This is news to me.

I was hungry, and it was 5:30 in the morning. So I looked into my coin jar, pulled out five quarters and headed to the minimart across from my apartment complex to buy a snack. Something meal-like but hopefully not terrible. I figured I’d kill about fifteen minutes deciding what to buy.

As it turns out, you can’t by anything with five quarters. I don’t mean the pickings were slim, I mean exactly what i said: you can’t buy anything.

I go down to the minimart from time to time when I’m up late, sometimes just to get out of the house, sometimes to satisfy an instant noodle craving, sometimes because nothing else is open. Maybe I’m going to the wrong convenience store but I was floored that there wasn’t a single thing I could buy with my five quarters.

Not macaroni and cheese. Not cup of noodles. Not an ice cream cone. Not a sandwich. Not a candy bar. Not a piece of pizza. Not a granola bar. Not a bag of pretzels. Not chewing gum. Not a pack of cigarettes. Not even a can of soda or a cup of coffee. Not even a hard, green banana. Nothing in that store totaled under $1.25 with tax.

Uh… what?

I used to think it was just vegetarians and vegans that had a hard time finding food we could eat when convenience called. I was so utterly wrong. Apparently omnivores can’t either because not even spam costs less than $1.25. This is a deeply disturbing discovery. Sure dads today must give their kids two dollars for a snack instead of the one our dads gave us, but that’s not the bit that bothers me. I’m bothered because there was only option left: McDonald’s Dollar Menu.

Call me crazy, but a hamburger — a whole patty of meat, two pieces of bread, and condiments — must cost more than a banana. It has to. Even if it’s just a plastic and corn model of a hamburger, logically it should cost more than a banana. Look at the raw ingredients. And yet, I couldn’t afford a slurpee at the 7eleven but I could afford a hamburger in ten minutes when the fast food joint next door opened.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. It goes back to that whole real price of food rant I gave a while ago. I get it now, I understand why you’ve got no options when you’re from a low SES bracket. I get it. If I lived next to a 24 hour grocery store, the story might be different. But it might not. My options were already pretty limited at that hour but the choice is overwhelmingly one-sided. It’s math I’m not sure I really understand.

I went home hungry and scrounged up enough ingredients for half a cheese sandwich instead.

1. Automatic Backups. The OS has an automatic backup utility built into it called Time Machine and it’s pretty slick. Always protected, all the time.

2. Easy data management. If you pay the mac store reps $89 they’ll migrate all your info over from your old computer to your new one. Once you go mac, you can use the built-in Migration Assistant to move your info from your old mac to the new one with the click of a button.

3. Macs require no maintenance. They don’t get viruses, they don’t require defragmenting, they don’t need security software, and every utility you need is already included in the software. The only thing you’ll need to buy is Microsoft Office. The OS doesn’t come with stupid trial software (called bloatware) and you’ll never have to reinstall your OS. No bluescreen of death, ever. They’re just a hell of a lot more stable and secure in general.

4. All the compatibility issues of yesteryear are no longer issues. Macs can read any PC-formatted drive, they can read any open file format (.doc, .xls, .pdf, anything you can think of). PCs on the other hand, can’t read mac-formatted drives. And if you really really needed to, the new macs are intel based, so you could install windows on your computer as a dual-boot (but really, why would you? OS X is so much better!). The mac store reps call it Boot Camp.

5. These puppies are wicked fast. Scary fast. Snow Leopard, the OS is lightweight and the machines are so locktight. When you buy Apple, you’re buying a brand, yes, but you’re also buying a format. So everything Apple makes is custom built to work with everything else Apple makes. PCs are cobbled together by competing manufacturers and so you get driver problems and hardware incompatibility issues, but because Apple makes every component in their computers, it all works seamlessly inside that little silver case. This means it will all work seamlessly with your iPod too.

6. They last forever. I had a roommate that had her mac laptop STRUCK BY LIGHTNING and it still ran for four years. Mine is going on six years old and it still runs great. It just couldn’t keep up with the demands of HD video playback, a notoriously resource intensive codec and for work, I really need to be able to edit HD in real-time, without waiting around for stuff to render. I’ve converted my old mac into an entertainment system. I got a free OS upgrade, a free battery replacement, and lots of patient genius representatives that spent a good two hours trying to figure out why my USB bus suddenly stopped providing enough power to spin a 7200rpm drive (they fixed it, by the by).

