What's so incredible? Why is she so awesome? How does she do it?

On my plate: green tea, homemade miso soup with tofu and wakame, steamed rice, zucchini and mushroom stir fry, and cantaloupe

On my plate: yasai (vegetable) gyoza and yakisoba at Wagamama in Harvard Square

On my plate: Cafe Luna and its intense selection of stuffed French Toast combinations — nutella, banana and caramelised walnut, mixed berry, and peaches and brandy among others — in Cambridge, MA

“As I see it, language is not an act, nor is it a skill; it cannot be possessed. Language is a habit. You don’t ‘learn’ a language as such, you live it. You don’t need to get ‘good’ at a language, you get used to it. You don’t become fluent at a language, you become it.”

There’s this cat on the internet (literally, he goes by Khatzumoto) who wanted to learn to speak another language and did it. This feat in and of itself isn’t particularly remarkable, but how he went about it is a story I was so blown away by, it warrants retelling right here, right now. Khatzumoto, like so many of us trying to speak in a nonnative tongue, got so sick of being told your brain hardens at age 12, of classes and classwork that didn’t get you any closer to fluent, of foreign language speakers that couldn’t hold a conversation in their purported language of mastery, of outdated textbooks that make you speak like a news anchor, ex-pats of several years who still can’t speak the native language, in short of all the hogwash out there that makes even the most spirited of language students feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle. So instead of buying into the idea that he couldn’t do it, Khatzumoto staunchly believed he could, and when the traditional means of lecture and memorise, of writing tables and making flashcards didn’t work, he came up with a method that did.

He calls this All Japanese All the Time, essentially a total immersion experience that does not require selling all your possessions and moving to a foreign country before you can speak the language passably. In fact, in just 18 months Khatzumoto went from knowing no Japanese to being able to hold business discussions, have casual conversations, find a job in Tokyo, and navigate the tricky and at times unfriendly world of moving to Japan. How did he do it? By watching TV. Okay, not just by watching TV. Khatzumoto also watched movies, and anime, and read books, and found Japanese friends, and pretty much anything else he could get his hands on. His reasoning? Learn like a child learns: through context.

The seed makes more than perfect logic to me. In my own experiences growing up with Spanish spoken around me, I heard certain phrases like “Quieres ir afuera?” when it was time to take the dog for a walk, or “Awwww, mi pobrecita hija, lo siento.” I just learned these patterns, and when I began to learn Spanish academically, suddenly the meanings of these phrases were more clear. “(Do) you want + to go + outside?” was easy enough, but the equivalent of “sorry” literally translates to “I feel it.” Unlike my classmates, I had the upper hand because I intuitively knew how to use these phrases in the proper context. Instead of trying to formulate how to ask if you wanted to go outside by first thinking of the verb I needed to use, then conjugating it, then picking out the vocabulary, then ordering it correctly and checking for errors, the phrase came naturally to my mind in a single chunk. I had associated the meaning of the phrase with the actuality of it, while my colleagues were still grappling with making the individual words make sense.

Of course even now it’s been several years since I’ve been halfway decent at the language, it’s now fairly safe to say tengo muy olvidado el Español, to the point where I’m once again inept. Why is this? Because I’m not using it. Spanish isn’t being spoken around me, I have no reason to ever break into the language, and I’m not trying to expose myself to it in the day to day. If I wanted to improve my Spanish, I’d have to start using it again, immersing myself around people who spoke it and finding opportunities to practice. It stands to reason then, that to learn a language with proficiency, the same method must be employed.

“It’s a cause and effect; it’s not ‘I learn this so I can do this,’ but instead ‘I do this, therefore I learn that.’ I made it like a game: how much more can I Japan-ise my life, and then suddenly, snap I can read Japanese, someone would hand me something in Japanese and I’d think oh snap I can read all of this.”

