ktcgx Wrote:Yeah, I'm hoping something clicks in the next year or 2. Because I am getting kinda old now. Well, old for starting a career, or rather, the traditional age for starting one.

My advice: Do something amazing. I can't say what is for you, but it could be climbing kilimanjaro or sailing across the pacific ocean or joining the peace corps for a year, or offering to work for free for someone amazing if they teach you what they know. Whatever you do, don't stick with the same old same old - you'll learn nothing new about yourself that way.

I've climbed Fuji... Does that count?

Edit, also, working for someone for free is not possible. I and my family are too poor for that.

ktcgx Wrote:Yeah, I'm hoping something clicks in the next year or 2. Because I am getting kinda old now. Well, old for starting a career, or rather, the traditional age for starting one.

When in doubt about what to do for a career, do what a lot of people do: get an accounting designation (i.e., CPA in the USA, CA I think in Australia and the UK). You'll likely make a decent living and work in a comfortable office. I know many people who have gone this route. They studied garbage in university (that you can't get a job with) like political science or art history or English literature and then later did their MBA and got their accounting credits so that they could actually get a job and earn a living.

I don't know what the situation in Japan is for accounting...do they use IFRS in Japan for financial reporting?

I'm not in the UK, Oz, the US, or Japan. I'm in NZ. To get a CA I'd not only have to sit through 3 years of an accounting degree, but also then spend another 1-2 years studying for what my friend described as 'the hardest exam of her life'. So I'd be 30-40k in debt, for a job I don't want. Plus there is fierce competition for accounting positions here.

I appreciate the advice, but if I was to get a job for a few years til I decided what I wanted to do, I'd prefer one without such a hefty price tag.

EDIT: sorry I should point out that I've already done the 'well paid semi-unrelated' job thing: I just came back from doing JET for 4 years. It didn't really clarify anything for me, except that my Japanese still sucks (because I don't have the energy to study), and that while I enjoy teaching, I get too wound up in it, and get burnt out. Also, the work culture in Japan sucks. It's not for me.

ktcgx Wrote:I'm not in the UK, Oz, the US, or Japan. I'm in NZ. To get a CA I'd not only have to sit through 3 years of an accounting degree, but also then spend another 1-2 years studying for what my friend described as 'the hardest exam of her life'. So I'd be 30-40k in debt, for a job I don't want. Plus there is fierce competition for accounting positions here.

Learn to code. Learn for free via http://www.codecademy.com & https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/co...rogramming , practice for free (Chrome/Firefox, node.js, Sublime Text), and free to get very skilled at: you can start applying this tomorrow to learning Japanese, hacking Anki, parsing native text, etc. Post questions in the Lounge and I or any of the other software developers on Koohii will surely answer.

Learn to code? Lol, you must have missed my posts where I confess to regularly ***** up computers...

aldebrn Wrote:

ktcgx Wrote:I'm not in the UK, Oz, the US, or Japan. I'm in NZ. To get a CA I'd not only have to sit through 3 years of an accounting degree, but also then spend another 1-2 years studying for what my friend described as 'the hardest exam of her life'. So I'd be 30-40k in debt, for a job I don't want. Plus there is fierce competition for accounting positions here.

Learn to code. Learn for free via http://www.codecademy.com & https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/co...rogramming , practice for free (Chrome/Firefox, node.js, Sublime Text), and free to get very skilled at: you can start applying this tomorrow to learning Japanese, hacking Anki, parsing native text, etc. Post questions in the Lounge and I or any of the other software developers on Koohii will surely answer.

Great advice. I'd just add that for those who are better at art than math and science, the equally (possibly even more) accessible alternative to coding is web design.

yogert909 Wrote:This reminds me of something that I've been thinking about since I don't have very much time to study Japanese every day. I was inspired by "A case for narrow reading" by Steve Krashin. The gist of the essay is that to do something like watch a tv show, read a book or understand a menu in a foreign language, you only need a small subset of the language. E.g. you wouldn't need to know any words describing the weather to order food at a restaurant. You probably wouldn't need to know any words unique to sports to understand a drama.

Even people who spend a lot more time studying than I do get impatient while studying endless kanji and vocab and grammar before you get to enjoy anything in Japanese. So what if instead of using a frequency list from a large corpus, instead you used a focused frequency list from a news article, drama, or movie. Using the simplest example, a typical news article is 500-1000 words and there will be a lot of duplicates so there's maybe 300-600 unique words. So, instead of learning 6-10k words, you could srs only those words in the article. Then when you read the article you'll know every single word without using a dictionary. Essentially you did your dictionary look-ups first. But here's what makes it even better. The next news article you read will contain a lot of the same vocabulary and grammar, so each article will be easier to read and you will need to learn less and less vocabulary to understand it. And you're learning by doing what you want to use the language for rather than memorizing sports terms that you're not interested in anyway.

Among other things, I want to be able to enjoy a Japanese dramas. I don't quite have the vocabulary to do that yet so I'm considering this experiment. I'm planning on getting the Japanese subtitles to a Japanese drama that I've already watched with english subtitles. I'll parse the subtitles and make a vocabulary list for each episode and SRS the list. I expect I'll have under 1,000 vocabulary to learn (much less than if I followed a frequency list) Then I'll watch the episode - maybe a few times if I feel it'll help. Then move onto the next episode. Much of the vocabulary will be the same in subsequent episodes, so each episode will require less and less study.

Of course I'll do this alongside my regular studies, but I'm hoping it'll gain me entry to enjoying native material sooner then otherwise. It's also good because although I don't feel like spending more then an hour or so per day studying, I don't mind watching Japanese TV for more then that. So being able to understand native materials effectively increases my "study" time.

