Category: Learning

My Experiences in Japan / 日本での私の経験

On October 26, 2018

So here I am, about a month after having returned to London, reflecting back on my experience in Japan. The most common question I’ve had from friends is “was it worth it?” or “did you learn what you wanted to learn?” and the answer to both is a resounding yes. However it isn’t as simple as that, as there are many layers to the question which need to be unpacked a little.

The first layer is understanding what it is that I went off to Japan to learn in the first place. Of course there is the obvious “Japanese Language” side of things, but there is much more to it than that. The real learning I was hoping to take away was about myself. And if you want to learn about yourself, one of the best ways is to teach others. Which thanks to Phil’s company I was able to do exactly that with a bunch of middle school kids over 6 days of English language camps!

Class photo!

The camp is worth a whole post by itself, but the takeaway is how teaching kids made me feel about myself and reflect on what I enjoy doing professionally. It allowed me to understand what I value (honesty, enthusiasm, progress) in a much more immersive way than a work environment would. I’ll definitely be taking this into my next role and it has helped me mature bit more as an individual.

Alongside teaching, there were many other examples of “bonus” learning opportunities I was able to take away from the experience. One key aspect was taking myself out of a familiar environment and getting the mental/physical space to learn and reflect. That alone was worth the proverbial price of admission.

The next layer is about “what” it is I did. While it is obvious to some, but not always to me, it isn’t the destination that matters so much, but who you spend it with and the attitude you take with you. I enjoy spending time by myself (quite a lot) but all my most enjoyable experiences are with friends and family. It isn’t just quality though, it is quantity too. People can help you overcome natural inertia (read: laziness) to get out there and do more. In fact, when Julie came to visit for a week, we crammed in more stuff than I did in the previous months!

Fun and hi-jinks!

Also, being in the right mindset (a positive one), I was able to value those times much more and care a little bit less about the latest distracting “must-own-thing”. But it is easily forgotten and I have to remind myself often to focus on new experiences with loved ones and less on new, shiny, technology…

There is a lot more I was able to get from my travels, but that’s about my limit for for self reflection today. I think I need to do a round up of all the beers I forgot to mention in a new post…

Japanese Calligraphy / 書道

By Matthew

On June 10, 2018

In Fukuoka, Japan, Learning, Student Life

This weekend I had an opportunity to try out Japanese calligraphy at an event put on by the Fukuoka International Student Support Centre (FiSSC). Calligraphy isn’t something I’d normally be very excited about, but I’m a sucker for trying anything new so I thought I’d give it a bash anyway. It also helped that my friend Sora was coming with me, who always ready to help me avoid doing anything (too) embarrassing.

Japanese calligraphy (shodou/書道) is an art form for writing Japanese Kanji (Chinese characters) using a brush and ink that is taught to all Japanese students in primary school, but it is rarely used after that. As such the event had a good mix of Japanese and non-Japanese people attending, with quite the range of skills on display, from very basic through to really artful. The sensei (teacher) for the lesson was truly an artist and was able to create evocative works with little apparent effort. Practice definitely makes perfect.

We were given our instructions, ink, brush and a stack of paper to practise with, after which we were told to get on with practising! My own works were somewhat less than perfect, but I learnt a trick or two over the period and I really felt that I’d improved at least a little bit over the duration of the class.

The sensei watches on as a student tries to do “光” or “light”

I’m glad I did manage to improve a little as I was “asked” to try out writing a kanji out on one of the larger sheets (the joys of being very-obviously-foreign). I choose the character for “joy” or “喜” as it is simple and represents something I think we could all do with a little more of in our lives. The end result was middle of the road enough to neither attract laughter nor praise. Phew, embarrassment avoided!

My “masterpiece”. On the left is my name in katakana – マシュートイ

My own experiments aside, the work produced by masters of the art truly is something else though. I’m impressed that so much feeling and emotion can be conveyed through a simple black and white medium.

All said, I had a lot of fun and learnt the basics of a new skill. Not a bad result for a Saturday afternoon!

My other creations. One of them isn’t a real kanji, can you guess which one? 🙂

Japanese Studies Update / 日本語の勉強の最新情報

By Matthew

On April 28, 2018

In GenkiJACS, Japan, Learning, Student Life, Study

Time for a quick study update! It has been 4 weeks since I arrived and how have things progressed thus far? Well, it’s complicated. As I expected, everything was all very challenging and a bit overwhelming at first. Coming into a new class that was half way through a course was difficult, but it was the lack of a solid foundation and effective study tools that really tripped me up.

When I was doing self study, I could do things at my own pace and skip through things that were uninteresting or too difficult at the time. However this leaves gaps in your knowledge and will come back to haunt you later, such as when that point you skipped becomes the basis of a more advanced point of grammar. So unless one has an iron discipline (that doesn’t sound like me) then you end up building a proverbial house with bricks missing in random places. As you can imagine, this past month has seen me making a lot of bricks!

In my work as a technologist, I’ve found very few situations where wrote memorisation is very useful. With technology changing continuously, it is more efficient to get a grasp of the principles and fudge your way through with the knowledge that everything will be different in 2 years anyway. However while it might be possible to apply these ideas to language study, you can’t get away from the fact that the more words you know and more grammar you have internalised, the better you will be.

A study and no play makes Matt… a better student

So there is that aspect, where I’m playing catch-up on kanji, grammar or vocabulary that I didn’t memorise sufficiently, but there is also the process of efficient study as well.