Khatzumoto seems to despise the classroom, and while I understand his point, I don’t think it’s a terrible place to start. But the classroom alone is not enough. In 2008 I began learning Korean essentially on my own (with some help from the good ol’ internet) but found there were just too many snags that held me up. So I broke down and signed up for a class. Having done it both ways, I can see why academic learning is inadequate, yet for those of us who don’t have a lot of opportunities to speak a foreign language (say, Russian in the US or Svenska in China) a class is an excellent place to work on speaking comprehension, the only skill of Khatzumoto’s four — reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehensions — that cannot be done alone in your room. If you lack confidence to talk to strangers yet, a class is a great opportunity to test the waters in a fairly safe environment. Everyone knows you’re a student. Best of all, classrooms offer feedback, the most important point often overlooked by those self-taught. You might only be a hair off on how to say X or how to pronounce Y, but you’ll probably never know until it’s been ingrained in your neuro-pathways unless you find someone (a teacher, a language partner, a native speaker buddy, a homeless vet, your 3rd grade teacher, anyone) to correct you. Sometimes the letters themselves are pretty confusing to figure out; I know that while I could associate a symbol with a sound pretty well on my own, I could not for the life of me figure out how and when to break up syllables in Korean, so having a teacher explain it to me enabled me to pursue more learning on my own that I could not have before.

“The real problem lies in ideas and attitudes…Someone who thinks they can’t do something, can’t. and someone who thinks they can, can…change the philosophy, and you change the behavior; change the behavior, and you change the results. It’s not touchy-feely; it’s simple cause-effect.”

Classes will only take you as far as you want to go though, and often textbook teaching is fairly wide of the mark. I’ve heard horror stories from friends with Mandarin majors only to discover they could only talk in a formal mode and were ridiculed when they arrived in China. I’ve heard of Japanese students who are fluent speakers but essentially illiterate, of Korean students that only use the -yo form. You cant just write down a bunch of declensions, memorise a bunch of new vocabulary words, and only speak when spoken to and expect anything close to proficiency. This is why you need the immersion experience. Enter All Japanese All The Time, where Khatzumoto urges you to consume all the Japanese media you can, to think in Japanese and create situations for yourself where it’s sink or swim, the same way it would be if you were a child learning language for the first time. You’ll start to recognise patterns and to pull out the few words you know, and before you know it you’ll start to pulling out the few words you don’t instead. It’s a more useful lexicon to pull from anyway because, unlike a textbook, Japanese products are organically Japanese and not some crazy construction of a bilingual speaker.

Khatzumoto’s methods are more common sense than anything else, but the fact that his ideas surprise me is further proof that we’ve got some serious societal barriers to gaining fluency that could do with a revisit. Why shouldn’t we try to learn not just a language, but anything by doing? As children that’s how we try on new hats and pick up new skills, we observe, we imitate, and we adopt. It’s aligned with many other principles I’ve spoken of before: stop distracting yourself or falling prey to your fears and distractions and just do. Khatzumoto makes a wonderful point, “On the one hand it’s so magical, but it’s also so predictable. If you put in the time, it will happen.” I think perhaps the greatest barrier to people learning foreign languages is not that they lack the resources, or the time, or the means, but that they don’t put in the time. You expect it to take you several years, it takes you several years. When it gets hard we don’t have anything but the necessity of a credit or the need for a good mark to pull us through, and in the meantime are being constantly reminded of how inadequate we are and how far off our ideal is.

“The whole process is one of sucking, you’re sucking the whole time and you’re trying to suck less each day, to phrase it negatively…so basically the time you spend inputting [the language] is directly proportional to speed at which you’re going to reduce your sucking. This is just what children do; if you think about the incredible amount of time even just a four-year-old has heard the language before they get to the point of speaking, it’s really pretty mind boggling.”