7. Freebies. The Apple summer deal is going on, so if you buy this month or next you’ll get a lot of freebies. A free printer, a free iPod Touch, a rebate on MS Office, they do a lot of summer deals at the apple store and god damn if the iPod Touch isn’t a really fun little machine. Think of all the travel you do!

8. They’re incredibly usable. They’re just fun. They come standard with a lot of really fun features and you can do anything you want right of the bat really easily. You can make movies, download music from iTunes, stream netflix, record your own songs, make photobooks, all sorts of fun stuff. They’re pretty, they work well, and most importantly, they’re easy to use. The biggest thing you’ll have to learn how to deal with is using the command button (the cloverleaf) instead of the ctrl button. Other than that, almost everything else is the same nowadays.

9. Mac developers are awesome. We’re a passionate bunch, and the cocoa development group is incredibly dedicated to creating awesome, well-formed, elegant programmes and solutions. They’re so much out there that’s mac only and near-perfect software. The Panic team has some amazing applications, Daylite changed my life, and everything from Adobe to Skype is just so much prettier on a mac. The devloper base alone is reason to switch.

10. They’re cheaper. No joke. If you put a Sony Vaio, a Gateway, a Dell, and an Alienware PC with the exact same speeds and specs side by side, you’ll find Apple’s version is actually a better value. Sure you can’t get a mac for cheap, but you also can’t get a bad mac. I can find several $400 laptops that, pardon my french, blow chunks and are impossible to use. But even the $700 mac mini, the cheapest mac you can buy, runs like a dream. That’s what I call value.

There’s more too, the amazing possibilities it allows, the premiere software it offers, the de-facto status among creative professionals, but for now, 10 reasons are enough. You fanboys and girls out there, any other important reasons I’m forgetting?

Inspired by Anger Burger’s post last week, I thought it might be fun to talk bout the jobs I’ve held — the brilliant, the miserable, and the utterly ridiculous.

And those are just the jobs I can talk about. What about you? What fields have you dabbled in? What odd jobs have you taken?

Metrocurean DC is a local foodblog with a regular feature called “Five Bites on Friday,” a weekly roundup of one local chef or reader’s five favourite places to grab a bite to eat.  It’s great for finding new spots to hit up, reaffirming your love of old standbys, and for unearthing the latest incarnations of long-standing restaurant groups so abundant here.  Even better, Metrocurean regularly posts the occasional unpublished or speakeasy deal to save you a dime for other dinners out.  It’s worth checking out if you’re in the area.

Two DC chronicles the explorations of a couple new to the DC area, complete with in-depth looks on DC standbys (think Julia’s Empanadas and Ben’s Chili Bowl), hopeful visits to the newest in the neighbourhood, and a number of take out places I’m itching to try. This is the best blog in the area to be perusing if you’re trying to get your bearings.

And of course, what Washingtonian would be legitimate without a gander at the DCist’s food & drink section, which mostly regales restaurant openings and publicity frenzies.  Still, it’s worthwhile to hear from the perspective at the top: which chains are opening new spaces, which yoghurt reigns supreme, who the current contenders for best burger are, which chefs won awards, and of course, which restaurants you’ll need a months-before reservation for.

If you’re trying to get away from all the ribbon cuttings and tasting menus, might I suggest you check out Tyler Cowen’s Ethinc Dining Guide to the greater DC Metro area.  Like his beloved hole in the wall establishments, Tyler’s blog is no-frills and to the point.  You’ve come to find the best noodles.  Or tofu.  Or Korean BBQ.  Or family-friendly Ethiopian vegetarian restaurant.  You want serious Himalayan food and Filipino bread and you want it now.  Tyler Cowen will turn nameless strip mall facades into a street map of finding your way around the ethnic spots worth hitting up in DC.

If home cooking is more your speed, there’s always Ed Brske’s blog about gardening, cooking, and eating in the DC area. Ed writes about everything from squash cassaroles to nearby school lunches to legislation that affects family meal time, all from his backyard in Columbia Heights. As a former reporter, Ed’s posts are always timely, high quality, and deeply relevant.

