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.

Visited Penang and Wuxi

 

Last week, I made a trip to Penang, Malaysia, followed by another trip to Wuxi, China. As there is no direct flight between these cities, I had to come back to Singapore for one night in between these trips, which lasted for a total of seven days. I had been to both of these cities multiple times before, but it’s been 10 and 36 years since my last visit to Penang and Wuxi, respectively, so I decided to revisit both destinations.

I spent the first three days of my vacation in Penang. I arrived on Saturday morning and checked into a boutique hotel situated in the middle of George Town. I walked around the hotel to acclimatize myself to the neighborhood. The old quarter of George Town is a World Heritage site known for its colonial architecture and rich cultural heritage, and is full of charm and character. I enjoyed walking randomly on the streets and lanes that seemed to have stopped in time, taking in the quiet and historical atmosphere.

What I particularly enjoyed watching was the traditional Chinese calligraphy of shop signs in those streets. They were created decades ago and most were hand-written, giving them a distinctive feel and unique character. Nowadays, modern printing technology has enabled mass-production of shop signs at a fraction of the cost, but most of them appear to be devoid of character and human touch, so I much prefer those old shop signs to modern ones.

Aside from exploring the old town, I also went to two shopping malls in Penang—Gurney Paragon and Gurney Plaza. At Gurney Paragon, I checked out BookXcess, an English-language bookstore nestled on the top floor of the shopping mall. While it had a nice collection of books, most of them were wrapped in plastic, so I couldn’t do much browsing, to my dismay. I also visited Popular Bookstore at Gurney Plaza, a stone’s throw away from Gurney Paragon. They carried Chinese and Malay books, as well as English ones, so they seemed more interesting than BookXcess.

Also at Gurney Plaza, I chanced upon a retail outlet of Padini, a local clothing brand. Judging from its Italian-sounding name, I initially thought it was from Europe, but it was indeed from Malaysia. Since I bought a few short-sleeved shirts by Padini in Kuala Lumpur 11 years ago, I’ve always been a fan of this brand. However, I couldn’t find their items in Singapore, so I was really delighted to finally find a Padini outlet here. I ended up buying two Padini shirts this time.

On Day 4 of my week-long vacation, I flew to Wuxi, China, where I spent the following four days. Wuxi is a city of 7.5 million residents, about 50 minutes’ high-speed train ride away from Shanghai. It’s located on the famous Taihu Lake and is known for its scenic beauty. Since Singaporeans can now visit China visa-free for up to 30 days, I decided to take advantage of it this time and travel to China.

I took a direct flight to Wuxi from Singapore, which took around five hours. I was able to get through immigration and customs relatively quickly, but the immigration officer asked me a few questions about the purpose of my visit and where I would stay, all in Chinese. Luckily, I spoke the language, so I could handle his questions smoothly, but I imagine it could have been a bit more troublesome if I didn’t speak Chinese.

In Wuxi, I visited famous parks like the Yuantouzhu Park and the Liyuan Park, as well as the Grand Buddha at Lingshan. I couldn’t help but be impressed by how well those sites were maintained. In fact, the entire city was super clean wherever I went, making my stay in Wuxi utterly pleasant.

Aside from the famous sightseeing spots, I visited a few bookstores in Wuxi as well. My favorite one was the Tsutaya Bookstore, which had just opened the previous month. Tsutaya is a famous bookseller chain based in Japan, known for its extensive collection of art-related books. This Wuxi outlet was great in that, while most books were covered in plastic, for many titles they provided a sample copy for browsing, adding to the pleasure of my shopping experience. In the end, I bought two books in Chinese.

I enjoyed my stay in Wuxi so much that I wanted to visit China again in the near future. My latest trip also rekindled my interest in brushing up on my Chinese, which had gotten rusty over the past few years. While there have been reports of economic hardships in China related to the latest slump in the property market, this country will remain an economic powerhouse for decades to come, and its language will stay relevant in trades and commerce. Although sometimes it can feel like a juggling act to maintain the multiple languages I speak, I’ll think of it as a fun activity to keep my brain young and active.

My Thoughts on the Immersion Method

If you are serious about learning a foreign language, you must have heard about the immersion method by now. It’s a method whereby you surround yourself with native-level content and maximize your exposure to your target language, no doubt inspired by how a young child learns a new language to fluency with amazing speed when they move to a foreign land.

Although I’m not an expert on second language acquisition theories, I can understand why the immersion method is considered one of the most effective approaches to language learning if employed correctly. This afternoon, I watched several YouTube videos on the subject created by famous influencers in the polyglot community and did some thinking about how I can implement the method to achieve tangible results.