If it makes you feel so rubbish, why bother? It’s maddeningly frustrating to feel inept and to be unable to communicate, and even moving to a land where no one understands you doesn’t guarantee you’ll pick up the language quickly, though most do out of necessity. That’s because trying to remember how to say “the plane took off of the runway” from a book is pretty dry, and most “practice conversations” are painfully dull. I fully agree with what Khatzumoto suggests, which is that you have to make learning fun or you won’t do it. I know from my own experiences that you have to treat yourself like a small child and learn songs, watch movies, and reward yourself with marshmallows and lemon drops (or whatever your Kindergarten teacher fed you when you got a math problem right). For a long time I’ve thought traditional academia has been sucking the life out of learning that we forget to take joy in as we once did in childhood. If you’re having fun, not only does it stick better, but you have more learning stamina, it’s easier to do, and use it more.

Ideas
Listen to music, like Cornelius or Pizzicato 5 or even J-Pop like Heartsdales and Full of Harmony. Watch movies of any variety (without subtitles) like Hiyao Miyazaki movies or cult classics like Ringu. Watch anime that you like; I learned how to say “good day” and “are you okay?” from Maria-sama ga Miteru, and various types of bread from Yakikate! Japan. Take advantage of free resources like JapanesePod101.com or language tapes at your library. Watch Japanese youtube videos whether they’re video blogs or Hard Gay episodes. Read all the manga you can find in Japanese and childrens books if you can get your hands on them. Find a language buddy or language exchange online to practice your speaking skills, usually for free. Take up a Japanese pen pal. Attend the Japanese service at a local temple or church if you’re town has one. Make friends with Japanese mates, or enroll in a big-brother style programme for Japanese new to the US. There are tons of ways to immerse yourself complete in a language, and these are just some to get you started.

Almost everyone who’s heard of polyphasic sleep thinks it’s both brilliant and insane. Well, in a nutshell, the idea is to sleep less, be awake more, and still get the same amount of actual rest (the REM sleep phase) as you would on an 8-hour, monophasic sleep cycle. Sounds ideal, right? That’s the sane part.  The crazy bit is your actual sleep schedule, the most famous of which involves sleeping for 20 minutes every 4 hours.  That equals 2 hours of down time out of every 24, and you’re still supposed to function like a normal human being for the 30 extra hours of wake time you’ve added to your week? With an execution that seems too dangerous to attempt and a payoff that sounds too good to be true, it’s no wonder polyphasic nappers appear to be totally off their rockers.

While there is precedent for polyphasic sleeping, most famously Leonardo DaVinci and Benjamin Franklin, there isn’t much of it.  The most extensive sources come from internet blogs and forums (a red flag if ever), and almost no research has been done on the long-term eaffects of polyphasic sleeping, mostly because not a lot of people actually DO polyphasic sleep in the long-term.  It’s difficult, it goes against what everyone else is doing, and it’s a huge adjustment to effectively double your waking hours so suddenly.  There’s also concern that there’s something about the 8-hour sleep process polyphasic sleepers will be missing that could ultimately hurt the body (sort of like how vegans and vegetarians have more health concerns because they don’t consume 7 essential amino acids that come from meat and meat by-products), just as easily as internal chemistry could be thrown by how so much waking darkness affects our circadian rhythms. But, as Steve Pavlina (another successful polyphasic sleeper) claims, the hardest part of any change is usually because your surroundings don’t support it. Yeah the world isn’t polyphasic, and that’ll always be the biggest deterrent. Of course, it doesn’t help that true polyphasic sleep is also really difficult to adapt to.  It requires an allegedly hellish few days of sleep deprivation before your body can fall neatly into the schedule, it mandates a huge psychological shift from having a quantifiable marker of days to now experiencing an endless flow of more or less uninterrupted hours, and it takes a certain type of personality to enjoy all the extra time, which is spent alone while the rest of the world is sleeping, let’s not forget. Polyphasic sleep, especially the 2-hours total model, is also really inconvenient.  The nap times are frequent and often inflexible, and most 9-5 jobs don’t allow for constant nap breaks, making it an extremely high-maintainence schedule.  If you’re in a mall, or a class, or a meeting, nipping out because you need to take a nap is some combination of both inconvenient and embarassing, not to mention oft impossible.