We all probably have a love/hate relationship with YouTube, and for the wonderful array of offerings this portal hosts, YouTube has an equal number of ridiculous, crude, and worst of all, boring videos. Still, running across the occasional explicit video is well worth the myriad product reviews, art projects, and cooking lessons presented by the other 70% of users. The truth is, there’s a lot worth watching on YouTube, and as I’ve gained more and more exposure to better and better content from independent artists and professional experts alike, I’ve started using the YouTube subscription feature like a television DVR queue. So today, in a nice little roundup I thought I’d show you some of they really good YouTubers (and Vimeo-ers) out there and tell you why you should give their videos a look.

Pomplamoose Music / Pomplamoose Music
Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn (aka: Pomplamoose) are a pair of gifted musicians with a bright, airy sound and a fun attitude. The duo covers popular songs (think Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” and Earth wind & Fire’s “September”) with an engaging editing style and a downright delightful music composition. If they created the channel in hopes of promoting their music, it worked for me. They have by far the most creative music videos I’ve ever seen, in terms of quality, consistently, and quantity.

Kevin Cooney / tokyocooney
Kevin Cooney (aka: Tokyo Cooney) probably has the best daily life videos you’ll likely come across. Kevin is a comedian and actor living and working in Tokyo still going strong with super videos. He may not upload as often as some of the others in the J-Vlogging community of Japan, but Cooney’s videos are always of substantial length and never fail to make me laugh. He does a good job of not only explaining Japanese culture with the respect (impressive in a comedy setting) but also by relating it to the rest of the Western world. Whether it’s eating ridiculous flavours of ice cream at Ikebukuro Ice Cream City or marvelling at the bounty of the Kombini, Kevin’s videos are well worth your time.

Impactist / impactist
Couple Kelly Meador and Daniel Elwing (aka: Impactist) have an collection of their creative work: commercial work, fun little animated shorts, and incredible electronic music. They seem inspired at every turn, making their uploads really intriguing videos to watch, regardless of your profession. Sometimes cute, always quirky, Impactist are able to perfectly capture a different emotion with each video, be it child-like wonder, complete solace, redeeming curiosity, or just a little silliness. It’s experimentation meets expression at its finest.

Vancouver Film School / VancouverFilmSchool
At first glance the VFS channel is nothing more than a showcase for student work, but the extensive archives and impressive shorts make it one of the best art showcases out there. There’s alarmingly polished 3D modeling shorts, thesis projects, and some thought-provoking shorts I’d never have expected to find so readily. Best of all, VFS uploads all their videos in crisp high definition and when it comes to the work presented, the sharper the better.

Revoluiton Cycle / revolutioncycle
Simon & Fearghal (aka: Revolution Cycle) are just about to complete the first Irish circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle, but they posted many a video along the way documenting their progress. The videos are short but sweet and surprisingly entertaining, even if cycle touring isn’t your thing. They have some high quality travel videos that manage to strike a balance between the personal intimacy of a journey such as theirs and the public appeal of an internet video travelogue. It’s a hard line to walk, but they do it well enough for me to recommend their work.

Want more?

Meet Verbal and Taku, the greatest duo since bread and butter. Who are they? Japanese musicians. They work in a variety of styles with a number of other artists from BoA to Yoshika but mostly they just make rad beats and rap over them. So yeah, M-Flo are hip hop artists from Japan and they’re going to teach you how to speak Japanese. Maybe with a little gangster swagger, but hey, what did you expect from international playboys? Sure listening to Japanese music must be helpful, but why M-Flo in particular? Well, my dear friend and fellow Japanese language enthusiast, M-Flo is the perfect duo to help you hone your linguistic mastery. I’ve not just one, not two, but eight impressive reasons why you should put aside your differences and learn to embrace M-Flo for the sake of your fluency.

For starters, all Japanese music, not just M-Flo are ideal choices to improve your listening comprehension because they’re written by native Japanese speakers for native Japanese speakers. While listening to Japanese audio tapes or informative podcasts will help explain some things, real Japanese speakers don’t use the same vocabulary found in Genki Chapter 8, they use much more and they say things much faster. Listening to native-made materials targeted to a native audience will get you to functional fluency much faster than Tanaka-san and Junko-san from your JLPT textbook conversation ever will. So start listening to the organic Japanese being created out there now.

