Nii87 Wrote:I stopped wasting so much time on the RtK forums.
...Wait, damn.

I spend a lot of time on these forums (as evidenced by my rapidly inflating post count...) but I manage to get a reasonable amount of work done here and there

mafried Wrote:Nukemarine,

Maybe talk to them and let them know that you are interested in learning Japanese, and ask if they'll put up with your broken Japanese and maybe even give you some feedback? My experience (although not with soldiers) has been that the situation you describe is rude and condescending if the foreigner is just trying to show off. But when people find out that you really are making a conscious effort to learn their native language, they usually take a liking to it pretty quick. Very generally speaking, people whose native tongue is not English feel complemented that someone who already speaks English would take the time to learn their native language.

Remember that outside of this forum people who make an honest effort to learn Japanese are few and far between.

There is indeed a gap that sometimes is appaling....
of course we are all aware to a certain extent that 90 percent of people just don t give a f... about japan . At minimum. By don t care I mean
"oh you ve been to japan/you live in japan ? you ate some dog meat of course.... how does it taste?"
"............
............
............
............"
good news is I grew accostumed , I m barely frowning now....

no what I can t get over is the general laxism inside the gaijin and japanese learner community in general.... I m just speechless before the mediocrity and lack of ambition that I have to deal with everyday.... guys living in japan for 15 years and they never bothered to learn japanese? 7 years and they arent able to read kanji "oh I just ask my colleagues/friends to read me when I m in trouble "? 2 years for passing the 3 kyuu , 5 years for passing the 2Kyuu ? they are more than 125 millions 1st language speaker and foreigner seems to consider it s like learning nuclear physic or string theory......

procrastinating on this forum has dangerous side effects because you end up considering things like SRS, timeboxing , heisig method , systematic mining, movie methodetc...absolutely normal.

blackmacros Wrote:

Nii87 Wrote:I stopped wasting so much time on the RtK forums.
...Wait, damn.

I spend a lot of time on these forums (as evidenced by my rapidly inflating post count...) but I manage to get a reasonable amount of work done here and there

Actually, if you're doing things right, you should have enough break time to make a quick post here a couple of times each hour.

Doing a few more things recently:

1: Ripping audio from first four episodes of most JDrama series that I have. Then cutting those into 3 min 30 sec portions for random iPod play. That'll cover about 80 hours of dialogue from large variety of actors, accents and situations. Before, I did all 9 to 11 episodes of a show but now I'm thinking more lower volume, higher variety is better.

2: Bought a iPod speaker for my desk at work. If they can play a TV in the office, I can play J-Audio at my desk. Looks more professional than having an earphone on all the time anyway. Now if only that one moron can stop moving his mouth at every stupid thought in his head.

3: Getting East Asian language support added to my work computer. I'm justifying the request since recently I sat in as pseudo translator for my deputy director. I'll word it like "This will help facilitate correspondence with Japanese units on base." In case you're wondering, yes, it's a pain trying to get sys admin to do anything even where I'm at.

4: Bought Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, Kanzen Master 1 and 2, Watchmen, Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, and 5 cm a Second books. In addition, got first three manga of Detective Conan, Salaryman Kintaro, H2, and couple of other series.

5. Taped drama scripts around my room. Might change them out to dramas that I have on subs2srs.

Latest thing I did to make my environment more Japanese:

Moved back to Japan, into a 3 generation house of Japanese natives, in a tight knit community. None of them speak any English at all.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Latest thing I did to make my environment more Japanese:

Moved back to Japan, into a 3 generation house of Japanese natives, in a tight knit community. None of them speak any English at all.

nice.

i love maps so i put a map of tokyo up. really wish i had a nice map of kyoto. just looos like the wickedest place.

This is the only English site I come on anymore other than AJATT. While I always get great ideas, resources and answers, I think I'm going to block it from my hosts file. I've got all the resources I need just for the moment, and I need to get back to full on 24-7 Japanese. Seeya for a while!