There is absolutely no way to train a cat.
However, you can simulate it. A cat lives by one single rule only: to do what is most enjoyable at any given time. So if you can make the desired activities enjoyable, the battle is won.
haiku friday
木曽古道・雪白くして・猶存す
きそこどう・ゆきしろくして・なおそんす
The Old Kiso Road, white beneath the falling snow, what it always was.
山口誓子・1974
tadoku notes
Today marks the beginning of another tadoku contest. This one will be a little different for me. Firstly, I’m adding German into the mix. It’s been a very long time since I studied German at all, but in the little I’ve looked at it in the past few days, it seems to be coming back to me easily. So I think extensive reading will be all that is required to get my German to a serviceable level for my purposes.
The German is very much a side project and Japanese remains my main language focus. For this though, I’m focused on my incremental reading project at the moment, and in fact have enough expectations for this that tadoku will be taking a bit of a back seat for a while. Well, essentially it is tadoku, just overclocked. But counting pages in my reading decks isn’t really practical so I don’t plan to report my pagecount from this source. All of which is to say, my score won’t be reflecting the actual quantity of reading I do, at all. A bit unfortunate but incremental reading is working so well for me I don’t want to put it on hold. I’ve lately added a four-panel manga deck into this mix, so I’m going to let this run for a little while longer before I blog about it, but I definitely do want to share more about this method soon.
As for what’s on the shelf, for Japanese I shall mainly be working my way through the Gosick light novels, which somewhat to my surprise I found I could read quite readily. I have all six volumes so that’s my Japanese reading sorted for the month. In German, I have a variety of classics, including (naturally) the German version of Alice in Wonderland. Also, I have an interesting book written by my great-great-grandfather, recording the story of how my ancestors left Russia and came to Canada. This is actually a parallel text, since my uncle made a translation of it. Additionally, I want to find some good German blogs, maybe some photography, or motorcycling, or early music.
haiku friday
巣を奪られ・たる親雀・天翔くる
すをとられ・たるおやすずめ・あまかくる
Robbed of their nestlings, the parent sparrows take wing into the heavens.
山口誓子・１９４９
haiku friday
渦潮を・両国の岬・立ちて見る
うずしおを・ふたぐにのさき・たちてみる
The promontories of two provinces, standing watching the maelstrom.
山口誓子, 1956
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My thoughts and prayers with Japan on this day of disaster.
incrementally down the rabbit-hole; or, 不思議の国のアリスの読み方
I have long maintained that for proper maintenance of mental health, it is absolutely essential to read Alice in Wonderland once yearly; and now, since the idea is to read whatever I read in Japanese wherever possible, why not Alice in Japanese?
And just then, Kendo mentioned an interesting SRS concept he was working on. Usually, incremental reading is used simply to learn facts and make connections between them, but in one’s native language. Instead, he was taking bits of Japanese text, like short news articles or monolingual definitions, and putting them in the SRS as simply reading cards. So he was getting the benefit of spaced repetition, without any of the stress of recollection; a sort of hybrid of extensive reading and SRS.
Now these were fairly short snippets of text, but I thought, why not attempt a whole book in this manner, with cards that could be read in five or ten or fifteen minutes each – and that was how the Alice deck was born. It’s a parallel text, taken from Genpaku and Gutenberg. The question side is the original text without furigana (for the most part – some of the more difficult kanji (it seems this edition was designed for maybe third or fourth-year elementary school students) have the readings following them in parentheses (I might excise these yet if they are bothersome)), and the answer side is the readings and the English text. Each chapter is divided into three roughly equal-sized sections, for a total of 36 cards. You can find the deck as an Anki shared deck to download. The title is “Alice in Wonderland – 不思議の国のアリス”.
I have great hopes for this method, but can’t comment at all on its effectiveness yet since I’m just starting. I’ll report back in a month or so. At any rate, if you are overdue to reread Alice, why not try it this way?
Lan'dorien's Mysterious Journey 