Another reason why M-Flo are lightyears more interesting to listen to than Tanaka-san and Junko-san, aside from vocabulary and Japanese slang a-plenty: it’s musical. It’s catchy. It’s got beats and hooks and choruses (that, thank goodness, repeat) with sound effects and basslines and even bridges that make you want to sing along in karaoke or at least dance. It’s not rocket science, it’s pop music. You don’t have to judge it against Wordsworth and Mozart, you just have to nod your head because the important bit is that it’s catchy, and catchy = memorable. Remember all those folk songs you learned as a wee one? Well, Verbal is your new Raffi.

So they’re catchy songs, yes (did I mention Loop in My Heart yet?) but even better, they’re short. M-Flo tracks may be filled with dense blocks of surprisingly clever rap, but they’re short and sweet. By the time your not-yet-fluent brain gets tired of hacking away at complex sentence fragments with your mental machete of diligence, the song will be over. Just as you’re about to pass out from the 8-G speed at which you have to read hiragana, the musical interlude will be here. It’s not easy material — a plus really, since it means you can spend hours working on it and still glean more every time — so the shorter chunk you can take it in, the better. I don’t know about you, but I find three minutes and thirty seconds of full on concentration to be a lot, enough to make me feel accomplished when I finish a song but easy enough to repeat the process.

I never seem to mind repeating the process either because it’s actually interesting. Like most, M-Flo songs are loosely narrative anyway, so I’m always pleasantly surprised when I realise that peppy track is actually about cheating or that sad-sounding ballad is about the first kiss. Plus the tune about a summer fling gives you all sorts of specific vocabulary for such an occasion, and how else would you ever know the word for “golddigger” if M-Flo wasn’t there to teach you the ropes? It’s like reading a book but simpler and with a better backbeat.

The narrative story of an M-Flo song becomes especially apparent in the music video, which you can easily look up on youtube. You may have never heard of them before this very moment, but M-Flo are Japanese hip hop royalty and completely prevalent all over the interwebs, thus they, their videos, and their music is readily accessible to anyone anywhere the web can be accessed. You don’t have to go to great lengths to hear Love Bug, you just have to google search the song title.

You want M-Flo to be popular. You want people to use their songs as ringtones and you want their videos to be copyright protected and all that jazz because it means you can find their lyrics really easily online. That’s the best part of learning Japanese through M-Flo: the actual words being spoken are already written out for your to follow along with so you can learn the kanji as you go (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) properly. You don’t have to rewind and pay the clip nineteen thousand times to hear if he’s saying きもち or きもじ because it’s right there for you. You can learn the word and its proper pronunciation easily and quickly. TV shows rarely publish transcripts and movie subtitles are almost always off, but an M-Flo song has its own accurate transcript ready for your consumption. Just search the song title and 歌詞(かし)

Now it may be pretty daunting to skim through those lyrics, especially if you can’t read it quickly or don’t recognise all the kanji. This is why M-Flo and Wise are much better to study to than, say, Rip Slyme or Silk Road (other awesome Japanese hip hop artists). Verbal and Taku (and Wise for that matter) are both fluent English speakers, so their songs are punctuated by English catch phrases that you can actually understand. You can use these as placekeepers to see if you’re on the right line or to adjust your reading speed to match their speaking speed.

That’s the whole beauty of using M-Flo to learn Japanese, you can self correct without having a teacher over your shoulder or a native speaker feed you hints. Taku sets the pace and Verbal feeds you the hints already. You can hear a word and because it’s a catchy, short story punctuated by English you can figure out the meaning from context pretty easily. If you’re already in Japan, you don’t have to feel silly listening to practice conversations or survival lessons from JapanesePod101 (a great resource, by the way), to everyone else you’re just rocking out to some M-Flo. People may even compliment you on your music taste, and if you aren’t familiar with the Japanese music scene, M-Flo tends to feature some of the biggest artists so you’ll know who to name drop when asked for your favourites. Seriously, don’t be afraid to let Mssrs Verbal and Taku from M-Flo school you in the fine art of street words, dangerously catchy loops, and native-level (if informal) Japanese.

With so much information floating around, readily available, it can become overwhelming fairly easily and, in the case of many naysayers, so easy to simply denounce. However, the accessibility of how-to information and new communicative mediums like social networks and forum communities can also give rise to some incredibly inspiring material. People are doing amazing work, and that work is making its way around the interwebs to incite change and invite other great derivative works. Because of these two facts, it makes it rather difficult to those of us well attuned to both society and technology, for we are constantly struggling with the balance between unnecessary information and life changing information.