This is a great idea. Half-way through RTK1, I decided to go Lite by learning the top 500 kanji in Nayr's Core5000 deck plus any other kanji used in the subtitles of 耳をすませば, the Ghibli film that my child watches every other day. I've been hoping to finish that in a month for the last month---I think your post has steeled my resolve to finish that. I wanted to do the 500 because I wanted to get exposed to all the primitives, plus, I hate it when I see kanji whose primitives I recognize but I've not learned. Learning the most commonly-used kanji is reducing that (now constant) pain.

After I finish learning the remaining ~250 kanji on that "790 Lite" list (top 500 + 290 other kanji used in the film), I was planning on making cloze-deleted cards with stills from the film and even audio, that sounds cool (if subs2srs doesn't work, I'll fix it, because goddamnittohell, I'm a programmer and fixing things is what I do). Previously I was stuck at the editing and syncing the Japanese and English subs with the video, but now that I understand cloze-deletion and have some experience with it, I don't need the English, I just need to sync up the SRT plaintext Japanese subs with the video.

After I finish all that, I was planning on essentially memorizing the entire script via Anki. Given that aldebrn-junior doesn't seem to want to stop watching it daily, and I really like the film, this sounds similar to what you're thinking.

In the Minecraft Japanese class run by @yorkii, there's a manga reading circle reading よつば！, and I was thinking of doing something similar with that (thought it might be too late now). Set up KanjiTomo, make a list of all the kanji, add that to my Core5k-RTK-Lite deck and learn those at my leisure, but more importantly cram the vocab. There is some impedance mismatch between this and the weekly format, since if making the list and previewing/learning it takes too long, it won't be as much benefit for the meeting and I'll keep falling more and more behind where we are, but I think it's worth a shot.

Edit: please note that the American Pediatric Association recommends *no* screen time for children under two, and minimal screen time for children older than that. The Aldebrns fully support and abide by these recommendations. Don't let your kids watch too much Studio Ghibli!

Stansfield123 Wrote:I'd just add that for those who are better at art than math and science, the equally (possibly even more) accessible alternative to coding is web design.

I would love to see more artists coding. 'Creative coding' seems to be a term used by (of all things) C++ libraries (see http://libcinder.org/ and http://openframeworks.cc/ --- I've seen some great stuff made with this, and great on an absolute scale, not like "wow look what beginners can do lolz"), but of course you can be creative in anything these days: web http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock , mobile http://unity3d.com/ etc.

Edit: removed language flamebait. Don't any of you f***ers starts a flame war in this innocent thread about f***ing computer languages.

ktcgx Wrote:Learn to code? Lol, you must have missed my posts where I confess to regularly ***** up computers...

You can now learn to master them, bend them to your will... for a living!!!

I love your optimism... I dunno, we'll see. Next year is going to be so busy. I'm not eligible for any study support this time around, so I'll be having to work nearly full time on top of studying full time for my honours degree. Combined with my chronic levels of exhaustion, I'm actually kinda worried that I might not be able to handle it.

Well, just found a succinct answer to op's question at slj FAQ "How is Japanese writing taught to Japanese children?": "further non-jōyō kanji may be taught at high school level".

ktcgx Wrote:Haha, I actually am not too sure what I want to do in life.
I guess maybe I could look at doing translation, or teaching Japanese (or English), but I'm not sure I could ever get my language good enough to be a translator.

From what I've heard, you're language skills don't have to be super duper amazing to be a translator.

I mentioned before in my other thread that I spoke at length with a translation editor from Yen Press (they do manga/light novels) and he was a translator before becoming an editor.

He told me a few things that gave me some hope, since I think I'd like to maybe work in the same field.

He studied Japanese literature or art in college, forget which. Then he spent like a year or two bumming around in Japan, and took JLPT N2 (never took N1, he said it wasn't necessary). He also said he is pretty lazy by nature and slacked off on studying.

He told me that a lot of people that apply for translation jobs, even if they have amazing language skills, still suck at translating in the anime/manga field. The reason is because manga and anime are stories, so you have to understand stories; he said (a lot) that it's much more important that you're a good writer than a translator. So he recommended that I start writing my own stuff, even take a few writing classes, because it would make me a much better translator than someone who isn't adept at understanding and writing fiction.

So it's obviously not all about language skills. Actually, from what I've read and from what I took away from my conversation with him, it's actually much more important to understand the language you're translating into and the material you're translating, than just being good at the language the material originated from.


So if you wanted to be an interpreter for businesses, you should know business stuff; know legal terms if you wanted to do that, or technical stuff if you wanted to get into that.

I doubt any of this information will help you think of something you wanna do, but I thought it was pretty interesting because it wasn't really the answer I was expecting to get from him.


There was a thread on reddit about careers and whether people knew what they wanted to do before they got started in their chosen career, and the overwhelming response was no. Most people go through most of their lives not having a damn clue. The important thing is not to give up and stay in a dead end job you hate, but to always keep moving towards something you think you'll like better. You may not know exactly where you want to go, but if you don't like where you are now, then you've ruled out one possibility at least (and possible several related options.)

Right now I have no idea what I want to do either. I went to college for automotive, hated it; now I work as a welder and I hate that too. I've always liked reading and stories in general, and I like anime and have a strange desire to learn Japanese. I've never written or translated anything before, and I'm not very good at Japanese at all right now, but that's what I'm interested in at the moment and I know I don't wanna be where I am now, so I'm moving towards my interests. But who knows where I'll be in 10 years.

Got a bit off topic, sorry.

Interesting post, thanks.

I'm not a good writer, but I do have a love of language, and my English skills are quite high, including obscure grammar and vocab that most people have forgotten about, hence why I have no problems with German word order, since it's basically the same as what I'd call 'old high English', lol.

At any rate, I definitely would not want to be stuck in a job or area I hate, so I'll probably be moving around for a few years yet...