So why would anyone in their right mind do this? Polyphasic sleep has some pretty hefty benefits.  First of all, you gain six hours a day you are now spending NOT in bed while still feeling like you did.  In fact, the overhwelming majority of polyphasic sleepers feel BETTER — better rested, more awake and alert, with faster reflex times and more consistant moods — than they did as monophasic sleepers.  And if feeling superhero awesome and creating extra leisure time like a magician wasn’t enough, there are a bunch of other side perks to the process.  You become a lucid dreamer, and your dreams are more vivid and way easier to remember.  It’s easier to stay fit because your body’s in “I’m doing things!” metabolism more or less 24/7.  You will from then on be able to fall asleep anywhere with ridiculous ease.  And if you have any problems or anxieties about sleeping (e.g., insomnia, night terrors, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, and so forth), polyphasic sleep is said to cure all of them in one fell swoop. Well, I’ve done it, rather successfully if I do say so myself, and while I can attest to these perks, there’re quite a few amazing benefits beyond the obvious, five of which in particular are urging me to continue on the polyphasic path indefinitely:

If you think about it for a bit, monophasic sleep — sleeping in one single block daily — is a totally constructed modus operandi.  Yes, the majority of people in civilised society all go to their full night of rest once the sun goes down, but not everyone folows suit.  In fact, many indigenous groups believe humans are supposed to sleep in four-hour blocks twice a day, while scientists calculated the human internal clock’s ideal run-time is 31 hours to a day, not 24. We’ve all had sick days or aeroplane flights where we dozed in an out naturally.  Perhaps the best example of how polyphasic sleeping can work and can be a more natural schedule is infants.  Babies don’t sleep through the night, but instead have to take constant and semi-breif naps every few hours. Like a polyphasic sleeper.  And as a parent of a newborn, what are you advised to do? Sleep when the baby sleeps.  The idea of departing from the norm stems from our ability to toss and turn all night and not feel rested when you wake. Why is this? Because the essential part of sleeping, the bit where all the vital processes, dreams, and actual restoration occurs is in the REM cycle, or the fourth phase of sleep.  Normally, when you sleep for eight hours, you still only get a small amount of REM sleep, about only 1.5 or so hours.  With polyphasic sleep, you are teaching your body to get really good at going straight into REM sleep, so you’re actually getting the same amount if not more, without all that tedious mucking about in the theta phase. Furthermore, your body is self-regulating, so once it goes into REM overdrive, it eventually cycles back through all the phases of sleep again, depending on what your body needs at the time.  Essentially, polyphasic sleep is just a method to make sleep more efficient.

I don’t suggest polyphasic sleep for everyone, but if I haven’t scared you off with all the sciency mumbo jumbo and you’re still intrigued, than I’d urge to check it out. It’s fit my temperament and my personality so well that my quality of life has greatly improved since adapting to the schedule. You can read more about how I did it, and find some helpful resources about polyphasic sleep here.

On my plate: individual peach cobbler from Clyde’s in Mark Centre

As far from my plate as possible: new “late night” flavoured Doritos, aka: heartburn in a bag

“New York was gone. He felt nothing. Then again, Arthur hadn’t really believed it existed anyway.” Douglas Adams, describing Arthur Dent coming to terms with the Earth’s destruction in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I have both a number of passions and quite a few pet peeves, and there’s little I despise more than when the two collide on holiday. It’s easy to see me as a high-maintence posh jetsetter who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Motel 8 or without a guidebook, as a go-see-do-er who (given my track record with new places) actually enjoys the one to two day max citystay, as someone who likes to draw up timetables and pack the sightseeing in tight. Alack, if you had these impressions I am sorry to inform you they couldn’t be farther from the truth. I enjoy the six-day minimum layover and like to spend my hours in a new places ambling through various neighbourhoods, stopping in cafes to savour beverages at every opportunity, and browsing bookshops, art museums, and parks and gardens. That’s what I like to do on holiday.