Recently I set about purging my RSS feeds and social networks, and while I fully expected to unsubscribe from half of them, I ended up only choosing to filter out a few. My criteria has become quite clear, and yet the problem I faced was reading a large bookshop filled with authors who have great things to say. I just didn’t have the time to read all of it I wanted to, and yet I still wanted to be able to skip a few days of feed checking and not be overwhelmed by the backlog. After all, I find the writing of certain others a huge source of inspiration and advice, and the idea of missing out on the things these people have to say is a truly stressful prospect.

Yet, despite such an overwhelming amount of high-quality content, alas I had to trim down my 100+ blogroll. Generally I read up on many different subjects as varied as graphic design and typography to cooking and nutrition to lifestyle design and personal finance to asian culture and nomadic travellers. It wasn’t even the length of blog posts that forced me to unsubscribe. When Bread and Honey ends up ranting for several paragraphs about nothing related to food at all I still find myself reading every word, while sometimes Brooklyn Nomad’s 500 word posts are just too long for me to bother with. It’s a wide world out there: if Steve Pavlina has mastered the longform, Seth Godin is a ninja of the short, which just goes to show there’s no real formula. If you’re good enough, I’ll read it.

In spite of well-written posts and a decent topics, there are three major criteria that are nagging enough to make me unsubscribe to otherwise totally worthy blogs, and I thought perhaps not every blogger out there has spent a lot of time matching their format to their audience. This isn’t wholesale advice, it’s my personal opinion and a small insight into what I think can get in the way of your stellar content, despite your best intentions. You may not care that you’re one reader down, but then again you may take my complaints into account as I outline the top three reasons why I unsubscribed to your blog.

1. Truncated RSS Feeds
Now, I know there’s been a huge debate raging in the blog world about full vs. truncated RSS feeds, but in my opinion it’s a no brainer. The risk you run of getting your feed scraped is infinitely less important the risk you run of not connecting with your community. Not only is a shortened RSS entry more likely to get skipped over by me in comparison to the full-length posts flanking it, but I am incredibly unlikely to click your link. There’s no good excerpt length either. A few sentences is not enough to get me interested and tends to have the opposite effect, while a few passages is just enough to make me frustrated I have to open up my browser, wait for the page to load, and then reread the bits I’ve already read. I rarely bother. So if you have a truncated RSS feed, I urge you to try a full post feed and see if you convert better. See if your community grows stronger. It drives me nuts because I do want to read your entree posts, but I’ll settle for the appetiser version instead of consuming all your content. Stop with the truncation and let me use my feed reader as it was intended.

2. Updating Too Often
I hate this with a bitter passion. If you update more than twice a day, I will not read your blog. I’d rather you write amazing, in-depth posts once a week than tiny morsels every hour you think about it. That’s what twitter is for, not your blog. I suppose this reveals my preferences for actual people rather than aggregate sites because I value a single person’s opinion, even one I disagree with, infinitely more than several. Do I read the Gadgeteer? No. Do I read everything Julie from the Gadgeteer reviews? Yes. Because she only writes when it’s worth writing about and she’s has one of the only sensible female voices in the industry. I Love Typography only updates one a month but each post is incredibly information-rich, perfectly formatted, and thoughtful. Die-hard Man U fan though I may be, I don’t read a single news feed because it would be barmy to hear the same quote about Nani seventeen times a day. It’s easy for me to stay subscribed to you if you don’t update as often as I’d like, but it’s much harder for me to continue to put up with your excess posting if I only like part of what you offer. Don’t update 11.7 times a week. It means you aren’t spending enough time on your writing.

3. Unoriginal Content
I’m not just talking about stealing someone else’s material and not attributing it, though that is a scary-big deterrent for me. I’m talking about what happens when a blog stops writing anything original and instead just guest posts, hosts blog carnivals (link roundups), interviews people, and reposts. This is why I do not understand how most people use tumblr. If I know you personally, I totally care what you read and what you listen to and what you like. That’s what del.icio.us, goodreads, google buzz, retweeting, and youtube subscriptions are for. Not for your blog. If you’re going to share a video, please explain why you shared it. If you’re going to interview someone, you better say something no one else has said about them. If you’re going to host a carnival, it better be framed by generous commentary and you better have five times more original content before you even think of hitting the publish button. This is a blog for goodness sake. Make it personal already. Travel blogs make this mistake a lot. I can find good flight deals and reservations in wherever you’re travelling on my own, but I can’t see it as you do or meet the people you did. I can look up volcano whatever, but I can’t have a spiritual awakening during a night hike. You have to make me care beyond the norm. The best travel writers write about what they did and why it was worth reading instead of where they are and how they got there. Liz Learns Japanese utilises ideas from all over the place, but although the story is the same everyday (”I’m practicing Japanese!”) she manages to make it personal, tells you a victory or a struggle from her daily life or a neat trick she’s tried, noting common phenomena through a unique voice. And guess what, I freaking love it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to make it yourself.

