Paris, Je T'aime et Je Te Déteste (Parfois)

Over the past few days, I have been searching travel-booking websites for a hotel suitable for my upcoming trip to Paris, France in the second half of March. Yesterday afternoon, after hours of searching, I finally managed to reserve a hotel room that meets my particular requirements.

I’m happy not so much because I found the right hotel, but rather because I won’t have to spend any more of my precious time conducting searches, and use it instead for things I truly enjoy, such as reading at a café, studying English and French, and exercising.

I’ve traveled to Paris numerous times since my first visit in 2007—in fact, so many times I’ve lost count already. Over the years, I’ve not only explored various neighborhoods in Paris, but also visited several suburban towns. Granted, there are still many areas that I have yet to discover, but I already have a few places that I particularly like, and proximity to those areas is definitely a factor in selecting a hotel for my stay.

As for what I do in Paris, I’m not someone who likes to pack my schedule with too many places to visit or events to attend. Rather, I prefer to have little planning and follow my instinct to visit whichever place that interests me the most at that particular moment.

Normally, I like to shop for books, visit art museums, and spend hours randomly walking around different neighborhoods, taking in the old architecture and occasionally sitting down at a charming café for book-reading and people-watching.

Overall, my numerous stays in Paris have been enjoyable, but as with most travels, my past visits have not been without a few mishaps and unpleasant experiences here and there. Some of the most irritating incidents occurred when I took flights with Air France, the flag carrier of the country.

On a flight back to Singapore in 2012, the air conditioning of the aircraft completely malfunctioned, and the temperature kept rising to the point of being intolerable, leaving passengers sweating and gasping for cool air for hours. No explanation was given by the crew afterward. However, I was naive back then and thought it was a freak incident and didn’t think much of it afterward. Little did I know that I was in for an additional series of utterly unbearable experiences with Air France.

During another trip in 2013, after landing at the airport in Paris, we had to wait in front of the baggage carousel for more than two hours. The area was not heated and was freezingly cold. There was no public announcement about the expected time of luggage delivery, so all we could do was stand around and wait. In the end, I lost my temper and got into an argument with the Air France ground staff, who shouted back at me without providing an explanation or an apology.

Near the end of that same trip, at the boarding gate for the flight back to Singapore, after some passengers had already boarded the plane, the remaining passengers were suddenly asked to stop boarding for some unknown reason and made to stand in line for another hour before the boarding finally resumed.

This time, a staff member made an announcement via the PA system to explain the situation, but none of us understood what she was saying in English because her voice was muffled and heavily accented, and she was talking unnecessarily fast, probably just to show off her English fluency. It was at that moment that I swore to myself never to take an Air France flight again for the rest of my life.

I believe that the inefficiency of Air France is a manifestation of the various issues plaguing France as a whole, to which there are no quick fixes. Setting aside all these issues with the airline company, travelers to Paris constantly experience a constellation of inconveniences, such as accommodation not equipped with an air conditioner or elevator, difficulty in finding clean public toilets, and public transportation being frequently interrupted by labor strikes.

Having said that, since I don’t live there, I don’t have to face these issues on a permanent basis. Instead of dwelling on the negative aspects, I should focus on the overwhelmingly attractive aspects of traveling in the City of Light to make the most of my stay.

Since I understand French quite a bit, language is not a major obstacle for me. However, I wish I could understand French even better, so I can watch a French movie at a local cinema or read a French novel while sitting at a café—in short, pretend to be a Parisian if only for a day and enjoy the same things as the locals.

Even in this era dominated by artificial intelligence and automated translation, ability to understand the local language firsthand can give you immense pleasure that cannot be experienced otherwise. In fact, enjoying my visits to Paris is probably the biggest driving force behind my desire to become fluent in French. As long as I keep visiting Paris for inspiration, I will persist in my studies of the language of Rousseau.

Revisiting Six Feet Under

Last night, after I got home, I binge-watched a few episodes of the HBO series Six Feet Under, which originally aired from 2001 to 2005. It's been more than 20 years since I last watched the show, and I'd forgotten some of the details of the plot, so it was nice to watch the show again and rediscover the fun parts. I kept watching until around 3:00 a.m. and went to bed. 

I woke up this morning at first around 9 with the urge to go to the bathroom, but I went back to bed and slept until 1 p.m. I had nothing planned for today, and the weather outside was kind of gloomy, so I decided to stay indoors and continue binge-watching Six Feet Under. I'm already halfway through Season 2 of the show.

