Dunno if anyone on my f-list is still around...!

Forgot when the last time I posted here. I ended my exchange year in Japan, lived in Taiwan for 2 months, came back to Sweden and tried to continue working on my degree in Japanese. Now I'm taking Japanese, Yiddish, and hotel/customer service classes (those last ones aren't in uni but I'll get an internship and almost guaranteed a job after). Right now I'm doing double full-time studies and I was depressed in the beginning so ended up behind, I'm not feeling bad anymore but it's very hard to catch up.

Got "hired" as a manga translator except the company has many problems and isn't signing their end of my contract and now has stopped responding to my Emails since a few months ago. Seems like in the meantime one of their main staff members has quit as well. I keep messaging them around once a month to please sign my contract but they're ignoring me. I had a friend who tried to sign up as a cleaner and their cleaning test never even got graded and they never heard anything back from the company either.

As for fandoms, I've been into Golden Kamuy for a few months now.

instead of attempt to repost the photos i'll just link to the entry on my pillowfort here:
https://pillowfort.io/posts/103270

i'm now working on a few more books but the easiest ones to finish are:
1. "how to self-publish, write, format, come up with ideas for etc etc books"
2. "how to translate japanese" (including stuff to do with gendered language, formality differences, when the kanji meaning doesn't match the furigana meaning and so forth)

the translation one in particular i'm slowly growing pretty proud of, because i'm pulling examples from real-life texts as well as covering a lot of topics that were never covered in the translation textbook i was forced to read for school.

tomorrow (the 8th of september) i'll have lunch with my "friendship family" one last time, then there's my farewell party at esperanto club. i have to go online and register that i'm going to throw out large/special trash (2 mattresses + 1 laptop) then go to the convenience store and buy special "tickets" to pay for throwing out said trash. we managed to cancel our phone contracts with a lot of effort (that wouldn't have been necessary if we were native-level japanese speakers) and now we just have to cancel our bank accounts, because from what i read it's illegal to keep a japanese bank account if you're a foreigner moving overseas - BUT we can ask the bank and see if that's true before closing it i guess. japanese banks have no monthly fees, they just take money from you when you're transferring money or paying bills instead.

i got my JLPT results in the mail today, i failed the N1 (got 82 points, you need 100 out of 180 to pass). i'm not really surprized, because despite studying for it for a year at university, when it came time to actually take the test NONE of the grammar we studied was on there, and as usual it was entirely geared towards the kind of japanese formal businessmen need and was unrelated to normal, real-life japanese or japanese for fiction etc. for example, there was essentially no katakana/english-borrowed words on the whole test, despite that in real life they're in literally everything you read, even in ads for "tenants wanted!" and stuff. it was also geared towards people who're fluent in chinese.

the good thing is, if i had gotten a job in japan part of me getting hired would probably have ridden on me passing the test, but since i'll be in taiwan that's not the case and i'll have at least another year to slowly study and pass a retake.

ordered a test copy of the physical version of my book, HOPEFULLY it arrives before i move to taiwan, then i can dump it off at my local esperanto club as a parting gift.

i started writing a textbook + dictionary for greenlandic now, which is really hard because i don't know greenlandic and the dictionaries/lessons suck. for example, "alluu" or something like that is "hello", but i managed to learn from a greenlandic youtuber that "alluu-kkat" means "hi everyone!" - elsewhere it said this kkat means "plural" among other things, but i had no idea from the lessons i saw that you could use it like that.

anyway i'm hoping to make a dictionary of 1,000-1,200 words, throw in a few examples of the grammar from 2-word and 3-word phrases i could actually understand, and then put it up for sale. right now i'm at about 800 words... i'm just hoping that someone will be able to use this book, go on to *actually* learn greenlandic, and then write a better textbook later so i can learn from it myself lol.

hey, one of you guys posted about a goal-tracker site that you were using for keeping track of wordcounts, can you tell me what it was...? i was using it and now suddenly i can't find the link in my bookmarks and can't remember the name of it >.>;

i'm now supposedly at HSK 2 in chinese, working on 3. learning some good stuff, like how to say "it's hard to (eat/look at/whatever)", and "everyone, everywhere". the guy said there's not much grammar left in chinese at all and the rest is basically vocab, but i don't know if he just meant "for conversational chinese" or not.