I talked about my troubles with Japanese class a while back, when I was debating whether to continue with formal instruction because it was drop-dead boring. I never made it to my fourth class, instead I combed iTunes for Japanese language music and updated my Netflix queue to only include Japanese movies. I am so glad I stopped going.

Now that’s not to say that we don’t all need a little help now and again, or to suggest that classroom learning can’t be fun, but for me, rote textbook memorisation wasn’t enough. I’m still a beginner in Japanese, but in the few months since I beefed up my own studies, I’ve learned absolutely loads about how to make leaps and bounds in a language most of my mates still find baffling. The biggest question is the how. How do you start from scratch, how do you make significant progress when you’re facing linguistic Mount Everest? What do you need to do to get a foothold stable enough to build some momentum? I thought I might share some of my language learning best practices so that you too might find a way to conquer that intimidating foreign tongue.

1. Stop with the pretense
If you’re waiting until you learn X to do Y, or if you think you can’t do THIS because of THAT, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot. It’s stupidly easy to put off things or to create qualifiers or to feed your energy to the wrong thing. I struggled with this quite a bit when I started my vlog but I can’t tell you how glad I am I made it over the pretenses I had put up to keep me from doing what I wanted to do. Having trouble quieting the lizard brain? Do what I did with vlog 1, make it bad on purpose. Not hard, but bad. Do it badly. Make it suck. Then the worst has happened and you can get on with the learning. You can put the pretense aside and start doing. Don’t wait until you know all the kanji to try and read manga. Don’t tell me you can’t speak Japanese because adult brains harden after a certain age. Don’t believe it’ll take years to become fluent. Don’t think there’s no good music. There is no reason in the world you cannot learn Japanese. No. Reason. Whatsoever. So stop with the pretense. Remember, it’s never a good time so you might as well get cracking.

2. There is no excuse for illiteracy
First of all, millions of people can read Japanese well enough, and millions more know triple the number of characters you have to know (Chinese has significantly more hanzi than Japanese has kanji). Second of all, the writing system is the best way to communicate in the language. Especially kanji, because drawing the kanji of a concept you don’t know how to say let alone pronounce it will get you much farther than any kind of gesturing, pantomiming, or poorly pronounced vocabulary ever will. Learn all three alphabets as you’re learning to speak. If you’re a Japanese school child, you’re surrounded by the writing every day of your life. You can ask your parents questions. You have to read it every waking hour of your school day. You would be laughed at for not knowing it. You are not a Japanese school child, so you need to learn hiragana and katakana immediately if not sooner. As for kanji, same thing goes. Japanese school children learn less than 200 characters a year until they graduate. Not you. You’re going to learn much faster because, unlike Japanese school children, you are not confronted by hundreds of characters every day. You can live your life happily without ever setting eyes on a single character. So you are going to have to shove kanji down your throat. Make it easier however you need to: by making up mnemonic stories, using pictographs, reading that textbook that uses examples from manga, using the Heisig method, eating an m&m for every kanji you get right, it doesn’t matter, just do what you have to do. I’ve learned more kanji in three months than my intermediate-level Japanese college buddies did in 3 years and as a result I can read what feels like 13 times the street signs, maps, and menus they can.