The museum especially can be so many things; the subpar art in Sydney set the tone for my cultural experiences in the state, while the incredible experience I had in Mori Tower ensured Tokyo would be my new love in life. A museum can thwart a promising vacation like the Uffizi did for me in Florence, or redeem a potentially disastrous experience like the High Museum did in Atlanta. Partially an ode to history in the least boring way (The Museum of Modern Art), part preservation of our culture (The Louvre), part respite from the pressing weight of our own lives (The Seattle Art Museum), museums are more than just a place to host some famous works, they’re opportunities for political statements (Banksy), a fight for non-traditional arts to be recognised (The Getty), even a litmus test indication society at large (The Art Institute of Chicago).

Crowds contemplating an Ellsworth Kelly exhibit in Atlanta, Georgia

There’s a brand new set of crises springing up everywhere from the Galapagos and Macchu Picchu to Tibet and Taipei; the city is sinking into the mountain, the erosion is too severe to continue tourism in the area, the political tensions are at an all time high, the immigration and visa laws have become stonewalls, the borders are closed, the train employees are on strike, the region is quarantined, and one hundred other events that mean birthright will be revoked soon, the DMZ will be closed, and the ruins will be entirely erased by human hands. There’s an equally intimidating set of old and often overlooked disasters from the great depression to the invention of mass production and photography to the end of art with value in and of itself. A museum is that liminal space, with its white walls and silent commentary that allows us to keep our eye on the horizon and weather the storm; the enlightenment and the industrial ages changed life and art forever and the DaVincis and Dalis who deviated, once labeled heretics, are now considered visionaries. We survived the revolutions, and the wars, and so too will we survive this, though the means are not yet clear and the radical solutions seemingly absurdist, just as cubism, surrealism, modernism were all called crockery in their own day, so too will Dan Flavin and Ellsworth Kelly, Murukami and Basquiat eventually be vindicated. I find peace in these places, reverent of people who saw the world in a different way, places that will mark the end of eras with a passing nod and perhaps a plaque but will retain the precious relics with expansive security systems and extensive CCTVs. Like a library, museums and I share the same values, here in my home country and abroad equally.

Which is why the flash of a camera as a tourist tries to capture the essence of the Mona Lisa ruins the whole experience. Your rangefinder, even your DSLR could never do the painting justice, and instead of admiring it for what it is, looking at Starry Night or Haystacks from various angles and distances, and soaking in the wonder that is The Birth of Venus, instead you’re using inadequate means to try and take the image’s soul. It’s not the act of photography that disturbs me, it’s the misunderstanding, thinking an image like the Sistine Chapel ceiling is just an image. Let me try to explain.

The hallways of the Louvre in Paris, France

When Edvard Munch’s famous German Expression painting The Cry (as well as his Madonna) was pitched out of a second story window and stolen form the National Gallery in Norway, nothing happened. No on rioted, no one mourned, no one weeped, and few papers broke the story at all. And though it found its way back into Norway’s hands, again it was lifted ten years later in 2004. This seemed to incur even less notice. I’m still trying to figure out why such an iconic image didn’t evoke more of a reaction the two times it was filched, why there was no eulogy for Munch when NPR wrote a one-hour show about Vermeer’s “Concert” stolen from the Gardner in Boston, never recovered. More astounding yet, when you look around for one of Munch’s own lithographs of the work, you instead find Warhol’s mass-produced prints, and The Simpson’s references to it, Erro’s renvisioning, Scream movie posters, and M&M advertisements. It’s Walter Benjamin’s worst nightmare; the idea has become more meaningful than the work itself. I wonder, does the same go for our ideas of other locales? Is our idea of China so prevalent that if it disappeared tomorrow we wouldn’t think twice? When Siem Reap no longer has recongnisable carvings, and when all the unique species of the Galapagos die out, will we not flinch, or blink, or even pause? Or will we say, “the flights were too expensive” or “I’ve seen it on TV”?