chinese grammar is, so far, basically ALL either the same as english (ex. word order) or japanese (ex. literal way they say things) so it's proving pretty easy. but understanding the chinese-only instructions (which have just started) is really hard, my brain just doesn't want to recognize chinese as an actual language yet.

i'm slowly figuring out memory aids for stuff like the tones, for example:

flat tone: imagine the word on a road
rising tone: imagine the word on mount olympus or with zeus
falling tone: imagine the word underwater (at the ocean floor on the sand)
rising-falling tone: imagine the word with the letter å which i mispronounce in swedish and end up giving a rising-falling tone

so like 谁 / 誰 ("who" - i already know the meaning so no aid for that is necessary) is a birdhouse with a little "i" symbol on it, on mount olympus. then i remember it's the rising tone super easily.

but i still have to figure out memory aids for all the SOUNDS. i'm trying to do the thing where ex. "shi" is just an image and "zhi" is the same image with ice/honey/whatever around it, but it's proving pretty difficult so far. i think i should revisit a bunch of memory aid tutorials, or maybe search for other people's that are specifically for chinese. when i can make a mental image, even if it's really crappy (like i imagined zeus fanning himself with the letter 単 because it looks like a japanese fan), i have zero problem remembering that part of the word afterwards.

wife most likely lost her wallet when we went on a trip to the neighbouring prefecture yesterday. luckily we went with a tour bus so we could contact the company online about it, and the wallet was most likely lost in the bus, but they aren't open on weekdays and we foolishly didn't write down the phone number the tour guide said to call in case of lost items : /

japan's supposedly really safe, if you find something dropped on the ground and turn it in to a policebox and the person comes to pick it up you get a finder's reward or something so "lost item return rates" are pretty high. there's also lots of stories where a wallet gets mailed to the person who lost it like the same day it gets lost and arrives 3 days later. anyway, all her stuff's in the wallet - we pay the rent and everything with my money so that's safe, but she has 3 bank cards, her proof-she's-not-an-illegal-alien card, health insurance card, etc in there. i'm still hoping we somehow just misplaced it in the house when we got back home, or that someone's already turned it in/mailed it and we'll get it really fast, because it's gonna be a huge pain in the ass and almost impossible to replace all that stuff (i'm not sure she CAN replace her bank card, due to how the bank works and us being abroad...).

in other news she says we CAN go to taiwan, so i can accept the job offer there, BUT if it doesn't work out getting the papers i need to update my passport and stuff (which is looking a bit grim because lol "my swedish doctor's on vacation and won't be back until september" among other things) then we cancel and stay in japan until december, then go back to sweden and try to get student housing somewhere. if that happens we'll be living on student loans for quite a few more years most likely...

wrote a joke gintama fanfic, it's here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/15164027

not much else is going on, my exchange year in japan ends in 3 weeks and if i go to taiwan for work it'll be in the middle of september. i finally got the medicine (a shot) i need to feel better, or at least one out of the two i thought i was going to get, and in general i feel a lot better but i'm still getting stomachaches every morning and stuff - going back to the doctor a week from now.

TRYING to get SOMEONE to come with the beach to me since i've been in japan for what, 10 months, without playing around at the seashore. still haven't done pachinko or gone to see a movie either, but i plan to see the new gintama movie in theatres next month (it costs like $30 USD for 2 people to see a movie so i don't want to watch a totally random one).

hanging around with some exchange students who speak chinese, i can DEFINITELY see how you can actually pick up chinese from immersion if you just know basic chinese already - they repeat the same words AAAAAALL the time, especially words like "here, there, don't want, ugly, cute" etc. and since there's no inflections or anything the words you do know are really easy to pick out. i love japanese but man japanese seems a lot harder than chinese.

