I started writing a monthly review last month, and I find it very beneficial. This month, too, I will look into what I have done and not done.
Anki
I guess that we all experience ups and downs with our SRS, Anki or other… I have been experiencing a total breakdown during the whole month of April. I have been busy at the beginning of the month and spent some days without studying Anki, with the result that I found myself with a huge deck. What happens in this case, is that I stop learning new cards and try to bring my deck to zero during the following days.
After that, I was not in the mood to learn new words, and I had no fun at all studying my deck (not that it is very funny at all). I try to get Anki over with as quickly as I can, and I got into the bad habit to dismiss cards I don’t know with the “difficult” button even though I should have tagged them “again”. I know I should not do that but…
I have already given up one of my goals for 2018: reaching 10,000 words at the end of the year. However, I think that this is something I can achieve for 2019 and I am thinking of trying JLPT N1 next year in July or more likely in December. When my anti-Anki phase is over, I will maybe consider buying an N1 vocabulary textbook to start adding new words from now on. I want to avoid having a lot of words to learn in a few months like I did when I prepared N2. If I start now for next year, it would not be a problem.
English books
I finished reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, certainly the longest novel I ever read in English. To me, the narrative structure was the most interesting part of the book. I love novels that are about novels, but The Golden Notebook is about writing a novel in its own structure. I mean, writing is a theme of the story, but it goes far beyond it. It is a real dissection of the relation narrator-character, of the difference between a first-person narrative and third-person one. This is, I think, the reason why I loved it so much.
Currently reading: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.
I bought this book some days ago when I had the occasion. I am working my way through English literature by simply following what I find on Google by searching for “contemporary British novels one must absolutely read” and similar things. Among the many titles I find, I go first for the ones I can buy here in Korea. This is how I found and bought The Paying Guests.
The funny thing is that I finally saw The Handmaiden by Park Chan-wook, and I didn’t like it at all. Despite the many praising reviews I read about the film, I still can’t understand why it had so much success. Anyway, there are things that I loved about the film and things I hated. But I didn’t know that it was adapted from one of Sarah Waters’ novels when I saw it. Now that I am reading The Paying Guests and learnt about the novel Fingersmith, I know what I liked and disliked in the film: I loved Sarah Waters’ novel that I haven’t even read, and I hated the gloss Park Chan-wook covered it with.
Anyway, I love the Paying Guests, I love Sarah Waters’ writing. I feel that the English language has incredibly many words, it seems that there is a precise word for everything and that Sarah Waters know them all! Reading her is good for my English.
Japanese newspapers
A question that accompanied me the whole month was: shall I try a paying subscription for either 朝日新聞 or 毎日新聞 to access paying articles?
The reason I would like to try a subscription is that I would like to read more opinion-like articles. I find that the articles I am currently reading do not convey any judgement, they simply report the facts. Even when they talk about political scandals, I don’t feel any criticism behind them.
I came to the conclusion that most of the articles available for free are there to inform and only report what happened and who said what. And maybe, to read articles that convey criticism, judgement, opinions and analysis, one has to read the paying articles. It would make sense, I think.
What prevented me from taking a paying subscription is the idea that these articles will be much more difficult to read and that I won’t be able to do much with them anyway. However, I could try just one month and see… Mainichi has a 1000 yen subscription plan which gives access to all the paying articles for one month. They even have a one-day subscription: 100 yen for 24 hours access. This is not bad when one wants to read a particular article.
I think that I will try a one-month subscription with Mainichi in May!
Conclusion
It is hard to look back at the month and judge whether it was satisfactory or not. I have the feeling that I didn’t do enough in April, that the weather was disappointing (either cloudy and cold or warm and dirty) and that I somehow missed the Spring impulse and energy I thought I would feel when the weather gets warmer. But it is a natural tendency of me to focus on the “not enough” part and ignore what I did achieve.
Even though I gave up on the 10,000 words goal and am struggling with Anki, I am satisfied with other things like reading the news in Japanese or finishing The Golden Notebook. More than everything, I am doing well with my 2018 reading challenge (a Japanese book per month), and this was my main goal for the year.
It was not a bad month after all!
So far, so good. I don’t think that I am mistaken here: with the new system, overtime work and work on days off will not be paid. However, there are some rules that the employer must abide by:
This is the part where I start to doubt my Japanese abilities. It is okay to let your highly skilled professional employee work overtime and on days off without paying him or her for that, provided that the employee can have at least 4 days off per month and 104 days off per year? I mean, it is not much…
Do they really have to choose one among them? Why can’t they have the 4?