3. No, マジ(for real), learn the kanji.**
It’s intimidating I know, but far from impossible. Here’s how you do it: 1) ignore the way the Japanese government/most schools present it. You have to separate out your writing learning from your reading learning. Learn more kanji than you learn Japanese. In other words, learn the meanings of kanji you don’t even know the Japanese word for yet (e.g., learn 専門 means specialty even though you don’t yet know it’s pronounced せんもん and is translated as major/area of study). Learn the characters and stroke order along with their English meanings first (stroke order is important otherwise you can’t look them up). Then learn their readings and radicals and all that jazz. As you learn more about the spoken language, you’ll have a better chance at discerning when they’re used and how to pronounce them (which changes based on context) than you would by straight up drilling. 2) When you learn a Japanese word, learn it all at once. When you encounter a new word or phrase, learn how to say it, what it means, and how it’s written with kanji otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad trying to unlearn stuff later. Plus you’ll be literate a hell of a lot faster.

4. Pimp the vocab, drop the grammar
This was a most valuable lesson taught to me by Benny Lewis. When you are at square one and you know nothing, the most important thing you need to do is pimp your vocab. Beef it up. Cram it into your head. Learn everything in your basic phrasebook. Do not start with the first pages of a textbook. Textbooks like to teach you the most basic grammar and the most formal vocab. In Japanese they seem to start with “to be” structures, introductions and asking people what school they go to and how old they are. Besides being dry and dull, I find it harder to start with grammar. Too much is unfamiliar. And you still can’t talk about anything because you don’t know the words “I” “know” or “nothing.” So forget about grammar. You’ll learn it intuitively and remember it much better after you realise that “の” seems to denote possession than if someone had told you outright. The point of a language is not to write copy-perfect paragraphs. The point is to communicate, and what you need is to develop a base of vocabulary from which to communicate. Back when I was in Kyoto and knew zero Japanese, I could still ask someone where they were from by pointing and saying “anata” and then looking inquisitive. I didn’t have to know that -ka signifies a question, or that anata is understood, and when it isn’t must be followed by +wa, no screw all that. Now that I know enough vocabulary to order in a restaurant, I know I should have said “doko kara kimashta ka” or “watashi wa vegitarian des.” But you can bet I knew how to say “niku” (meat) and shake my head before I knew the rest of it. So don’t stress about grammar until you have a shedload more vocabulary in your arsenal first.

5. Avoid translations
Eschew anything with romaji. It will just make it harder for you. Don’t watch anime or movies with the subtitles on. Subtitles do a great job of making you focus on the story but a terrible job of making you concentrate on the language. Story is incidental. It’s the honey that makes greek yoghurt taste better. Watching subtitles is not eating yoghurt at all, thus not improving your Japanese. And like taking straight shots of honey, just focusing on the story is addictive but ultimately leaves you hungry and is not the best way to go about snacking. If you’re really fighting to read よつばと but can’t seem to get it right, the moment you turn to the English translation is the moment you have no reason to keep struggling. It’s basic logic. We’re hardwired to take the path of least resistance. So don’t offer yourself that option. Instead keep at the hard stuff and you’ll progress faster overall, despite how painfully slow your progress through a single page may be.

6. Be a tortoise, not a hare
Okay, this one I stole from Khatzumoto, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if it isn’t true. Sure your rate of improvement is directly proportional to how much time you but in, but it isn’t like filling a coin jar. Whether you put in two quarters every day or 60 quarters at the end of the month does matter. It’s like eating. Your body probably wants around 2,000 calories per day, and we tend to spread them around the the waking hours. If you eat 10,000 calories for breakfast on Monday, you may skip some meals but you will be hungry long before Friday rolls around. You haven’t thwarted the eating system by filling your coin jar for the month, you’ve gained weight and probably messed up your metabolism. Just like your body is good at processing calories, even excess ones, it’s really good at forgetting stuff that isn’t constantly reinforced. If you want to eat properly, you have to eat three meals a day every day, and if you want to learn Japanese you have to practice regularly and routinely. Read more about why tortoises are much better than hares over at Khatzumoto’s site.

7. Start with filler words
If we’re talking about basics in any language, I might add that one area you won’t be able to navigate by feel is the filler words. The particles, subject markers, indefinite articles and other such nonsense that appears a ton but seems to have no meaning. So if you only read up on one thing, read up on the particles and what they mean. Learn the conjunction words. Learn words like “anything” or “something” or “nothing.” More importantly learn your Ws (what, where, why, who, how, etc.) and your Ts (there, that, this, those, these, the others, etc.). Luckily you won’t have to learn possessives in Japanese but if your target language requires them, learn them too. Learn the prepositions. Learn how to stall in your language. How do you say “er…so…well…that’s right…” and the like? Having these filler words will not only make your Japanese sound more native and smoother, but will help you pick out new vocabulary amidst the words you don’t know. You can tell when わ is は and other semi confusing bits of grammar you are going to ignore until you’ve learned more vocab.