took the JLPT N1... in a nutshell, it was designed (same as N2) for people who literally only read "businessman japanese". so if you listen to "hey you made a mistake in your project, go fix it" conversations, read crappy self-help "social psychology" articles, and read a LOT LOT of kanji (= formal japanese) then you'll do fine. there was literally almost no katakana-english in the whole test, and they specifically designed the vocabulary section to stump people who know chinese (like, kanji that have a special meaning in japanese but not in chinese, or words with different pronunciation in japanese than chinese). same as with N1, there was only 1-2 questions that involved keigo and 2-3 that involved everyday casual japanese, meaning you can pass the freaking hardest level of the so-called japanese proficiency exam without proving you know the type of japanese that makes up like 70% of the japanese language. i spent a whole semester studying N1 vocabulary and grammar at school, and did a little self-study as well, and basically none of that appeared on the test (the other students complained of the same thing).

anyway, i'll find out my results in september. i'll probably be working for a year in taiwan anyway so if i fail i'll just retake the thing in taiwan in december.

so still feeling like crap i went to school today, but no one had told me that morning class was cancelled so i had like 3 hours of waiting at the school until my next (and final) class. in the morning i had replied to that teacher's email. her email had said "are you okay? it'd be good if you got better before the JLPT on sunday." i don't even know why she's sending me this email, no other teachers sent me anything.

i replied "i'm sick, i went to the doctor and it will heal with medicine but i'm waiting for test results and things so i probably won't get medicine until thursday or friday, it affects my whole body a lot but i'll try to come to school starting from today. even if i AM in good health for the test, it's a very long test in a very bright room. at any rate i'll be aiming to pass it". i explained all this only because i already knew she thinks i'm lying about being sick. keep in mind i only actually skipped 2 days of class.

so i'm sitting in the break room with my wife, Angry Teacher walks past the room (which has its door open) and goes into the next room (secretary's office) and starts complaining to the secretary ABOUT ME! naturally i couldn't hear all of it but what i did hear was my first name quite a few times, and "...said he's sick but he's sitting in the classroom right now" and "...that's awful, don't you think?" in that tone of voice she uses when she thinks someone is doing sometihng horrifically unjust to her and she wants everyone else to agree with her.

then after a few minutes, she comes into the doorway of where i am (doesn't enter). "hello", she says quietly, "hello" me and my wife say. "how's your status?" as if she doesn't actually care. "i'm pretty bad" i reply. "so (i read from your email that) you went to the doctor and had some kind of test? you didn't get any medicine?" "no" "you didn't get any other medicine?" "exactly as i wrote in the email, i have to wait for test results before i can get medicine and i'll get medicine on friday or so." she didn't seem to believe me that i had any test results that needed a few days, or on that i didn't get any medicine - no idea why. i certainly didn't tell her that getting this medicine actually needed like 5 weeks of tests and the end of this week will get me to the final round. "okay. it'd be good if you got better before the JLPT on sunday.", sort of as if you get better after you've taken medicine for a single day. then she walked away without even saying "bye" or even attempting to talk to my wife, which is apparently a habit of hers.

my wife pointed out that this teacher said NONE of the standard, sympathetic stock phrases japanese people say all the time in this kind of situation - y'know, "don't push yourself" (無理しないで), "take it easy" (楽にしてね), "your health's more important than school", etc. neither her email nor her actual words sounded like she actually gives a crap about me but she still pretends to care about me. it's just frustrating. if you don't care then just leave me alone, don't come talk to me face to face after every little thing that happens, doubt everything i say, and not listen to me OR my wife.

in "english-american literature class" the teacher brought in a halloween dracula cape + hat that he put on briefly and invited us to try on (after class), and we watched a bit of Nosferatu, some 1950's dracula adaption and the 1990's interview with a vampire movie. i felt AWFUL, my stomach was hurting and i was getting hot flashes and feeling like i would throw up and stuff but it was still a really fun class.

when i was going home, for the first time i met a swede by total chance on the subway. it was a mom with her little kid. i was already standing next to them so when the mom moved to put the kid on her lap, i asked "går det bra att sitta här" - "is it possible to sit here / can i sit here" in swedish, but i think she didn't hear me properly and thought i was speaking japanese or something because she got this confused look on her face and didn't say anything. so i just sat down anyway and listened to her Extremely Standard Swedish.

