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By Verdana, 2010/07/20

I’ve been considering getting a dog, so of course costs of caring for one are a big factor in making that decision. Dog costs would include the sum of the following: dog itself, food, potential accessories (crate, collar, leash, food/water bowls, toys) and veterinary care. All of these except one are very easy to take into account and calculate the yearly cost of dog ownership. You know the price of the dog up front. You can also find out how much the food would cost for that kind of dog. Many of the accessories are one time only purchases which could potentially last for the lifetime of the dog. Other accessories may have to be purchased multiple times throughout the dog’s life but wouldn’t usually make a big dent on anyone’s budget. The one that varies is, of course, the doggy health care.

Regular checkup can be anywhere between $50 and $100. Then there are vaccines, deworming, flea treatment, desexing. This can all run the bill up to around $1000 in the first year depending on the dog size and geographical location. The wild card in this calculation is the unexpected medical emergency or chronic condition. When getting a dog, you never know what its health will be like in 5 years. Dealing with some health issues could costs thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

Internet offers many opinions about this issue. Some complain about high vet costs, some advertise pet health insurance, some share their ways of saving money for vet bills. However, no matter how hard I looked, I wasn’t able to find anyone who doesn’t take for granted that veterinary care HAS TO be provided to the pet. Nobody seems to think that vet care, even though available as an option, is just that: an OPTION, not a requirement. Just because you could take your dog to the groomer, doesn’t mean you absolutely have to. You can just as well groom the dog yourself at home. Same should go for the vets. If your dog is sick, you have an option of taking him to the vet, but you can also try to help him yourself. The fact that people in the western world seem to think that pets deserve the same or better care than humans in all respects I find outright insulting.

For example, on one forum discussing high vet prices someone said that they just want to slap a person who tells them “it’s just a dog” when they complain about high health care costs for their dog. Then they went on to say something like they wouldn’t euthanize their child if they had an expensive medical condition, so why suggest the same for a dog.

Excuse me?

My child is my species, my blood, my legacy to the future. I will do anything for my child, even give my own life. No cost is too high to save the life of my own child. On the other hand, my pet is in my life with a different purpose. Its purpose is not to be my legacy and carry my genes to the next generation. Its purpose is to protect me and my house, entertain me, keep me company, warm up my feet, play with my kids and bring me joy. If the costs of caring for the pet exceed the value of the services it provides, then by simple cost/benefit analysis it makes sense to let the pet go.

This may seem harsh, but in reality the pet is better off spending its life in your care than in the wild. It’s been shown that many animals, especially domesticated ones, live significantly longer when cared for by humans than when living on their own in the wild. So even without any medical care, a pet has better quality and quantity of life than its wild counterpart. It doesn’t have to hunt for food, it is fed. It doesn’t need to protect itself from predators, it is protected. It doesn’t need to look for shelter, it is sheltered. If a pet owner never spends a dime on a vet visit, their pet is still way better off than without such a pet owner.

Now I’m not saying that people should treat pets like worthless dirt and not care at all about what happens to them. But people should never put animals above humans. If your dog has cancer and you have the money for his treatment, and don’t mind spending it, by all means go for it. But don’t demonize the people who have more important things to spend their money on, such as food, mortgage, their own medical bills or their children’s education. Vet prices are going up because of better technology available, but keep in mind just because it’s available it doesn’t mean you have to use it.

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By Verdana, 2010/05/17

Let’s say you want to get married. If you live in US, you need to pay the state to get a marriage license. Now this seemed odd to me at first. Why on Earth would you need a license to marry someone you love? Shouldn’t you just have someone perform a ceremony and make an official document that yes the two of you are married and all is well with the world? But then again, why do you need someone to perform a ceremony and write some official document about your relationship? Is love less valuable if it’s not written on some paper? What does marriage mean anyway? What does it have to do with love?

The truth is marriage has nothing to do with love. It has nothing to do with the relationship you have with another person. Instead, marriage is a way of population control by governments and other organizations.

While for most women wedding is all about the pretty dress, the big party, the cake, the decorations, the invitations, the rings, etc., in reality wedding is about giving the government the right to mess with your family life. You have to ask the government for permission to marry. By doing so, you give up control of your relationship to the government. At that point the government has the right to refuse to give you a marriage license. It can require you to do a blood test. It has opened the doors to any other regulation of your marriage that could be signed into law in the future. No wonder people get less satisfied with their relationship after they marry. It has been shown time and again how loss of autonomy leads to loss of happiness and life satisfaction.