As children, we get many years of repetition and immersion to study our first language. As adults we try to condense learning a new language into a shorter period, all while thinking/acting in a different modality. Since doing it as an adult is a different approach, you need different tools and support structures to get you to your goal. Which is what I’ve been going through, a process of discovery with over the past 4 weeks. A lot of this is from other students and the rest is through the necessity of keeping up with the relentless stream of new knowledge we are expected to learn.

This is very much a developing topic for me. I’ve got a handle on certain aspects and still struggling with others, but the overall trajectory is very much positive. I’m very curious how I’ll feel 2 months from now…

Japanese Language School / 日本語学校

By Matthew

On April 10, 2018

In Fukuoka, GenkiJACS, Japan, Learning, Student Life, Study

I haven’t given much of an introduction to the language school I’m studying at and how the first week of classes have gone. It has all been a little overwhelming so far, making it difficult to put into words, but I think I have pulled enough of my thoughts together to make a reasonable stab at it.

The first question most people ask is “why go all the way to Japan to study?” which is valid, since there are a number of good schools in London I could go to for only a mildly outrageous London price.

The main reason is that while in London, everything is in English and you can’t get away from that. News, people, advertising, stores, all in English. So your chance to apply anything you learn in class is immediately limited to the things that you actively seek out in your target language. Even if you did a full time course in London, you aren’t going to apply that knowledge in very many places outside of the classroom. In Japan that issue is taken away – everything is in Japanese and straight after a class finishes, you see the kanji you just learnt or hear the grammar point you have been discussing. In the past week, I feel like my comprehension has gone up a lot (although speaking/writing is still lagging behind) and my appreciation for learning to read all the kanji has risen in proportion to my desire to actually know what is written on the packages of food I’m eating or on the menu I’m ordering from.

So much to study, so few brain resources…

So having established that studying in Japan is more suited to applying what you learn into real life, how’s school then? I choose to attend a school called Genki JACS (Japanese and Cultural Studies) as it had a good curriculum and excellent reviews on the web. They also focus on small class sizes (2-9 students, with my class being 6) and a highly interactive learning environment. They also arrange a lot of extra-curricular activities in conjunction with the local universities and the like. For example, last Wednesday I attended a casual Japanese calligraphy session with the local Women’s university and then an English language conversation meet-up for Japanese people studying English to speak with real-life English speakers. All these are excellent opportunities to learn new things and make new friends.

If you look closely, you can see one cheeky chap has written the kanji for haemorrhoids

My timetable for school is 4 hours of face to face study (morning or afternoon) and anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours homework. Repeat this for 5 days a week, with extra homework for the weekends. It sounded a lot easier when compared to my 9am to 6pm job, but I’m completely mentally exhausted at the end of each day and I literally could not cram any more into my head than I am right now.

A lot of this is because the classes themselves have been quite intense. That isn’t because the teachers are overly strict, but rather it is because in the 4 hours of lessons each day we are taught nearly 100% in Japanese and I’ve jumped into a class that is half-way through its course already. So I felt like I’m playing catch-up right from the start and as anyone who knows me would vouch for, I’m not overly fond of being bad at things.

So I need to catch up on the material I missed and try and stay ahead of the new information being taught. My final challenge for the classroom is that my brain has been on a learning vacation for 18 years and it really needs to whip itself into shape (neural plasticity anyone?) and get itself together. Seriously, my ability to memorise things is horrific!

Overall it is the massive learning experience I was looking for. I wasn’t engaged with my work and really felt the need for a challenge. Well, I’ve got my challenge now and it is a doozy! So all is well and I’m hoping that after a period of adjustment, it will be a manageable one.

Now, back to study…

Starting School / 学校が始まる

By Matthew

On April 3, 2018

In Japan, Learning, Student Life, Study

月曜日から、私は GenkiJACS 日本語学校でフルタイムの学生として勉強を始めました。大学を卒業して以来、フルタイムの勉強はしたことがなかったので、私のような甘やかされたサラリーマンにとってはかなり大きな変化です。私は、比較的快適な場所から、地球の反対側で、まったく異なる経験の真っ只中に飛び込み、すでにカリキュラムの半分が終わったクラスに参加しました。これは、そうでなければ難しい状況に、さらに挑戦の要素を加えています。

Had to get a little bit of Japanese practice in there before continuing on with the rest of the blog! It will be interesting to look back at it in 6 months to see how cringe worthy the grammar is.

Hello fellow students, I too am a cool and hip student like yourself.

Here’s the longer-form version in English…

I started as a full time student at GenkiJACS Japanese language school on Monday. I’ve not done any full time study since finishing up at university, so it is quite a significant change for a spoilt office worker like myself. I’ve gone from a place of relative comfort and landed right in the middle of something completely different my experience, on the opposite side of the world, and I’ve joined a class that is already half way through its curriculum. Which adds an extra dash of challenge to an otherwise challenging situation.

The biggest difference I’ve found so far is the amount of attention you have to give to your surroundings. You have to actively think and what you are being taught, digest it as best you can and recall it on demand. You don’t even get the luxury of Googling the answers to the tricky stuff, which is bordering on unreasonable! All this is tempered by having really nice and friendly teachers though. Each of them have very different teaching styles, but it is clear from the start they have giving the students a good education at the core of their values.

Looking back on this post, it feels a little whiny, so I hope you can indulge me a little. This really is a positive-problem sort of thing, in that I was specifically looking for something that will challenge me and test my boundaries. I’m pretty sure that in a few weeks, once I’ve filled in the larger missing blanks of knowledge and established a rhythm, I’ll be a lot more confident and feeling less awed by the gap between where I think I am and where I’m actually at.

My pre-intermediate level textbook

I hope anyway.