then on the way home i rented the interview with a vampire movie, along with the new gintama live-action movie and a few episodes of jojo. got a bunch more hotflashes, bought sushi and some other stuff at the grocery store and made it home. i really, really don't want to go to school what with how sick i've been feeling but i also don't want to skip school so...

i sent an email to the school's "ombudsman" (middle-man in charge of handling things if you've been treated unfairly) about that BA project proposal. i tried to explain that i think my final assignment (an F) was graded unfairly, and i gave them a copy of what i had turned in, the class grading criteria, the info we got in-class for how to complete the assignment and a screenshot of my grade. and also said that my supervisor had made some rude comments to me and other students in general during the course.

i had already sent 2 mails to the student council-whatever guys and they never responded, so i hope these other guys help intead.

my plan from here on out is:
• take different courses to get a different supervisor; graduating with a BA in Japanese in spring 2020 (my original graduation date would have been autumn 2018!)
• start getting a BA in mandarin
• ask if any of my credits in various english classes & american literature classes count towards an english degree, but my wife thinks they won't

• i'm applying for english-teaching jobs in taiwan, where you only need a 2-year degree and a TEFL certificate (which i've also gotten) in order to teach. i keep applying for jobs in japan but either get nothing back, or they've just hired someone, or they'll only hire me for part-time... entirely due to that i have no BA, or was just unlucky with timing.

i've probably studied 5 hours of mandarin by now... it's helping me sooo much with japanese! the biggest help is kanji meanings, and the meanings of the parts inside each kanji, but it's actually also helping with pronunciation. people say the grammar isn't the same between the two but actually they have some similarities due to stuff like japanese trying to literally copy chinese grammar hundreds of years ago, or due to almost all high-level japanese "grammar" actually just being vocabulary words (with kanji taken from chinese), so it even helps there.

so yeah, even if nothing else but for the sake of my japanese, i'm definitely sold on the idea of to "just keep learning chinese until i'm fluent".

i got a not-even-part-time job as a substitute english teacher!

this can't get me a work VISA so i have to keep looking for jobs, but at least it's something that can go on my resume/CV... i also have no idea how often i'll be working (once every two months??), how much i'll get paid, etc.

i'm 3-4 hours into learning mandarin from "Domino Chinese". they claim that after 22 hours you'll understand around 75% of all mandarin. one lady studied (new material) for 2 hours a day, 10 hours a week, and got to HSK 4 (a feat normally taking 2 years) in 9 weeks. if you study on the weekends and do 14 hours a week instead, that's about 6 weeks. on their official site you can pay as low as $2 USD a month to have access to all their materials, which can at the moment get you up to HSK 5 (=able to read newspapers).

well. i was thinking, i can certainly put in more than 10 hours a week. i can do a little in the morning as i cook breakfast, some at school on long school days, some at home every day — and you can also speed up the videos (which i do on the english but not on the chinese). they've specifically designed their "lessons" to constantly reuse the old stuff so you don't have to actually take notes or really study, you can just breeze through it, so this is a kind of test to see if i really CAN just breeze through all the videos without anki, memrise etc.

why learn mandarin?? aren't i taking the japanese proficiency exam next month?? well:

• just 2 hours of mandarin already taught me kanji in japanese that i hadn't know the precise meanings of, and grammar to figure out kanji compound words

• my exchange year in japan ends next month and for the whole time i've been hanging out with people who speak chinese but haven't been able to understand a word of it — what if, in 4 weeks of constantly taking these lessons, i could actually hold a decent conversation with these guys in their own language? just 2 hours of study and i already started recognizing some words that the exchange students are saying all the time!!