8. Practice numbers early
This is especially true with Japanese, where the word for three when talking about people is different than the word for three when talking about pieces of paper. Numbers are incredibly important. Can you image not being able to tell time? Not being able to write down a phone number? The problem with numbers is that you have to know them backwards and forwards, in other words so thoroughly that it appears intuitive to be able to use them. Just knowing how to count to 100 isn’t enough. Get really insanely good at dealing with numbers sooner rather than later. You’ll need the help, and if you get good at spouting off and picking up numbers you’ll be one whole huge step more functional. It will take much practice, so get started now with your numbers, and you can thank me by sending a 三百(さんびゃく) euro check to me later.

**I hear “but kanji is sooooo hard!” all the time and it drives me crazy. It’s one of my pet peeves when people claim writing systems are too difficult. I don’t care how difficult (or more accurately, different) they are, being illiterate but fluent is a travesty. Especially you expats, if you’re living somewhere for goodness sake take a few months to learn the language of the country you’re in. If you don’t know to read it, you don’t know the language.

5% Unassuming Bookworm

Because I read voraciously and I buy mostly nonfiction

Because I hold library cards to multiple counties

Because I am a member of a Young Adult Fiction book club

Because I still make book covers out of grocery bags for my most precious volumes

Because I prefer glasses to contacts

Because I would rather browse a bookshop than sightsee when I travel

5% Leet Superuser

Because I think shell commands are faster than GUI ones

Because I understand how RSA works, change all my passwords every three months, and monitor my RAM usage on my desktop

Because I find DIY projects relaxing and actually read MAKE:

Because I programmed my computer to talk to me when I log on

Because I am the master of keystrokes and custom shortcuts

Because I refuse to sell my tube telly so I can still play my original NES lightgun games

15% Loudmouth Texan

Because I am usually the loudest person in the room

Because I slip into a Southern accent when I’m angry

Because I own and wear a cowboy hat

Because I live in denim

Because I am elitist about BBQ, Soul Food, and Mexican fare despite being vegetarian

Because I could drive through West Texas on autopilot, including the detour to Buckee’s

30% Tiny Hipster

Because I wear skinny jeans and love plaid button downs

Because I don’t carry a purse

Because I own a wardrobe entirely from Vale-U-Village, my sister’s closet, or 8th grade

Because I have been to more Of Montreal concerts than you

Because I rock the short haircut (and it’s asymmetrical, too)

Because I journal in a Moleskine

45% Quirky Japanese

Because I have an unrelenting work ethic

Because I drink a scrillion cups of green tea daily

Because I take public transit everywhere and pay for it with my mobile

Because I actually enjoy reading in Kanji

Because I adore the onsen like a second living room

Because I am unnaturally obsessed with technology and totally unafraid of robots

Because I practice Soto Zen Buddhism

Because I may have Irish descendants, but my liver is not from them

Because I take quality design seriously

Because I like to Karaoke to Full of Harmony’s “Exclusive” so much it’s my ringtone

Other Bits and Bobs
I learned how to be a filmmaker from Anthony Leakey when I was 15 and haven’t stopped since. I’m an archivist at heart who loves to make lists and document everything. I may be small but I can eat a pound of pasta in one sitting. My lifelong ambitions are to become a polyglot and find the perfect cup of tea (I can already tell you it’s probably an oolong). I believe being a renaissance individual is the best way to approach life and tend to have my fingers in many different disciplinary pies simultaneously. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I know too much about information security not to be substantially paranoid. I am definitely a foodie whose kitchen equipment is worth more than her jewelry. I hope I never stop learning new things. I’m afflicted by terminal wanderlust and like to pack for weeklong trips in a single rucksack. I get up at 8:00 on Saturdays to watch Manchester United play, and I always cheer for Ji-Sung Park. I learned to beatbox when I lived in the ghetto. I am a polyphasic sleeper, a lucid dreamer, and a supersmeller, which means I sleep four hours a day, totally thought that piece of toast chasing me was real, and can smell the popcorn you ate yesterday.

Please look at this adorable stack of cute Valentine’s Day stuff my flatmates and friends got me!!