Six Feet Under is one of the signature shows on HBO from the 2000s, so you might have heard of it. But in case you haven't watched it yet, it's centered around a family that runs a funeral home in Los Angeles. At the beginning of each episode, somebody dies and gets brought into the funeral home for the services.

The show depicts how the two brothers of the family, Nate and David, their mother Ruth, as well as their sister Claire, live their own lives while coping with the stress of providing funeral services and processing dead bodies for viewing. It also portrays how the bereft families and friends react to and process the death of their loved ones.

Nathaniel, the father of the family, dies in a car accident at the beginning of the first episode. The burden of running the funeral home suddenly falls on the shoulders of David, the younger son, who is already working alongside his father as a licensed funeral director.

Coincidentally, Nate, the oldest son, flies into LA from Seattle for a short visit, after being away for a long time. Given the sudden death of their father, Nate decides to remain in Los Angeles and help his brother run the family business, despite the fact that he has no license and knows next to nothing about the business. 

From the outside, David looks like a normal, stable character, but he has his own inner struggles, mainly related to his sexuality, being a closeted gay man. His struggles are made worse because he is also religious, and goes to church regularly, a place filled with bigotry about homosexuality. He agonizes in self-denial until he finally learns to accept himself and comes out to his family.

Claire, aged 17, is the baby sister of the family. She still goes to high school, but hasn't decided whether she wants to go to college in the future. She has a rather distant and sardonic view about society, and struggles to find out the meaning of true happiness and of life in general. She gets involved with a boyfriend with drug addiction issues, and runs into a series of troubles in school.

Ruth, the mother of the family, is perpetually uptight. During Season 1 of the show, she begins to suspect that David is gay, and she has a hard time trying to accept his sexuality. She's upset that all three of her children have drifted apart from her over the years, and tries hard to lighten up and improve her image in their minds, only to have her efforts backfire and create unnecessary tension in the family.

I'm a gay man and I never came out to either of my parents before they died. I don't know whether they suspected that I am gay, but my dad kept bringing up the issue of marriage with me from time to time. I wonder if it would have made things easier for him if I had come out, but now that both my parents have passed away, I will never know how they truly felt. I like to believe that I made the right choice not telling them about my truth, although I am not ashamed of my sexuality.

By the way, the latest episode that I watched today was about a woman in her 40s living alone, who suddenly chokes to death in her living room. Apparently she has no friends or next of kin, so no one shows up at her funeral services. Luckily she had left a note concerning how she wanted her funeral services to be conducted in the event of death, so Nate and David were not at a loss about what to do with her body.

This episode hit a bit close to home for me because Uncle S, my distant relative, passed away last week. He had never married and was living alone. As he had no legal successors who would normally be expected to hold his funeral, the local municipal government will be responsible for incinerating his body. His ashes will be kept for a certain period before being disposed of. It's a bit sad that nobody will hold a funeral for him, but I want to make sure that his ashes are buried in the family plot in his hometown.

Some parts of Six Feet Under are hilariously funny, but due to the subject matter of death and bereavement, each episode contains an unavoidable undertone of profound sadness. It’s this bittersweet mixture of happiness and grief that makes the show interesting and keeps me watching. I was 31 when I first watched Six Feet Under. At 51, I still find it exceptionally well-made and worth watching. I hope I can learn a lesson or two about life and death while viewing this masterpiece of a show the second time around.

Read "Talent is Overrated"

A few weeks ago, I finished reading the book Talent is Overrated, authored by Geoff Colvin. I read the Japanese translated version that I bought during my vacation in Japan last November. Out of the numerous self-help books I’ve read over the years, I’m convinced that this book will be one of the most influential in shaping the next few decades of my life.

To summarize, as its title suggests, this book argues that your innate talent, i.e. genetics are not as important a factor in determining your success in your chosen field of excellence, be it in work, academics, arts, or sports, as it’s generally believed to be. Rather, the book reveals that it’s the amount and intensity of deliberate effort that you put in over the years that really count toward ensuring your success.

As a language-learning enthusiast, there are several takeaways from this book that I can apply to my study of English, French, and Chinese.

First, Colvin argues that in order for you to succeed, you need to keep putting in substantial amounts of deliberate effort, for years on end. He mentions that most world-famous athletes and musicians put in at least 10 years of intensive practice before producing outstanding results in their fields and achieving stardom.

