My Yaruki （やる気）

Today I'm pleased to introduce a guest blogger Alex Elkholy who has wrote today's article, you can find more of his great articles at alexelkholy.com

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In my time learning Japanese, there has been one big hurdle that nobody seems to know how to effectively overcome. Because of this, there has been quite a bit of controversy to the proposed solutions. What I refer to is learning to listen to Japanese.

This is so hard to get good at because it takes lot of skill. Not only do you have to know the vocabulary, you have to know to listen for them. Often times strings of words will turn into a giant blur. While I'm still not past this stage, I'm getting slightly better and better. Today I finally realized my way to progress and getting better, and this experience is what I'm going to share. Not a bulletproof method, not a guarantee, but just my observations.

I believe there are three factors for successful learning to listen to Japanese. These are: interest, comfort/convenience, and familiarity. All are necessary to level the playing field, otherwise you will be fighting an uphill battle.

The first factor is interest. All things flow from this. If you are watching or listening to something just because it's in Japanese, and it's not something that would otherwise catch your interest, then you have a little bit of a problem. I've said it a million times, and I'll say it a million times more, you have to have interest in what you're doing. In my case, I've become obsessed with DragonBall. I found the entire Japanese DragonBall and have it ready to play at a moment's notice. I will put off other things to watch another episode, because I'm engrossed in this stupid kid's show.

The second factor is comfort/convenience. You must be comfortable when you watch, and it must be really convenient to turn it on. It doesn't help if you get headaches from leaning into your computer screen watching in the dark, or if you have to go through and setup everything just to begin watching. These both used to be big problems for me. I finally solved it by setting up a second monitor a few feet away from my working area to where I could just look up or lean back to start watching. It made a big difference. Also, if you have to tab between what you're watching and your dictionary, then consider something external so you don't have to interrupt the video.

The third factor is familiarity. It is tremendously helpful if you have some sort of familiarity with the content before hand. I used to watch DragonBall/Z all the time as a kid, so I know the story decently. Not enough to have the dialog memorized, but to know that there are seven Dragon Balls that can only be used once a year... Anyway, make sure if you're a beginner to use something you're familiar with. This makes a huge difference.

Now that we're all setup, another question is whether or not to lookup words. Some tell us to lookup everything, or we'll be wasting time. Others tell us to lookup absolutely nothing. I personally fall into the middle. I don't force myself to lookup everything, but I'll still look up words.

It's all about balance. If you decide to lookup absolutely nothing, you're probably going to end up with nothing to show for your time (unless you're able to invest 24/7 for a couple years straight of ONLY watching television in the target language). However, if you force yourself to lookup EVERY single word, you're going to end up totally ignoring the reason to watch something in the first place: entertainment. I have a specific anime series I really like, it's only 24 episodes long, but a year after I started watching it I still haven't completed it. Why? Because I felt like I needed to lookup every word in every sentence to get through a single episode. This has led to me putting it off. Don't fall into this trap.

My solution is a simple one: Listen as hard as you can and follow the story as best you can. When a word pops out at you, look it up. Don't make yourself decode every sentence for every word, only try to wait for words to come to you. In this way you'll still boost your listening skills considerably, but it won't become a chore to start.

This article wouldn't be complete without discussing passive listening. This concept was introduced to the community by Khatzumoto. The technique of passive listening is to have a 24 hour stream of Japanese to your ears. This has been met with controversy by those who don't particularly like to work to hard. However, those who praise and use the technique often find it as a testament to their resolve to master the language.

The controversy is often because we do not know if it gives us any benefit or not. The very definition of "passive" indicates that you will not be focusing or thinking about what you're hearing at all. In my opinion, passive listening can be very helpful as long as you approach it the correct way. Throughout the day, we have many unused moments, time in which we are not using our minds for anything useful. Passive listening can take those moments and force you to think about Japanese.

As I pause to reflect on what I write in this article, my mind wonders to the Japanese I have playing in the background, even if only for micro moments. Indeed, how can this technique be anything but helpful? Be warned, you must be selective in what you choose to passively listen to. Even more so than how you would be in choosing something to actively listen to.

I believe that I have covered everything important that pertains to listening to Japanese in this article. We went over successful conditions in which to begin listening, how to use the dictionary effectively while listening, and what role passive listening has in our learning. Go forth and listen happily.

This is a guest article from Alex Elkholy. You can find more of his writings on his new site. Alex Elkholy .com

Next up is how I'm getting on with the weight training, since I started back in February I think it was, I've come a long way from being a skinny bean pole who could barely lift anything that could be considered to have a substantial weight, when I first started I was curling like 8kg and doing way too many different exercise per session 4 times a week I was basically running my self into the ground even with the small amount of weight I even had the complete wrong idea on how to do sets, basically after every set you should take about 60-90 second brake (good for Hypertrophy) for maximum testosterone production then go on to your next set after completing your sets for one exercise you jump to the next.