• if i do happen to get pretty fluent in mandarin i can make a buttload of money being a translator... probably

started learning mandarin from a course by a swedish guy on Udemy (you can get your money back if you cancel before 30 days and courses were on "sale" for 1,600 yen each so i thought i'd try it). i've been thinking of learning a bit of chinese for a long time because i for some reason end up making friends with chinese (cantonese usually) speakers a LOT, and also knowing chinese would really help out my japanese (due to weird stuff going on in kanji that i have no clue about). plus i figure, eventually it might be good for jobs or something. the two courses i bought promised to get you to understanding around 75% of all chinese after 20 hours.

well!! i'm only doing the pre-lesson stuff right now and it's already paying off! not only is this guy a really good teacher (even if he wastes time...), but he's making sure to always teach how the stuff is useful. like he taught "king", then he went to burger king and showed the burger king sign. after his like 2-minute tone video i'm already starting to recognize the tones too. apparently he has a website where you can get the same videos for a bit cheaper so i'll just cancel my purchase once i finish watching them all and then go pay at his site instead. it's called "domino chinese" or something.

also continuing to do the TEFL courses but since i've finished the main 120-hour one i can take it easy with the others.

hey! if you wanna join pillowfort (the DW/Tumblr mix), you can get on the waiting list here:
https://mailchi.mp/20a35b1a80af/ai9p4sin4u

also i completed that 120-hour TEFL in just under 7 hours; now i get to wait "up to a week" for my assignment to be graded and if i pass, i'll be the owner of a teaching certificate.

TEFL was essentially reading a book, meant for people who haven't been in school for a REALLY long time and who haven't studied a foreign language, then answering multiple choice questions until the very end where you submit a sample lesson plan + justification for what you put in the plan. most of the stuff to be "learnt" were common sense items as you can see above, and/or all i had to do was think back on the various lessons i’ve had in language classes to realize what they were talking about. the hardest stuff was remembering the TERMINOLOGY - every chapter felt like it threw 10 new abbreviations, or 10 english test names etc, and then i was supposed to remember them and what they were good for ("the IELTS is an American test meant for people who... blah blah"). i still for example don't really remember the names of each type of lesson plan ("PPP", "TTT", "Audio-Lingual"...) or of English tenses ("present continuous"...). they’re all standard terms though so googling them brought clearer info than what was actually taught to me in the TEFL instructions i think. the other problem was essentially that due to their vague wording on the quizzes it was pretty confusing at times.

otherwise, not a problem at all. i think the 120-hour TEFL can actually be done in 5-6 hours, because i barely failed a couple quizzes and had to retake them + was slow in writing my final assignment + tended to eat while sitting at the computer. all in all, if you need a job and/or want to boost your resume, i definitely recommend doing this as it's a piece of cake. i bought the 300-hour package that has extra stuff in it like "toddler's english" and "business english" so i'll be working on those later on, though i've heard the 120-hour course alone suffices for work stuff. i bought mine from "i-to-i" on a sale so it cost around $200 (as opposed to the normal price of around $600) so keep an eye out.

I just completed 27% (=32.4 hours) of the 120-hour TEFL course in… 2.5 hours.

It’s basically just reading a book (written veeeery simply, like, for people who failed high school) and answering some questions that are either 100% obvious or that use the same exact wording they used in the book chapter. The only problem is their wording is counter-intuitive or vague sometimes on the quizzes, which means you get questions wrong because your “common sense” understanding of the question is making you forget what they “literally” said in the book chapter. I'm a relatively slow reader so anyone faster than me would be even faster.

Anyway it's way easier than I expected and with any luck I'll actually finish TOMORROW! I'm copying down all their sample lesson plans (which are full of flaws btw — stuff like, they keep suggesting to make things into contests, but the students who lose the contests will feel bad) and general lesson plan notes because the "final assignment" is to write one up so yeaaaah I'll just copy one of theirs.

visited a guy at a 3-person english teaching school. basically he said he'd ask around if anyone he knows can help us find jobs, even part-time jobs; said we should try for schools outside of town / on the outskirts of town because they're probably a bit more lax with rules, and said i should go get a TEFL (= english as a foreign language) teaching certification.

so i researched about TEFL. a 120-hour course is the international minimum to qualify you for *anything*, but apparently if you know about english grammar, linguistics and/or teaching then you can finish it in NINE HOURS. there was a huge sale on "i-to-i" (which, after googling and youtube-ing, was actually a legit site though it doesn't look that way to anyone who sees it) for a 300-hour course, that ended up being $200 USD instead of the massively overpriced $600-1500 USD i saw on other sites (+ the non-sale price of this site).

