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Study diary

Week 29: 13-19 July 2020

July 19, 2020 By Karl Andersson Leave a Comment

After some discussion we decided to end our self-imposed quarantine. Thus: Pad thai and beer at the Wasserturm in Prenzi on Monday, and my first visit ever to Sommerbad Kreuzberg on Tuesday. Too salty vegan burger from Kiiro on the terrace at night.

I edited some of the days. On Friday I half-heartedly participated in a Zoom seminar on visual representation. But basically I just wanted to edit.

I tried a new working technique on Saturday: From 15 to 18 I did 6 Pomodoro blocks à 25 minutes, each one followed by a 5 minute break. Then food break for half an hour followed by 2 hours of non-stop editing 18-30-20.30, because by then I was already in it. I HAD A GREAT TIME! The Pomodoro sessions were a great way to force myself to get there, instead of spending the day procrastinating and miserably getting to it at 20, 21 or 22. Now I was done in the studio at 20.30, backed and packed up for 15 minutes and biked home. After tea and Wataru I kept working for four and a half hour until 2.

The mornings were for Anki.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 31 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 90 min per day

Anime

  • 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E32 (raw)
  • 2017: Boku no Hero Academia, S2 E20–23

EASA2020 Lisboa film

  • Nous Sommes Ensemble (We are Together) (Ascanio Varroni 2019 | 33’ | Cameroon / Norway)

Seminar

  • Who Represents Whom? Photographic representation in the 21st Century (Niama Safia Sandy and others)

Articles

  • Bicycling/Gloria Liu: Hey, Bike Shops: Stop Treating Customers Like Garbage (2019)
  • Cyclingtips/Matt de Neef & Iain Treloar: Finding Mr X (2018, skimmed, but very fascinating)
  • GQ/Rachel Tashjian: We Are Living In the Age of Sweatpants and Never Going Back
  • Bon/Daniel Björk: Det är över… svettbyxan har vunnit
  • Jacobin/Paris Marx: Now Is the Perfect Time to Crack Down on Airbnb
  • Techcrunch: Apple, Biden, Musk and other high-profile Twitter accounts hacked in crypto scam

Filed Under: Study diary

Week 28: 6-12 July 2020

July 12, 2020 By Karl Andersson Leave a Comment

I delivered a new cut to my supervisor on Tuesday. We talked on Thursday and I proceeded to edit.

A new class on curating ethnographic exhibitions started on Tuesday.

I read a section of Nagayama Kaoru’s Eromanga Studies – his language is really hard, it took time. In comparison the first couple of pages of an article in Eureka’s Otoko-no-ko issue were not so hard to understand, although I didn’t get all the kanji readings.

We’ll attend the EASA 2020 conference online next week and we started watching some of the films.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 35 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 80 min per day
  • Nagayama, Kaoru. 2006. “ショタ、またはオート・エロティシズム”. In Ero manga sutadīzu: “Kairaku sōchi” to shite no manga nyūmon. Tokyo: Īsuto Puresu. 238-44.

Anime

  • 2017: Boku no Hero Academia, S2 E14–19

EASA2020 Lisboa

  • Histórias de Lobos (Faber) (Agnes Meng 2018 | 22’ | Portugal)
  • Guardians of the Night – Guardianes de la noche (Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier 2018 | 17’ | Cuba / Canada)
  • Sudanese Industrial Sound: Sonic Labour in a Truck Workshop (Valerie Hänsch 2019 | 3’ | Sudan / Germany)
  • Zigzag (Zeynep Merve Uygun 2018 | 9’ | Turkey)

Book chapters (reread)

  • Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
    • Race 91-97
    • Sex 97-108

Filed Under: Study diary

Week 27: 29 June – 5 July 2020

July 5, 2020 By Karl Andersson Leave a Comment

Cleaned up my studio to get into the right editing mood. We shot some more footage of me and I kept on editing. It feels much better now. The film feels like a whole but with a few gaps. I will finish some kind of rough cut again for my supervisor on Tuesday. And I must quote S after I showed him a new sequence I cut yesterday. He said:

When it works it works.

