because adults are often unwilling to look foolish. Adults learn facts about languages instead of languages. Kids on the other hand are seldom embarrased when they make mistakes. The trial-and-error style of learning required to learn a new language comes naturally to them. If adults are to succeed at language learning, they must either be shameless sociopaths or fluent in the metacognition behind language learning. (Check out this article in The New Yorker.) Apropos, language learning is something that suits the learning style of just jumping right in preferred by kids over the taxonomic style of learning preferred by besuited economic automata.

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Memory and Language

There are two fundamental kinds of memory: declarative and nondeclarative.  Declarative memories are the kind of memories that we can declare; when we talk about our "first memories" we are talking about our first declarative memories.  Nondeclarative memories are things like muscle memories or skills that we acquire throughout life: walking, writing, skiing, trapeze, and supernatural Halo ability are all nondeclarative memories.  

Mastery of traditional Japanese arts like aikido and shodo is based on the formation of nondeclarative memories.  The reason students of karate practice the same blocking move over and over again even when there is no opponent is to fuse this movement into their nondeclarative memory systems so that it can be recalled as a fixed action pattern when the situation arises.  It's literally a case of true mastery coming without effort. 

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Which of the World's Languages is Most Difficult?

One thing that should puzzle and repulse thinking foreign visitors to Japan is the widespread insistence that Japanese is objectively one of if not the most difficult language in the world.  It's an insistence that is flatly unfalsifyable, and it's obviously insulting to the foreigner to whom it is directed!  

This is something I heard a lot when I first came here and started learning Japanese, and it is something I've heard a lot recently in the context of my first daughter, who is quickly developing proficiency with both English and Japanese.  Friends, relatives, students, clients, everyone wants to know every last detail about my daughter's linguistic development, and I suspect - at least for some - that this curiosity stems not from any altruistic concern for my daughter nor out of simple intellectual curiosity, but from the conscious or subconscious desire to get definitive proof from something as controlled as a bilingual child's development, that despite losing the war, despite being bombed and bombarded and used as a test case for the most destructive weapon ever produced and despite being occupied and neutered and told what to do and despite watching as cultural elements deemed too nationalist or obtrusive were gutted and dissected by occupying foreign authorities and despite having to reinvent culture as a strange blase neon avant-garde, there is still in Japan a deep-seeded and irrepressible drive to be Number One.

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On the General Shittyness of Textbooks

A language textbook is at best an approximation; at worst a distraction. 

In The Black Swan,  Nicholas Nassim Taleb describes two types of knowledge (admitedly an overgeneralization): nerd knowledge, and non-nerd knowledge.   The former is the kind of knowledge that comes from mastering the rules comprising systems.  Some examples of nerd knowledge would be Keynesian economics, computer programming, chess, and most of what we learn in high school.  Non-nerd knowledge on the other hand is the kind of knowledge that comes from intuitive grasping of part of reality.  The corresponding examples are Austrian economics, biology, business, and most of what we learn in college.  The key difference is that it's possible to master nerd fields, while non-nerd fields remain elusive.  For this reason, the non-nerd is often unsure of himself, depressed without rewards, and in need of a nerd hobby, like car-maintenance or Halo 3. 

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Imagism in Japanese Children's Songs

This traditional Japanese children's song reminds me of Ezra Pound and the Imagists.  I usually render Japanese text in Roman letters on this blog, but, seeing as Pound's Ideogrammic Method was built on a foundation of Chinese characters, here it is.  Click on the links for images, or perhaps you already know what some of it means...

大きな栗の木の下で

貴方と私

仲良く遊びましょう

大きな栗の木の下で

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Intemperate Rant about Next Week

Next week, I start teaching at a magnet school run by Fukushima University, which is supposedly the best elementary school in the city.  I just finished watching the "official" guidelines DVD for teachers, and I can say that after watching it I had an express desire to punch every single person in the DVD square in the face.  I could not begin to describe the humiliatingly idiotic and pointless things which the model teachers in the DVD have to go through and do (but I will), except to say that the people in charge of things in Japan must be retarded tyrants and their underlings complete coward scum.

As I mentioned in a previous post, most teachers either leave Japan bitter over just how stupid the curriculum is or become lazy, freeloading public servants leaching off the tax-pool.  We'll see which one I become next week I guess, but there is absolutely no way I'm dancing, acting like a clown, smiling excessively, using unconventional gestures proscribed by the morons in charge, having the students repeat lines of their own language, or attempting to teach greetings in Kiswahili.  

Japan has the worst English test scores in Asia after North Korea, and this should absolutely outrage people, especially since Japan is a wealthy, highly-educated country, which mandates English instruction for six years or more.  So, umm... get outraged.  Unless there is a radical change of curriculum immediately (Anything would be better than the current system, including giving children and schools more free time by ending English education!), I urge the current DoE bigwigs to publicly apologize, retire, and do Japan and the world a favor by jumping in front of the Shinkansen.