When I first wanted to read books in Japanese, I bought mangas. The problem is that with exception from One Piece and Case closed that I love, I don’t much enjoy reading mangas. I guess that I am simply not a manga reader. And then I discovered 益田ミリ（ますだ・みり）and her series of yonkoma manga すーちゃん. I read them all and love them. She has also written several books (not manga) that seem to be personal thoughts on everyday life. I bought one, which is 「今日も怒ってしまいました」. I chose this one because I understood the title, it was short (but they almost all are), and each portion of text inside the book was very short too, with dialogues. Also, the book alternates between text and yonkoma. But I bought it too early, it was still challenging to read a full page of Japanese at the time. So I put the book aside and went on studying. I don’t know why I never picked it up again, but now, I will definitely read it from time to time. I’ll put it in one of the storage bags on my desk to think of it.
Let’s continue with 「蹴りたい背中」by 綿矢りさ（わたや・りさ）. This book is very famous because it won the Akutagawa prize, and its author was only 19 at the time. I have always wanted to read this book in its French translation but never did. When I was well into learning Japanese and reached a point when I could read some things in Japanese, I bought this book. It may be one of the first novels I bought in Japanese. Maybe because it was short (180 pages), I thought it would be easy to read. But to me at the time, it was not, and I gave up pretty soon. It was some time ago, and I think I might be able to read it now. I will maybe insert it in my reading challenge for the year!
During my first trip to Japan, last year in March, I bought 「火花」by 又吉直樹（またよし・なおき）. At the time, this book was piled up everywhere because it had just been adapted into a drama. Once again, I was misguided by its length: 180 pages. It was much too difficult for me. If I remember correctly, there was this scene at the beginning when the two protagonists perform a manzai (a traditional style of stand-up comedy involving two performers). I was completely lost, haha, I vaguely recall that I could not understand at all what was going on. Even now, a year after, I am not sure if I can read this book. I will keep it for later!
First, I bought a book by Dazai, which was completely crazy because it is obviously above my level. I got influenced by the manga Bungo Stray Dogs (文豪ストレイドッグス) who was pretty popular at the time. This manga has named its characters after great Japanese writers and given them some of the real authors’ characteristics. Along with the promotion of the manga, the publisher 角川文庫 had added a new manga-related cover to all the books by authors cited in the manga. If you were standing in front of these neatly piled up books, I swear that it was very tempting to buy them all. That day, I made the solemn resolution to read them all, bought 「人間失格」by 太宰治（だざい・おさむ）, read 10 pages of it, and that was the end of my resolution! I don’t think that I will try this book again this year…
First, a book I read in French a long time ago by an author that I would like to read more and know better: 「金閣寺」by 三島由紀夫（みしま・ゆきお）. I read a third of it and gave up. It was very difficult to read, but some passages were okay and gave me the impression that I could go on. Even if I could not understand all the subtilities of the story, I promised myself to come back to this book years later when I reach a necessary level, and just enjoy what I could for the time being. If you know the story, you know that the protagonist meets Kashigawi at some point in the novel. The first time they met, Kashigawi starts a very long monologue about I had no idea what because I could not understand a word and was literally waiting for him to stop talking. After that, it became harder and harder because it seems that everytime Kashigawi talked or was involved, I didn’t understand. And so I gave up. Again, I am not willing to start again soon because this experience was not a long time ago. But I will read it one day, I want to!
The other title was 「古都」by 川端康成（かわばた・やすなり）and, after my disappointing results with the Temple of the Golden Pavillon, I didn’t even open it. First, I thought I could not possibly read Kawabata if I couldn’t read Mishima (I may be wrong, but that is how I was thinking), secondly, there was no time to read it before going to Kyoto and finally, I came back from my trip with a lot of books for my 2018 reading challenge and I more or less forgot about it… 😳
And finally, a book I already talked about on this blog: 「シャーロック・ホームズ対伊藤博文」by 松岡圭佑（まつおか・けいすけ）. A novel that mixes fiction and historical events and where Sherlock Holmes meets Hirobumi ITO! This is the book (from this list) I mostly want to read, but it is still out of reach. I started it some time ago, and the opening scene was okay because it described something every fan of Conan Doyle knows: the Reichenbach falls. Somehow, I could follow the narrative and descriptive parts, but things got out of control when I reached the first dialogues. Surprisingly for me, the dialogues were more difficult to understand than the descriptions. Maybe it was just this first particular confrontation that was full of references and subtilities… Anyway, I was lost and judged that I should better wait a while before really starting this book.
Inside That Japanese Book 