On Thursday I participated in an ethnographic film screening online. It turned out I had already watched Withering House (and met the filmmaker) in Freiburg. I think it was even better this time around.

Tonight I finally watched Ruben Östlund’s Play, which has been on my list since it came out – in 2011! It was as brilliant as Force Majeure and The Square. Think Michael Haneke doing Lord of the Flies.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 34 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 90 min per day

Anime

  • 2017: Boku no Hero Academia, S2 E6–13

Cineclub Film Screening & Discussion

  • Dhruv Satija: Welcome Valentine 2017
  • Shreyas Dasharathe: Bismaar Ghar (Withering House)

Film

  • Play (Ruben Östlund, 2011, 118 min)
  • Prison life: Justice in Japan (France 2020, on SVT Play)

Articles

  • Matt Taibbi: On “White Fragility”
  • Bard och Widblom: När prinsessan blev tyrannen

Filed Under: Study diary

Week 26: 22-28 June 2020

June 28, 2020 By Karl Andersson Leave a Comment

An editing week, sort of. S watched the third version of my rough cut and we discussed it for hours. I’m becoming a filmmaker. It’s a process, in which I make cuts which divert in various directions. You roll back one thing, strengthen another, and not least, find a story, a red thread. But it’s also like a puzzle: You change one thing and then other things stop working. I felt overwhelmed.

On Thursday I met with a classmate in a park to discuss our projects, which intersect a bit. It was only my second social meeting since we got back from Japan. He seemed surprised when I dodged his goodbye hug.

I biked to FU on Friday to validate my student card in the one machine they have opened for that. Unfortunately I forgot my face mask but was let in by the guard at the entrance anyway. It was completely empty.

I impressed myself by building a simple (but still!) kanji quiz in Javascript and Jquery. I put in all the 3,000 Heisig kanji in the arrays but limited the test to the first 2,200, which are my friends. Then I managed to add a box for a custom number instead. And yes, this was procrastination (since I was feeling overwhelmed), although I had wanted to create a super simple kanji randomiser for some time. Check it out!

Another way I procrastinated was by closing all 240 tabs in Firefox. I signed up for Pocket to deal with the separation anxiety. Again, browser tabs are the piles of paper you have on your physical desk, and closing them equals clearing the desk in one satisfying blow. Pocketing maybe equals taking a phone photo of some of the most important-looking papers. In both cases I will probably never return to them.

Dream Girls was an amazing film that we watched as part of the Fringe! x RAI Queer Eyes festival.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 39 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 80 min per day
    • MIA: More Low-key Anki tutorial

Anime

  • 2017: Boku no Hero Academia, S2 E1–5

Fringe! x RAI: Queer Eyes

  • Dream Girls (Kim Longinotto, 1994, 50 min)

Articles

  • ABC News:
    • 1 dead, 1 injured after shooting in Seattle autonomous zone
    • Seattle will de-escalate and dismantle ‘CHOP’ autonomous zone: Mayor

Video

  • Apple WWDC keynote, Marques Brownlee’s summary, some Matt vs Japan, and my new favourite Japanese channel while falling asleep.

Filed Under: Study diary

Week 25: 15-21 June 2020

June 21, 2020 By Karl Andersson Leave a Comment

I start feeling that the kanji become my friends. As if I’ve been to a huge mingling party for years on end, and finally started to get to know the people there, one after the other. The feeling came not from Heisig, but from when I started to write down the words in the sentences in the Japanese Core 6000 deck. All of a sudden the words became so much easier to pronounce and read fast – I read them out loud along with the speaker. It felt as if I recognised them as individuals. Friends. Male, female and in other forms. Magic, love, ecstacy!

I finished the second volume of Yankī Shota to Otaku Onēsan. It’s such a lovely story that centers the conflict (?) of 2D and 3D realities, in the form of a woman (the otaku) and a boy (the shota) who always seem to end up together, which causes the woman stress about whether her interest in fictional 2D shota says anything about her predilections in the 3D reality. Again, there are several scenes with direct bearing on my research. The fact that they are there says something about what the readers have on their minds. Pop culture is a perfect source.