So why would one marry then? Why do gays wish to marry so much? Well, there are some benefits to marriage, but they are all derived from organizations. For example, when you’re married, you get some tax relief. You also get hospital visitation privileges and in case of death of your spouse are eligible for compensation from social security. You may be able to obtain citizenship in another country. You can get health insurance through your spouse at a reduced cost.

All of that though has nothing to do with how well you get along with your significant other. It has nothing to do with your feelings for each other or other people. It has nothing to do with your love and your relationship.

Marriage is in its true nature a legally binding contract which externally regulates a relationship between two adults and their relationships with other organizations.

There is nothing romantic about marriage. You can put as many flowers, cakes, candles, rings to cover it up and make it appear lovely, but you will never be able to run away from its true cold purpose. Let’s face it: if you really love someone and want to live with them, you can do it perfectly fine without having that piece of paper. It will not be any less true or valuable or secure for the two of you.

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By Verdana, 2010/01/28

In my last post, I listed the tools that I use for studying the kanji the Heisig way. Now, I will explain the method.

The First Steps

1. Read the intro

First of all, you should read the introduction to RTK. Heisig there explains very nicely how the whole method is supposed to work. I’ve read the introduction at least 2-3 times before I’ve completely understood how to use the book. Believe me, it’s worth it in the long run.

2. Install and set up Anki

To install Anki, go to its website, download it, and follow the instructions.

After you install Anki, you will want to install Japanese support plugin. The instructions on how to do that can be found here.

Once you are done, set up your new deck to use Japanese model. To do that, go to Settings > Deck Properties… > Models & Priorities > Add. It should be pretty simple.

3. Create a RevTK account

Go to RevTK website and create an account. You may want to look around the site to get familiar with it too. It has pretty cool forums which will be a great time leach if you ever venture that way.

That should be it for the setup. Now on to the actual learning of the new characters.

The Learning

1. Look up the character in RTK

When learning a new character, look it up first in RTK. You will find the kanji itself, the English keyword associated with it, the information to help you remember it, the stroke count, any special instructions on how to write it, and possibly some info about its meaning, position, and changes when used as a primitive.

It looks like this:


Many characters are pretty straight forward without any special instructions, so you don’t really need to look them up in the RTK. However, some characters change drastically when they become primitives or they get different meanings. Sometimes you could figure these out with just using stories from RevTK, but other times there seems to be very little similarity between the original kanji and its primitive version. Also, certain primitives are not characters themselves so you wouldn’t find them in RevTK. Like this one:



However you decide to do it, keep RTK handy, because chances are good that you will want to look into it.

2. Find a story

Although Heisig provides the stories in Part One of the book, you are free to ignore them if they are not working for you. Heisig soon weans you off the stories anyway by giving you just plots in Part Two and only primitives in Part Three (the biggest part of the book), which means you eventually either have to make up your own stories or use stories other people already wrote.

That’s where RevTK comes in. This excellent site has an easy-to-use database of stories created by other learners just like you. They did the work, so you don’t have to!

To get started, go to RevTK website. Then go to the “Study” section and look up the character you are trying to learn. You will be faced with something that greatly resembles the frame in RTK, but the part where the story goes will be empty. You can click on it to write your own story. Underneath that you will find a list of stories from other learners.



Read the newest and most popular stories first. If you find one that resonates well with you, take it. Do star the story you picked, because it will help others who come after you. Every now and then you might come across a kanji with no good story. In that case put the primitives together and form a story that will work for you. Unless there is something very obscene or private, please share your story with the rest of the community.

You probably won’t know exactly what works for you right from the start, so experiment with the stories until you find out what makes it easy for you to remember. The feel for it will come with practice.

3. Add a new card into Anki

Click on the big green plus sign button in the main window to add new items. A new window will pop up. There are a few things to do here.

1. Set Model to Japanese (if it’s not like that already; you’ll probably have to do this just once)
2. Set Cards to Production (if it’s not like that already; you’ll probably have to do this just once)
3. Copy the character from RevTK page and paste it into Expression field
4. Copy the keyword from RevTK page and paste it into Meaning field
5. Copy the story you picked from RevTK page and paste it into Meaning field underneath the keyword
6. Highlight the story you pasted and click on the white color button (if the button is not white, make it so by clicking on the < , >, or + buttons around it
7. Click on the Add button

It should all look something like this:



Once added, the story will be invisible, since it’s written in white characters on white background. You may use different colors, but make sure to write the story in the background color. The point of going through this extra step is to make sure you only see the keyword when you review, but to have the story readily available. I will go into more detail about this in my next post.