Furthermore, deliberate effort should involve practice sessions that bring you moderate amounts of discomfort. If you keep doing things that bring you no pain, you won’t achieve that much improvement. For example, most drivers learn and improve their driving skills in the beginning, but their skills plateau after a while as a result of automation, as their series of movements become literally effortless. Another easy example would be building up muscle through gym workouts. If you don’t endure the pain of lifting weights, you can’t expect to become muscular.

To keep growing your skills, you need to deliberately step out of your comfort zone and make endeavors in the learning zone—tasks that are slightly unfamiliar, yet not entirely foreign. In terms of language-learning, you can focus on vocabulary words and sentence patterns you’re unfamiliar with, and keep using them until you get them down pat. The author also points out that your efforts need to stay within the learning zone. If you step further out into the panic zone and take on challenges that are too difficult, you’ll only end up being discouraged. 

 

Second, Colvin stresses the importance of receiving feedback on your practice, so that you’ll know whether you’re exercising in the right way. Aside from taking lessons, practicing for numerous hours on your own is a must, but you also need to integrate a mechanism in which you can receive pertinent feedback.

Currently, I regularly practice expressing myself in English through writing journal entries. The beauty of this method is that I have my writing proofread by ChatGPT, which generates instant feedback on how a native speaker would express the same content. Plus, I take online lessons with my Canadian teacher, who provides his own inputs from a native speaker’s perspective, alerting me to the potential pitfalls of relying on artificial intelligence alone. I’ve learned immensely from this practice, and my fluency in the language has been improving by leaps and bounds. 

Third, if you’re lucky enough to find the right method and teacher, the earlier you get started with the practice, the better. Mozart began playing the keyboard at 3 years old and composing music at 5 years old. Tiger Woods first held the golf club to practice at 2. If you want to make a name for yourself in a certain field, there’s simply no better time than now to start practicing, as the expertise to be recognized as world-class requires years, if not decades, of deliberate and painstaking effort.

As a 51-year-old man, I certainly don’t stand a chance to become world-class in any field. That said, I’m still glad that I’ve read Talent is Overrated at this juncture of my life. I can apply the principles explained in the book to make various improvements in the things I engage in, both professionally and in private life. As long as I can keep achieving modest successes measuring against myself in the past, I’ll be more than happy. This is indeed a life-changing book for me, and I want to keep revisiting it for inspiration for years to come!

A Blessing in Disguise?

Happy New Year!

A few nights ago, my apartment building was filled with smoke all of a sudden. I found out about this upon returning home from work. When I stepped into the building, I smelled the smoke and immediately started panicking, afraid that something might be burning inside my apartment. I also couldn’t rule out a gas leak, so I was really scared when I turned the key to open the apartment door.

Once inside, I gingerly turned on the lights, fearing that it might cause an explosion. Thankfully, nothing happened—there was neither a fire nor a gas leak inside my place. I stepped back out to check the source of the smoke. As it turned out, it was emanating from a Chinese barbecue restaurant opposite us. Their smokestack was blowing thick smoke into our building through our back door, which is only covered by a metal grid, with no plastic sheet over it.

Although I kept my apartment door firmly shut throughout the night, it couldn’t prevent the smoke from wafting into my room, and I woke up the next morning feeling sickened by the foul air.

I recorded a video of the smokestack billowing out thick smoke toward our building with my phone and forwarded it to my landlord. She in turn lodged a complaint with the relevant authorities in Singapore overseeing the food and beverage industry. I also reported this incident to the property management company of our building, but so far I haven’t received their reply.

I’ve been living in this apartment for more than 20 years, but this is the first time I’ve had to endure such unbreathable air. I imagine that this kind of complaint will take a long time to be addressed by the authorities, so most likely I’ll need to endure this unpleasant situation for at least a few weeks. To make my surroundings a bit more bearable, I’ve purchased an air purifier, scheduled for delivery tomorrow. Hopefully, it can help me breathe more normally going forward.

Speaking of improving my living environment, recently, my robotic vacuum cleaner which I’ve used for the past five years has begun to malfunction, making it unable to clean my apartment effectively. In light of the Chinese New Year sales promotion starting tomorrow, I’ve decided to buy a new one.

The model I’m thinking of buying is a combo device with dual functionality of vacuuming and mopping. Since my apartment is relatively sparsely furnished and I have no carpet on the floor, my place should be ideal for the new device to move around. I’m looking forward to experiencing an enhanced level of cleanliness in my apartment with this new device.