The big mistake we were doing is we did each set of an exercise concurrently, no rest, then we would rest for 60 seconds and start the next set of all exercises we were doing more harm than good basically wrecking havoc on our nervous system. Anyway the mistakes we made and the things we learned over the past 5 months or so can wait for a future post as there were more ^^

Any woo I gained a few pounds of muscle over the first few months of training averaging about 1 pound of weight each week which is about what your aiming for if your wanting to gain muscle and not fat this was helped by my increase of calorie and protein intake helped by the weight gainer protein shakes took some time to get used to the banana flavor but its grown on me.

Then typically when I was starting to see change in my physique I injured my right deltoid may have been caused by not warming up adequately or just from general wear and tear as weight lifting for hypertrophy puts a lot of strain on your body, this took about 3-4 weeks to get back to shape although I did no weights in that time I kept my weight/muscle by keeping my protein intake high and calories clean.

Then finally I could start again this time reading much more into what routines, exercises were best for me being a hard gainer, the basic idea for us hard gainers and beginner weight lifters alike is to do mostly compound exercises for the first month or so these include the bench press, deadlift, squats, military press etc on alternate days 3 times a week the idea is to build over all mass and increase strength rapidly then later when your bulked up you define the muscles by doing the non compounds e.g. bicep curls etc

One tip if its strength and size your after you need to constantly be increasing the weight you lift find your perfect weight that you can only manage around 6-8 reps per set with and each sessions try to add a little more weight from everything I've read over the months this is the best way to increase bulk and strength.

Anyway I keep getting off topic, with the change in exercises and new found knowledge on how to weight lift correctly for maximum results we again started to gain 1-2 pounds of weight each week and can now see a good change in my physique, I've added 9 pounds of weight from 8.5 stone to 9 stone which I've never weighed that much in my life always been either below 8 stone or just above.

Current stats below, this is over a month with the new routine (except the body weight which is from February)

Body weight: 8.5 stone to 9 stone
Deadlift: 132 pounds to 176 pounds
Bench Press: 100 pounds (not been doing long, but started not being able to even lift 100 pounds now I can do 3 sets of 6 reps)

Military press: 66 pounds to 77 pounds
Pendley Rows: 77 pounds to 90 pounds
Squats: 103 pounds to 123 pounds
Crunches: 3 sets of 15 with 10kg weight + 15 reps of leg raises on pull up bar
Pull Ups: 6 reps to 14 reps (working on lats not bicep pull ups to get that v shape)

Not huge weights by any means but for me its a great improvement, will keep posting updates over the coming months and maybe even some before and after pictures.

Well over the coming days I plan to do post some updates on my progress with my goals that I listed a while ago, to recap these were.

Learn Japanese
To keep improving my Japanese and hopefully step it up a gear.

Weight Training
To improve my overall physique to basically not look like a beanpole.

Healthy Body and Mind
Generally to improve the way I live and eat always believe you should look after yourself as you only get one body no point when your 50 starting to eat healthy because your obese and can barely move from all the crap you've eat and drunk over the years same goes for the mind.

Savings
One thing that I've always had trouble with is saving now that I realise I've gotta save if I ever plan to live my dream of going to Japan for a year to enjoy myself and job hunt.

Other goals I planned to set were to expand my reality in general experience as many different things as I could and to also network more in and out of my career.

- Body and Mind -
For the first post I'm going to do a quick rundown on my body and mind goal, overall this is going pretty well most days I've kept with the eating healthy at least having some fruit and veg everyday, although I have had a bad habit of taking trips to KFC and the local Chinese a few times a week as they tend to be more convenient and a quick way of getting my required calorie/protein intake to keep adding more body weight this needs to be pretty high especially as I tend to be pretty active with 3 weight sessions a week and lots of cardio in between.

I've also started to take much more care on the way I look for years I had the same set of clothes and would only buy new clothes when they were worn thin but now if I see something I like (or my wife does) I'll go out my way to buy it, caring about the way you look doesn't just help change what people think about you it also makes you feel better and more confident.

On the mind front I think this has improved from before I'm generally feeling much happier and have a huge renewed interest in my Japanese language studies, web development and technology in general. Everyday I get closer to my trip to Japan even if it is years away planning for it now helps stop my interest waning and keep me motivated and happy.

Next up Weight Lifting

Had on and off problems with the sites theme randomly not loading, now I think this is sorted or at least it's not happened to me in a while can anybody confirm everything is loading ok?