4. Rinse and repeat

Once you’ve added a kanji, move on to the next and repeat the steps. RTK works mostly because of the way it is ordered, so make sure you follow that order. Start with frame number 1 and don’t skip any until you reach the frame 2042.

That’s it for today. In the next post I will explain how to review, although you may probably already have a pretty good idea.

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By Verdana, 2010/01/14

During the past 11 months I have been slowly learning how to write kanji following James Heisig’s method described in his Remembering the Kanji book. While the book gives you the groundbreaking approach to learning kanji, it is usually not enough on its own to get you through all 2042 characters. I’ve experimented with different tools and methods and found one that worked the best for me. This is the first post in the series explaining my way of doing RTK. Hopefully my experiences will also help others on their journey through RTK.

The Tools

• Remembering the Kanji by James Heisig

Since it’s the essential part of the whole method, you should get RTK book. To save some money I suggest half.com where you can get it from someone who already finished. Also, recycling is good.

• Reviewing the Kanji

RevTK website is a great tool for sharing the stories. This means you can have easy to remember stories even without being too creative and original yourself. The site also has a decent SRS tool for kanji reviews, but I found it too limited for my own needs.

• Anki

Anki is the best SRS program I’ve found so far. It works well for my RTK deck, but it’s even better with keeping all of my decks (kana, sentences, C++…) together in one place so I can save time while reviewing.

• Writing surface and writing utensils

I first wrote just “paper and pencil”, but in reality you could use just about anything to practice writing. As long as you have a surface on which you can write out the kanji and something to write it with. Even your hands and fingers could be enough to satisfy this requirement.

That’s it. Assuming you have a computer with internet connection, these are all the tools you’ll need to learn the kanji the way I’m learning them. In the next post, I will describe how to effectively and efficiently learn new kanji, add them to your deck, and review.

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By Verdana, 2010/01/11

There are many prejudices that burden language learners and range from broad generalizations about how hard it is to learn another language, to some specific misconception about an aspect of the language that is being learned. For this reason, children indeed do have an advantage in learning languages when compared to adults, since they accept things as they come without any false preconceptions of how things are supposed to be.

To me this happened often while I was learning English. For example, English inherited many words from Latin, which are also used in Serbian, my native language. However, they sometimes mean different things and are pronounced differently. This is perfectly normal, since each language took the original Latin words and molded them to fit the rules of the younger language.

The problems for me as a learner arose when I took English interpretations of Latin words as wrong, since they deviated from the way they are used in Serbian and other European languages I’ve been exposed to. “Americans are surely deaf to the way normal people speak and incapable of pronouncing words correctly,” was a pretty regular thought in my head at the time. “It’s not aluminum, it’s aluminium, you dumb Americans!”

Yeah…

Well, while I still think English is in many ways retarded and could be improved, it does me no good to be grumpy about the way it’s using words, no matter what their origin may have been. If anything, that approach only creates resentment, reduces the fun of learning, and slows down progress. Learning a language and being a language purist at the same time is simply a bad idea. Until you know enough of the language that you can effectively use it to discuss the most obscure nuances of its grammar, syntax, spelling, pronunciation, or whatever other grievances you may have, it’s best to just shut up and accept it the way it is used in your environment.

Sure, native speakers might use improper grammar, misuse common phrases, overuse slang, and so on, but in the end it’s their language, and they can do to it whatever they want. The point of a language is to communicate, and if most people around you are using the language in a certain way, even if it seems wrong in your head, it is still the best way to be understood.

I’m finding the same thing happening with people who are learning Japanese. After they get passed the “Japanese is hard/impossible” preconception and actually get to intermediate stage, they continue to complain about some parts of the language. Some complain that there are too many kanji which should be abolished to make the language easier to learn. Then again, others have invested great efforts to learn the kanji and are so much in love with them that they put kanji even when natives would just use kana instead. Yet others complain about overabundant usage of words imported from English and written in katakana.

The point is there are many things you might find strange, different, illogical, annoying, unreasonable, politically incorrect, or simply wrong about the language you’re studying, but let’s face the fact that you are just some foreigner learning a language you don’t know enough about to judge. Accept it as you find it, marvel its quirkiness and learn to use it just the way the natives are using it, even if at the moment it doesn’t make sense to you. Sometimes there just isn’t a reason why something is done in a certain way, except that someone once started doing it like that and others copied.

Once you become comfortable in the new language, you will develop your own isms and strange word usages that will make sense to you and be understandable by others. And who knows, maybe some of them will catch on and become a part of the language, if not in general population, then at least in your own community. Everything in its own time.