Even as I say such foolish phrases now, I sincerely doubt anyone would think our idea of China or Kenya and their actualities are even comparable. I would hate for anyone to think the American stereotypes are the same as the reality of the American experience, and that idea alone is justification enough to go see The Cry for myself. And of course, seeing it is a very different experience. That’s my whole point.

Bust of Nero in Rome, Italy

Every poster I’d ever seen of the painting was large-scale and incredibly vibrant, and I had built up in my head this idea of The Cry as an impressive sight to behold that I would surely have to contemplate from a modern wooden bench halfway across the near-empty room. That idea couldn’t be further from the reality. The piece itself is not even three square feet, a mere smattering of oil paint on a single-ply board that although clearly artfully crafted is entirely underwhelming to those expecting a James Rosenquist-scale masterpiece. I had to restructure my idea of The Cry completely.

Going to Amsterdam is a completely different experience than knowing about Amsterdam in any capacity, and just knowing about an image, iconic or not, is not enough. Fortunately, with art, seeing the image isn’t enough either. Taste, context, and historical period come into play. That’s why it’s important to go see Picasso’s work not just when it comes to your city, but in Barcelona, the place so formative to his early periods, in a time when you can just imagine him, in his reconstructed room in the Picasso museum, sketching thousands of cubist Las Meninas duplicates and feverishly pacing around the room, peeking through the drawn curtains at the sunlit and tiny alleyways below. You feel one hundred times closer to him, and his work, and you leave the Barri Gotic feeling like you understand him that much more. Don’t believe me? I don’t expect you to. After all, you have to see it, nay, feel it for yourself.

The Barri Gotic by night in Barcelona, Spain

KSCR: Late Night Sessions with DJ Nosh

05 March 2008 22:00 PST

club mix, lounge vibe, not quite dub

For a few semesters at USC I held down my own radio show every Wednesday night at 10pm. The show was a 2-hour DJ set live on the air called “Late Night Sessions” featuring after-hours grooves and all sorts of genre fusions. Above you’ll find the audio from my first ever solo show. Feel free to check out more current grooves at kscr.org and keep an eye out here for more of my older shows trickling out for your listening enjoyment.

RIYL: Spoon, The Cardigans, The B-52’s, Pizzicato 5, The Bird and the Bee

From the opening track, California’s own Persephone’s Bees makes it perfectly clear this is no ordinary album. Notes from the Underworld starts on a particularly high note and refuses to come down several tracks later. Each track features smooth lyrics and catchy riffs blending into a sound that can only be described as “Gypsy Pop.” Lead vocalist Angelina Moysov is more than charming with an unmistakable Russian accent and a pleasantly melodic voice, giving an otherwise definitively rock album a softer feel.

It is impossible to classify this band. The entire album is a blend of gypsy, folk, pop, ‘70s funk, and classic rock influences. Tracks vary from the ultra-catchy “Nice Day,” to the somewhat silly, B-52’s-esque “City of Love,” to the solid but subtle “Walk to the Moon.” Each song can stand alone, and while the album may not transition from one track to another well, the overall feel of Notes from the Underworld is one of musical competency and incredible allure.

Listen, and listen with care. It may take a while to appreciate the less pop-driven, deeper cuts, but a second or third screening will not disappoint. As their first major release, there is something clearly fresh about this band and how it walks the line between genres and audiences. Sometimes funky and flirtatious, occasionally sombre and assured, listeners will be hard-pressed to find a sound as unique or as varied as that of Persephone’s Bees. Don’t be discouraged by the album’s release date. Notes from the Underworld is practically a dinosaur created way back in August 2006, all the more reason to support the band into releasing some new material.

Recommended Tracks:

“City of Love,” “Nice Day,” and “Queen’s Night Out”