The recent incident of our neighborhood restaurant blowing smoke into our building has certainly been annoying and unpleasant, but it has at least helped me decide to get the most sophisticated appliances available in the market. As I’m not the kind of person who keeps chasing the latest trends, this incident could be a blessing in disguise, by making me embrace modern technology willy-nilly. I can’t wait to start using the new air purifier and vacuum cleaner!

Just Keep Learning French Words!

Today is a public holiday in Singapore for Christmas. Since I woke up in the morning, I haven’t gone out yet, and have been browsing the Internet for no particular purposes. I really shouldn’t be wasting my time like this, so I’m thinking of heading out later to a neighborhood cafe to do some reading.

A few days ago, I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my learning project of the Larousse French-Chinese dictionary, with which I have been studying French vocabulary intensively. As of now, I have studied 450 pages out of the total of 765 pages, representing the completion rate of 58.82 percent.

I haven’t tracked the exact number of words I’ve learned, but assuming 20 words per page, it must be in the neighborhood of 9,000 words. If I go by proportion, I should be able to learn around 15,300 words by studying the entire dictionary, a very substantial figure.

This might sound like an ambitious endeavor, but I’ve done similar things in the past, where I studied an entire dictionary on two separate occasions in French alone. If I include English and Chinese, I’ve already studied several dictionaries in their entirety during the multiple decades of my language-learning journey.

In terms of developing my ability to understand a foreign language through reading and listening, intentional studying of vocabulary is an extremely powerful method. Previously, I used physical and digital flashcards to memorize words. However, nowadays, I try to commit them to memory by simply reading over the dictionary entries in a particular section several times.

The new method is surprisingly efficient, because I can save a substantial amount of time and effort by skipping the creation of flashcards, an extremely labor-intensive undertaking. However, the effectiveness of memorizing words with flashcards differs from one individual to another, so I won’t refute the utility of this method for every learner—if you find it useful and sustainable, by all means go for it.

Among the three major pillars that form the basis of proficiency in a foreign language—grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary—vocabulary is the most challenging to learn, not because of the difficulty of individual words, but because of the sheer quantity of words you need to learn to achieve satisfactory comprehension of native content, such as books, movies, and television shows.

By some statistics, an average college-educated native English speaker is estimated to recognize and understand 20,000 to 35,000 English words. This estimate sounds about right based on my own experience of learning English, where I began to read English books comfortably with around 20,000 words in my vocabulary.

Assuming the same for French, I still have a long way to go before I can understand and enjoy novels and movies in this language, although I’m more than halfway through in my vocabulary acquisition. Since learning French is something I enjoy tremendously, I intend to keep on learning, at least until I finish studying the current dictionary. Hopefully, I can have a breakthrough in French comprehension in 2025!

Loving Extremely Inappropriate!

During the past week, I’ve been watching Extremely Inappropriate! (不適切にもほどがある！), a Japanese science fiction comedy television series that came out this year.

I normally don’t watch Japanese shows, not because they are boring, but because they don’t serve my language-learning purposes — as a native speaker of Japanese, I understand almost every word and phrase in the dialogues, making me feel as if I were merely being entertained without learning anything useful, and therefore wasting my time. For this reason, I normally gravitate toward English shows.

However, this time, I decided to watch Extremely Inappropriate! as it has garnered critical acclaim and won multiple prestigious television awards. “Futehodo”, an abbreviation of the show’s Japanese title, was even chosen as the Buzzword of the Year in Japan, attesting to its enormous impact on Japanese television and pop culture.

Extremely Inappropriate! revolves around the life of Ichiro Ogawa, a teacher in a public junior high school in Tokyo, set to be 51 years old in 1986. One day, by sheer chance, he takes a mysterious bus from the school, which travels through time and brings him to Tokyo in 2024. 

As the cultural landscape in Japan has shifted tremendously during the intervening 38 years, Ichiro encounters one surprise after another, shocked not only by futuristic gadgets like smartphones and wireless earbuds, but also by the whole concept of propriety in the 21st century.

In 2024, people are conditioned to be extremely careful about not offending anyone with inappropriate remarks and actions. With numerous restrictions, a stifling atmosphere envelops the entire nation, where everybody feels pressured to conform with the mainstream, and creativity and artistic freedom are severely curtailed.

This contrasts sharply with 1986, where all manner of inappropriate behaviors were prevalent and even tolerated, such as smoking on public transportation, inflicting corporal punishments on children, and addressing minority groups with slurs. Yet, the overall economy was much more vibrant, and pop culture was full of spicy, tantalizing, and entertaining content.  