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By Verdana, 2009/08/16

It was always amazing to me how easy it is to get sidetracked by following tangents in either my own thoughts or in conversations with others. The topic can be anything and very soon something else will pop into the conversation and take it where it was never meant to go. Unless there is some strong desire to come back to the original topic, the point that was supposed to be made is forever lost to something that at the time was more interesting.

This process is a very crucial factor in learning. In order to learn something, one has to pay attention, and in order to pay attention one has to posses some interest in the subject. While a conversation involves more than one person and the interests of participants will most likely be different, an individual will find his thought process to follow his own interests at the moment, making it easy to pay attention to wherever the thoughts are going.

The tangents in learning are different paths that a person takes in discovering the world. A child might play with a toy truck and then become interested in a number of things such as mechanical workings of vehicles, logistics of shipping goods, geography, infrastructure, history of transportation, family life of truck drivers, etc. By following these interests and whatever tangents arise from researching them, the child will encounter a vast amount of information. Some of that information will be learned and thus converted to knowledge, while the rest will be discarded. What becomes knowledge and what doesn’t is entirely up to the interests awakened in the child.

Different learning environments allow tangents to different degrees, and thus have different advantages and disadvantages.

In free play a person is, as the name implies, free to do whatever he wants. This is great because it allows him to absorb the most knowledge since he will devote his time and full attention to following any tangent to his thoughts he finds interesting. However, this may leave him stuck with things he already knows something about and slow down the discovery of new areas of possible interest.

Conversation is another way to gain knowledge. Talking with others lets the student find out about subjects that she herself may have never thought about. This in turn would allow new interests to form and be followed. Paying attention to the conversation is a bit harder than paying attention to your own thoughts, since you don’t have the full control of the flow of information. You have to listen to something that may not be very interesting to you, but is interesting to other participants. That may allow the concentration level to drop and some of the information would fail to be converted to knowledge.

The most restrictive form of learning is instruction. It is a one way street. Tangents are controlled by the instructor, and everyone else is there just as a witness, not as a participant. This allows mind to wander, following its own tangents. The information presented will most likely be only partially learned and even then to a lower degree than in a conversation. However, instruction can be a good way to expose yourself to ideas that you might find useful or desirable to learn, but not interesting enough to pursue them on your own.

I guess the worst kind of learning environment is the one we have in our public schools, where we have instruction which we’re forced to attend. We’re not even given a chance to consider whether that information is something we could find useful or interesting, we’re just forced to learn it, even if we forget it right after we’re tested. But that’s for another post…

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By Verdana, 2009/06/16

All children are born as autodidacts, but through schooling, most forget that they can learn something on their own without being taught. This happened to me too. After 12 years in brainwashing school systems, I assumed that in order to learn anything credible, it has to come from an institution with lots of good reputation, otherwise there is no way it can be useful.

However, when I was faced with picking a major in college, I picked programming. I noticed that it wasn’t because I had a great programming teacher, or because I took lots of programming classes, but because I was spending most of my free time having fun programming on my own. From that point on, I took learning as something I do for myself and teachers are there only as consultants that will give me advice and information.

I’m now confident that I can learn anything I put my hands on if I really want to know it. Case in point, in the past two years, I became a hobby auto mechanic, just because I was interested in cars. I didn’t take a course at a local community college; instead I bought a 1991 Nissan 240sx that needed some TLC. While trying to make that car run and look better, I researched suspension, handling, intake, exhaust, powertrain, basic maintenance, body work, interior and exterior styling, lighting, etc. and applied that knowledge to my own car, tinkering with it on weekends. I learned about different automotive competitions and driving styles and techniques. In order to make my well built car perform better, I also found the need to improve my driving so I participated in several autocross events. I became friends with people who were into working on cars, so we helped each other and learned from each other. In short, I made cars my number one preoccupation in my free time, which in two years turned me from a completely ignorant girl that would judge cars based on their color, to a car enthusiast who could swap the suspension in an hour or troubleshoot and fix an idle problem.

In the same way by reading books, websites, magazines, forums, Wikipedia, etc. and gaining practical knowledge at the same time, I can learn how to be a vet, a detective, a farmer, a pilot, or whatever else I want to become. The only hitch about being an autodidact is that you don’t get a piece of paper that says what you are supposed to be able to do. I know people who finished computer science, yet can’t write a decent piece of code. They were never passionate about programming, and went for it just because they heard it would be profitable. How are they now any better and worth more than someone who spent thousands of hours on a computer improving the kernel or writing elaborate web tools for fun, is beyond me, but that is how the modern school system functions, and frankly that will get a post for itself.