you can use a 120-hour course to get teaching jobs in places like china, korea, cambodia and thailand, but each country is a bit different on their requirements. for example, korea wants you to have at least 20 hours of in-person teaching (which you can only get through TEFL if you live in very certain countries) but japan doesn't care about in-person teaching with the TEFL at all. and certain countries want you to have a university degree on top of all this and other countries say you can teach with the TEFL alone.

the 300-hour course is actually one where you finish the normal 120-hour one first, get your 120-hour certificate, then just keep taking more separate courses and i assume get a different certificate later on after they're all finished. you "activate" the course via clicking a link you get in your email after you've paid, and you have x amount of days (70 in the case of the 120-hour course; 21 for each of the others) to finish the course. if you don't finish in time you can buy an extension for like $30 or something. i decided the more hours the safer, since i don't have my degree yet and reading online it seems like the international hour requirements are slowly climbing up so i don't want to have to like, tack on extra courses every few years in the future.

anyway... i bought the TEFL thing, i'm gonna start working on this on wednesday (due to site maintainance) and we'll see how it goes. at the very least, i'll be able to use this to teach in china for a year or whatever while i wait for my 4-year degree and to return to japan, if i really have to do something like that.

got sucked into pillowfort. since it's so new and basically everyone there is actually active, and it's easier for people to find your stuff as well (like even in my brand-new comm, if i just tag stuff other people will find my post), it has the feeling of back when there were actually people on LJ. plus almost everyone there is someone who's actually active in fandom.

wrote a bit more on my "o / go" post for japanese (added a couple quotes + another example sentence), someone found it and commented but they didn't get what i was trying to say at all... i think i need to find a lot more example sentences and then, no matter how badly i explain it, the reader should understand. after i get more sentences i'll get my wife to beta it so it's more comprehensible and then i'll just publish it. it's already at 14 pages in OpenOffice now.

this hormone stuff (or whatever it is) is hell... i'm not so worried about being irritated all day for no reason, but it also makes me feel really tired and then i get really clumsy and stuff. i'm so tired all day i feel like i'll fall asleep sitting up, even though i slept. tomorrow's an important day so i'm just worried i'll be like that thoughout the whole day and make a bad impression at those places i have to go to...

joined pillowfort.io, it's like a mix of LJ/DW and tumblr. it's still in beta but is looking pretty good so far (aside from the layout, which i've changed with add-ons). there's a bunch of features currently missing but that's 'cause it's in beta.

i already made a BL comm, joined a fanfic comm and japanese-learning comm.

EDIT: here's some example images!

( Read more... )

turned in the rewrite of my BA! (with this, my swedish class is over for the semester no matter if i pass or fail)

checked my email 2 minutes later to find i'd JUST (like, 10 minutes before turning in my rewrite) gotten an email offering me an interview at an english-teaching place in sendai!! for next week!!! why they're emailing me at 21:30 i have no idea, it's like being back in sweden again. also the guys from that one english-teaching startup in sendai got back to me and said i can email and/or visit to ask questions about job-hunting!

on top of that i bought harada's "color recipe: 2" which just came out TODAY, and am gonna go read it now!! whoohoo!!!! !!!! !!!

i need to just fork over the cash and get a real iron + maybe an ironing board. tomorrow's the mandatory 5-6 hour emergency drill at the apartments i live in, which is gonna start at 9am and be terrible in general...

Temple University in Tokyo costs around $7,000 a semester for full-time studies and just so happens to waive the admissions fee ($150) for students from my old American community college. You can major in Japanese Language there too. The deadline for applications for fall semester is July 1st, so I've got one month to figure stuff out / decide everything.

I don't have an extra $7,000 laying around but I could theoretically get a tuition loan somehow, and then both me and my wife will just get normal part-time jobs (instead of our not-so-good English teaching jobs we have now) and theoretically make enough money to pay for tuition for subsequent semesters. This uni doesn't cost any more than a language school does, and people pay for language school using part-time jobs so it should be fine, especially considering we're two people...

Of course, the best option is still to just get a job. And also to pass the BA class. But those options are looking pretty slim.