Also noticed an issue with the posting a comments page loading slowly, think I may know the cause of this anybody else experiencing the same issue?

Now that I'm on the topic I have plans to change the theme in the near future to a 3 column theme as this one is starting to feel a little cluttered, I'm also in the process of brushing up on my XHTML and CSS skills so I do plan to completely overhaul the site at some point in the future.

EDIT: Sorted the slow loading pages looks like the script for the hit counter was playing up

Recently went out and bought myself a new desk as I was starting to get sick of using my bed as a desk not much room to get thing done, also I've had a 19" wide-screen monitor lying about doing nothing for the past god knows how long and thought it would be great to use this as a dual display with my Mac. Should make productivity much greater for my language studies and work.



After only a few hours of using this setup I think its excellent already finding it easier to sentence mine and keep up a Japanese environment, now I just need to get myself a 3rd monitor.

p.s. The rose isn't mine ;P

Was just reading a post over at Nihongo day by day (雨と水） and remembered just how excellent SRS software is for not forgetting things that you've learned I could read most of the article bar a few vocab, that I'll be sentence mining by the way. Now for the last few weeks I've not really added much to my sentence deck and not had huge exposure either except the 5 hours of listening I got the other day but yet I still could read the majority of that article the only thing I had kept regular was my sentence reviews.

So even though I hadn't actively been using Japanese each day for a while I've not really forgotten anything and the bits I have forgotten get picked up much easier the second time.

So for all those that worry they are going to forget everything if they take a brake from there Japanese studies don't worry about it just be sure to keep up with your reviews and when your ready to get back to your Japanese you'll be almost were you left off.

Well as some of you may know one of my largest goals in life is to live and work in Japan and no matter how hard this will be I intend to make it. So today I thought I would talk a little about what my plans are and how I intend to reach my goals of living and working in Japan.

I have nothing really special don't have a degree, haven't got much money and don't work in company that has a Japan division. First of all I've had to look at the degree front contrary to popular belief you don't need a degree to obtain a working visa in Japan, 10 years of experience in a specific field will also allow you to obtain a visa, this has set the first part of my goal I want to set off for Japan when I'm 28 at this time I will have 10 years experience in IT which comes under the working visa 'Engineering'. Although there is no denying that a degree would make life much easier for finding a job and the worst case scenario becoming an English teach, which I will talk about possible plans for me to obtain a degree before I set off to Japan in a later post.

Next up is another large obstacle 'money' my plan is when I reach the ripe old age of 28 that I will have enough cash saved to live in Japan without work for up to a year on a working holiday visa this should allow me enough time to hopefully find a job. To do this I've worked out that I need around 10k preferably more to live comfortably for many months until I find work this has to take into account there will be 2 mouths to feed as my wife will be with me. I started saving for this earlier this year and if I keep going at the rate I am now I should at least reach my goal of 10k

Other than these 2 main obstacles I just need to keep increasing my knowledge in many work related areas, my Japanese and people networking as any one of these can give you opportunities in life that you may otherwise never have.

As long as we all have dreams and ambitions we should realize that we can reach any of our goals in life if we try hard enough but we all need to think what can we be doing 'now!' not later but now as we all only have a finite amount of time.

Recently watched Tekkonkinkreet with my wife and must say I really didn't expect it to be as great as it was from the onset I thought oh this isn't my sort of animation style and oh this is gonna be another one of those mindless anime's that's got no real story and is just fighting.

How wrong I was I quickly fell in love with the anime I even like the animation style it seems to suit the story, basically its about two friends called black and white both are homeless and live in an old rust bucket of a car, black has always protected white since he was young and they both protect a part of the city called Treasure town from any sort of outer influence whether its other town gangs or the Yakuza.

When the Yakuza start moving back into the area is when all the trouble starts and black and white need to do there best to defend there city, although after white gets injured and taken away from black is when the show becomes great black is now out for revenge and the story starts to become pretty dark and twisted, black starts to lose all form of humanity as he seeks revenge he falls more and more into the dark with white being the only one that has his "screws" as white likes to say.

The story becomes a battle of black trying to stay away from becoming purely evil and white trying to gain his own screws back to saves blacks.

The show has many interesting themes that we can all take away, we all have a dark side and we all must battle with ourselves at one time or another, and even the innocent have there twisted side as we see with white and having great friends/family can help us keep grounded.

To sum up an excellent anime highly recommended to any anime fan and none anime fan alike, a surprisingly deep, twisted at times anime, if you can get past the different style of animation I'm sure most of you will find a gem of a show.

Noticed over at On How to Learn Japanese that there has recently been a sort of quiz over at revTK asking questions on how your faring with the AJATT method, so I thought I'd join in.