Regardless, learning new things on your own even especially after leaving school is an invaluable skill to have. By learning whatever you want or need to know, you will become more flexible and adaptable, make your life more interesting, and in the long run possibly make/save money if that’s what you’re into.

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By Verdana, 2009/06/11

For those of you who don’t know what All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) is yet, here is my attempt at defining it in one sentence: AJATT is a method for learning Japanese language by creating a Japanese immersion environment around yourself while having fun every step of the way. Khatzumoto’s AJATT website contains incomparably more information about the whole method, so please check it out, but I’ll try to explain its basic philosophy in the nutshell.

Writing
Khatzumoto suggests learning the writing and meaning of all the basic kanji and kana characters before ever trying to learn anything else in Japanese. The reasoning behind this approach is this: knowing the writing system will put you at the same starting point as a Chinese person studying Japanese. Kanji is considered the greatest obstacle for westerners in learning Japanese, so overcoming it right from the start will greatly help learning other aspects of the language. Being literate will enable you to read real Japanese (books, manga, signs, forms, websites, documents, etc.) from which you will learn real Japanese sentences.

Sentences
Sentences are another big part of AJATT method. Instead of learning words and grammar rules, Khatz recommends just learning complete sentences. Why? Well, it’s actually pretty simple when you think about it. When you learn vocabulary and grammar rules, you have building blocks to make your own sentences. It should be fairly easy to put them together and express your meaning, right? Wrong. It would be almost like learning to walk by training one muscle at a time and then learning different positions your legs will be in while you are walking, and then trying to go for a stroll in the park with all that information and trying to figure it out in real time how all those small pieces of information fit together. Not very practical.

However, when baby is learning to walk, she is learning it all together. All muscles are working at the same time, and even though she doesn’t know what to do with all of them in the beginning and stumbles a lot, she is still slowly developing a fluid walking motion. Even if she can’t really walk, she will be able to go from point A to point B in her clumsy fashion. Over time, she’ll figure out which muscles to use to move the right foot, which to use to move the left, which are used for moving forward, which for moving back, which lift the foot off the ground, which keep the torso upright, etc. and refine the motions of walking until she achieves acceptable level of walking skill.

Same goes for language learning. By learning complete sentences, you will get a feel for the language and where each word usually goes. You may not know the rules and reasons for that particular order, but let’s face it, you didn’t even know what irregular verbs were until you were in elementary/middle school when you already knew your native language well enough to read comic books and used those same irregular verbs just fine. It is no different with your second or third or any other language you decide to learn.

Immersion
Immersion is yet another important component of AJATT. By exposing yourself to as much Japanese as you can, you will slowly start picking up words, phrases, mannerisms, etc. without even noticing. People adapt to their surroundings. When you spend a lot of time with a new friend, you will most likely pick up some of their jokes, phrases they often use, their ideas about things you haven’t thought about before, and so on. You might even pick up their accent, and yet you’ll probably be oblivious to all these changes in yourself until someone who knew you before and hasn’t seen you in a while tells you that you’ve changed.

That’s why you should make Japanese your new friend and just spend a lot of quality time together. Just by being around Japanese all the time, you will slowly pick up stuff without even noticing. You will just be able to understand more and more of it, and then one day you will even speak it and make your own sentences.

FUN
Most importantly though, while spending your time with Japanese, you MUST HAVE FUN! If something is boring, it will become a chore and thus you will run away from it. So whatever you do, make it fun. If it’s not fun, stop it, and do something else. Japanese people have fun in their language, so you can have the same kind of fun in their language too. Or your own kind of fun in their language, whichever you prefer. Like to watch movies? Watch them in Japanese. Like to read books about whales? Read them in Japanese. Like to play video games? Play them in Japanese. Like to cook food? Cook it from recipes that you read in Japanese. Looking for a new car. Read reviews in Japanese… You get the point.

Don’t make Japanese the goal, make it the means to the goal, and you will have a lot easier time learning it.

SRS
In my opinion, Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) is not a required part of AJATT, but it makes it a lot quicker. SRS is basically an intelligent flash card application that makes sure you see the cards you need to see when you need to see them before you forget them or just after you’ve forgotten them. This makes remembering stuff you once learned much easier and reduces the time necessary for review, which in turn gives you more time to learn new stuff.

Well, I think this covers most of the basics. You really should visit AJATT and see it for yourself.

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By Verdana, 2009/05/12

It has begun. From the creator of skvirc and IstinaByLuzers, here is finally just for your enjoyment another installment of a blog! Exciting, isn’t it? No, it isn’t.