As for the language, thanks to having mastered the 2,200 kanji in Heisig (which I keep repeating in flashcards), I can understand so much more in manga now than before. I’ve never been as immersed as when I read the last three chapters of Yankī Shota in one sitting (in my favourite corner of the sofa) on Wednesday. I had planned to do other stuff, but I just kept sitting and reading. I felt like a child who has just discovered reading (and who has his long summer break from school so he can just read all day long). Japanese is opening up for me. A whole world of literature and research is becoming accessible.

I absolutely loved this text, which I found via Khatzumoto’s email:

  • Seb Pearche: Grammar is cheating: the brain vs. language learning (2014)

It turns everything I’ve known about language learning upside down. Ever since I studied Czech at university, my approach has always been “just show me the grammar tables”, because I felt that private language schools always tried to hide those since they thought people were intimidated by grammar. And although I still stand by that criticism, it doesn’t mean that grammar is the way. This text, Krashen’s principles, MIA, Ajatt, and so on stress the importance of input. Two mind-opening excerpts:

In the last few decades, classroom language teaching has undergone a major upheaval in the English teaching world, possibly because people cottoned on to the fact that they were hopeless at German even after studying it for 5 years. Now, the emphasis is on “communicative competence.” Accuracy, which used to be paramount, has effectively been replaced by fluency, and grammatical errors are given minimal attention.

…

And you can study as much grammar as you want, because you’ve already internalised the language that you’re analysing. Using grammar rules will no longer be blindly gluing words together, but understanding why the language you already speak works the way it does. Now you’ve got some bread to put the butter on.

Made a PS5 meme with Wataru.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 51 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 90 min per day
    • Matt vs Japan: Anki Tutorial | Deck Options and Anki’s Algorithm
    • MIA: About half of the super interesting and nerdy Low-key Anki tutorial
  • 新にほんご500問 N2: Week 4 (pp. 213–), test: 23/35.
  • Manga: 星海ユミ: ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん, volume 2, chapter 12–15 + extra, pp. 61–154.

Anime

  • 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E31 (raw)
  • 1989: Madou King Granzort. E16 (raw)
  • 2016: Boku no Hero Academia. S1 E9–13 = end

Articles

  • Euronews: Assita Kanko: Leopold II is part of the uncomfortable truth of who we are. We can’t erase him ǀ View
  • BBC: Atatiana Jefferson: ‘Why I will no longer call the police’
  • The New Yorker: Postscript: Remembering Aimee Stephens, Who Lost and Found Her Purpose
  • Rolling Stone: Seattle’s Autonomous Zone Is Not What You’ve Been Told
  • Jason Hickel: The case for reparations
  • GP: Anna Björklund: Alexander Bards fall är ett modernt gladiatorspel
  • Vice/Eric Cervini: Spying Before Stonewall: How the FBI Secretly Tracked Gay Activists in the 60s
  • The Japan Times: 900 LGBT couples have been certified in Japan since 2015, survey finds

Video

  • Alain de Botton: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
  • Slavoj Zizek — White Guilt & Victimhood Culture
  • Slavoj Zizek — Why white liberals love identity politics
  • Marques Brownlee: PS5 Impressions: My Thoughts!

Filed Under: Study diary

Week 24: 8-14 June 2020

June 14, 2020 By Karl Andersson Leave a Comment

I worked on my film a bit during this week, but also read and translated a bit from a Japanese book.

We had the Editing Forum on Tuesday. I also got the first feedback from my supervisor on my rough cut and thesis outline. Overall very positive – we’ll talk more next week.

The same night, from 1 to 3 am Berlin time, I watched the final presentations of Tom Boellstorff’s course Digital Cultures at University of California, Irving, but now being taught and presented in Second Life:

  • Ryan Schultz: Anthropologist Dr. Tom Boellstorff Teaches His Course on Digital Cultures Within Second Life

I was very impressed by the presentations, not least the timekeeping, but also by how skillfully the participants navigated SL, creating nice avatars and all. Not that it’s hard, but just the fact that they gave an effort.