Luckily for Ichiro, a neighborhood bistro where he was a regular in 1986 is still being run by the same owner, albeit much older, in 2024. He discovers a hole in the wall inside the bathroom which can transport him back to 1986, enabling him to travel back and forth between the two eras.

Aside from experiencing generational gaps, he also accidentally finds out what would happen to himself and his beloved daughter in the future. Ichiro is tormented about whether or not to tell her about this.

This show is somewhat reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi movie, Back to the Future, but with a unique focus on the evolution of Japanese society and culture, which I find fascinating. I was 12 years old back in 1986, and I still have some very vivid memories of that era. While I look back over that period with a certain amount of fondness, overall I’m still glad that Japan has transformed itself the way it did, so I definitely do not wish to move back to 1986.

Out of the 10 episodes of Extremely Inappropriate!, I have so far watched six. Each episode is so gripping that time really flies when I’m watching it. The rate I’m going, I should be able to finish the entire series by this week. I can’t wait to find out what will happen to Ichiro and those around him in the final episode!

Katsuya Kobayashi: My Inspiration Forever!

Another busy week has just flashed by, and it’s the weekend again. The past week has been particularly stressful for me, because on Monday, the system of my company was switched to a new one due to the recent acquisition by another company, and I have to perform my job tasks by strictly adhering to the procedure set by the newly consolidated company.

Since I have been very busy, I haven’t gotten much reading done lately, but I continue to read a few pages here and there when I have a moment to spare. The book I’m currently reading is an autobiography by Katsuya Kobayashi (小林克也), a famous Japanese disc jockey and TV personality specializing in Western pop music and well-known for his excellent English pronunciation, which he acquired without having lived in an English-speaking country.

I’ve known of Katsuya Kobayashi since I was in elementary school, because he was already famous at the time hosting a weekly American pop music countdown show on Japanese television. In the program, Kobayashi announced the latest songs with their chart rankings and interviewed Western musicians visiting Japan in English, inspiring the audience with awe with his beautiful pronunciation and deep knowledge in pop music.

Back then, I had just started learning English, so I had no idea what Kobayashi was saying, but even I could tell that his English sounded authentic, just like a native speaker. I envied him for being able to speak the language so fluently with a convincing accent and understand the lyrics of those chart-topping songs with the most catchy and pleasant tunes in the world.

This autobiography by Kobayashi focuses mainly on his experience of learning to speak English to a very high degree of fluency, hailing from the city of Fukuyama in western Japan, where there were very few foreigners around. Although he really liked to study English in school, he didn’t have a chance to converse with a native speaker until he was 20, when he took the Licenced Interpreter Guide Exam and was interviewed by a Japanese-American examiner.

Kobayashi was born in 1941, the year in which America went to war with Japan after the Pearl Harbor attacks. He spent his childhood in post-war Japan, a very poor nation trying to recover from the ravages of World War II. One day, he turned the dial on his home radio and discovered an English-language station run by American military personnel based in Japan. While he didn’t understand the language, he was instantly enthralled by the beautiful sound of English, and before long he began to habitually tune into this radio station for up to a few hours daily.

One thing about Kobayashi that really impressed me was the length he went to to perfect his American English accent. He would not only listen to English broadcasts regularly but also mimic native pronunciation using the shadowing method, absorbing the natural speech rhythms of American radio hosts.

Kobayashi even developed his own method of perfecting his pronunciation, which he calls “the voice aerobics method,” whereby he dissects each of the vowels and consonants that make up a word so every word can be pronounced correctly. He stresses the importance of practicing to enunciate each word completely before trying to say whole sentences at a faster speed: according to him, if you can’t pronounce each word correctly, there’s no way you can sound natural when you pronounce a full sentence.

While Kobayashi’s English pronunciation sounds impeccable, in this book he also acknowledges that his English is by no means perfect. He specifically mentions his regret that he didn’t read much in English when he was younger and he remains a slow reader of English books to this day.

When I watch his past interviews with Western artists, I can also see that he wasn’t entirely fluent in actual speech, as if he were struggling to find the right words or grammatical structures to formulate his thoughts. Having said that, his humbleness and honesty make me look up to him even more as a trustworthy model to draw inspirations from.

At the time of this writing, Kobayashi is 83 years old. It is truly fortunate for his Japanese fans that he is still active as the host of a radio show going on air every Friday in the Greater Tokyo region. I wish him continued health and success and all the happiness in the world.