I’m keeping up the kanji and also started the Japanese Core 6000 deck. The blue bars are new items, so after having learned the last of the new kanji (first five days), I only reviewed for two days (green), and then I started the new deck:

Anki stats 14 June 2020
Anki stats 14 June 2020.

Loving Anki so far although my learning went down a bit from Flashcards Deluxe in the beginning, but I think it was only because I was used to a certain system. I love Anki’s flexibility, customisability (although FD can do a lot too), and user base (lots of shared decks and add-ons). I don’t like that it’s tied to the computer unless I buy the Ios app for 30 euro, which I consider a total ripoff for a flashcards app, no matter its features. But the web version seems to work great on mobile devices. Not sure if it needs internet though. I’m mentioning these things simply because it’s so important that you can grab your flashcards app anywhere and at any time. It shouldn’t be something you do only when you sit down at your desktop computer (which I happen to do most of the time anyway at the moment, but you get the point).

Been looking just a bit at Khatzumoto’s blog. I don’t want to read dozens of posts in English instead of engaging with Japanese, but what a goldmine of inspiration it is. This is probably the most beautiful and inspiring thing that has been written about kanji – from the post with the long title:

So I love kanji. I love them. I love seeing them. I love touching them. I love writing them. I love reading them. They are beautiful to me. One guy once joked that I’m aroused by them — I’m not, but I do I find them aesthetically pleasing. It’s like seeing Megan Fox in Transformers or Schuyler Fisk in Orange County, you’re not aroused, but you’re undeniably faced with a visually appealing image. Each kanji has a unique feel, a unique personality. Each kanji is a friend; she can talk to you and tell you a story.

Again, I love kanji. And I believe the actions taken by the Occupational Government in the 1940s (and by the Chinese Communist Government in the 1950s and 1960s) are literally the worst thing you can do that doesn’t involve harming people, harming animals or confiscating private property. It was cultural vandalism (and borderline civilizational suicide) to attempt to truncate, abbreviate and even destroy the kanji lexicon. I don’t force other people to use kanji like I do, but I’ll be damned — damned, I tell you — if I’m going to submit to the fiat of illegitimate governments (and the Communist Party is about as legitimate as my disastrously effeminate thighs) without a fight.

I started watching My Hero Academia (finally!) with S, and it’s quite enjoyable. Which I can’t say about Detective Conan, which we watched the very first episode of.

I’ve started reading the second volume of Yankee Shota to Otaku Oneesan, which is so well written and amazing, and even has bearing on my research – I might quote from it!

In news, the Palme murder investigation was closed and a suspect, dead since 20 years, was named. I got very interested in that suspect after seeing a TV interview with him from shortly after the murder. Psychological issues seem to abound, and this blog post sort of mentioned them, and why they contributed to the police dismissing him as a suspect back then.

Japanese

  • Flashcards Deluxe: 64 min per day
  • Anki: Ca 45 min per day
  • Manga: 星海ユミ: ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん, volume 2, chapter 9–11, pp. 1–60.
  • In the mornings and every now and then: JapaNews24 ~日本のニュースを24時間配信 (live)
  • When falling asleep: Random videos by Okada Toshio

Language acquisition

  • Ajatt/Khatzumoto:
    • Critical Frequency: A Brand New Way of Looking At Language Exposure
    • Khatzumoto, You Say to Imitate Japanese People Faithfully, But Why Do You Overuse Kanji? Isn’t That a Bit of Hypocrisy? Also, Why Are Your Thighs so Thick? It Doesn’t Really Seem Appropriate for a “Heterosexual” Man? Could You Do Me a Favor and Never Wear Shorts Again?
  • Ricardo E. Schütz: Stephen Krashen’s Theory of Second Language Acquisition (1998)
  • Steve Kaufmann (video): Anki Vs. Input-Based Learning

Anime

  • 1988: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru. E30 (raw).
  • 1996: Meitantei Conan. E1.
  • 2016: Boku no Hero Academia. E1–8.

TV

  • Moesha (1996), S1 E2

Video

  • The Life-Sized City: The Unholy Trinity of Bridge Stupidity in Copenhagen

Filed Under: Study diary

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