Let’s assume that you are a Japanese person living in Tokyo learning English. What can you do to create an immersive environment conducive to improving your command of the language?

The first thing you can do is probably change your TV viewing habits by starting to watch only English shows, which you can find aplenty nowadays on streaming services such as Netflix and Apple TV+.

But what if your English still isn’t up to snuff and you don’t understand those shows? In that case, you can still put on the subtitles in Japanese rather than English. The main idea is for you to get used to the sound of English, so watching English shows with Japanese subtitles is still better than watching nothing at all. You can switch to English subtitles when you’re more advanced.

The second thing you can do is start reading books in English, and by that, I don’t mean textbooks for learners of English, but general books intended for native speakers on any subject you’re interested in, be it fiction, nonfiction, or self-help books. Again, you don’t have to read books that are too difficult. Start with easy books and gradually transition to more advanced ones.

The third thing you can do is switch the user interface of your smartphone and computer to English and conduct your web searches in this language. Search results will appear in English, and you will start watching English YouTube videos.

However, this is easier said than done, as your web searches are most likely related to your local interests—for instance, what’s on the menu at the nearby ramen restaurant, or whether your neighborhood drugstore sells the particular medication prescribed by your doctor—such information is definitely more readily available in Japanese than English. Therefore, you don’t have to force yourself to use English for such tasks, lest your browsing activities become too stressful.

Unless you’re living in a country where your target language is spoken, the immersion method is difficult, if not impossible, to fully implement. This is especially true if you’re learning a minor language for which there are relatively few learning resources available. For example, if you’re studying Cantonese in Tokyo, you might be able to watch Hong Kong movies on Netflix, but it’s practically impossible for you to find other learning materials, such as comic books and gossip magazines written in vernacular Cantonese script instead of Mandarin.

Even if you can fully implement the immersion method, one thing we can’t ignore is that it’s not a panacea or magic method by which all your language-learning problems are resolved and you can become fluent in your target language all of a sudden.

There is an essential difference between a young child transplanted to a foreign country and an adult learner of a foreign language using the immersion method. While the former is put in a situation where they need to speak a great deal every day with their classmates and teachers, and are exposed to copious amounts of native content in various subjects through the school curriculum, the latter can simply watch shows and read books without necessarily having to express themselves in their target language. While they both go through immersion, they will inevitably achieve different levels of fluency.

More importantly, we should not forget the effectiveness of more traditional learning approaches unrelated to the immersion method, such as conscious learning of grammar and deliberate acquisition of vocabulary through flashcards. Compared to watching shows on Netflix for hours, these seemingly old-fashioned methods can bring more substantial benefits, especially for beginners and intermediate learners.

In a nutshell, while I believe that the immersion method can be helpful, we should view it in relativity and not overestimate its effectiveness. What’s really important is for us to stick to learning methods that are reliable, sustainable, and suited to each one’s learning style. I don’t know if I’ll ever use the immersion method to learn a foreign language, but even if I do, I’ll be realistic about what to expect.

Keep Trying Till You Find the Right Method

 

Since last December, I’ve been using a French-Chinese dictionary to study French vocabulary. I go through each headword and example phrase in the dictionary by not only reading the explanation in Chinese but also verifying the meaning using ChatGPT in English, Japanese, and Chinese. After I’ve looked up the entries in a certain segment, I review the items multiple times for memorization. It might sound like a rather old-fashioned method of learning vocabulary, but it’s quite fun and pleasurable when you actually do it.

I try to study three pages in one sitting, but since I can’t study every day due to my other commitments, this learning endeavor has been progressing rather slowly. Nonetheless, a few days ago, I surpassed the 50 percent mark of my way through this dictionary, after nearly nine months of studying. This is worth celebrating, as it’s not a feat many people can achieve. Although my vocabulary is still inadequate for me to fully understand and enjoy French novels and movies, I feel confident that I’m on the right track toward my goal of mastering the language of Rousseau.

While I’m a self-professed polyglot, for most of the past four decades that I spent on language learning, I’ve been anything but an efficient learner. In my quest for achieving fluency in English, Chinese, and French, among many others, I’ve tried various approaches, but with the exception of a few methods which have proven successful, most of my attempts have been inefficient or downright futile.

Take the shadowing method, for example. It’s a well-known practice in which you try to imitate a model speaker by immediately repeating whatever they say, supposedly good for improving your accent and fluency. I’ve tried this method countless times, but each time ended up fizzling out due to fatigue and boredom. I also tried reading the same novel multiple times after hearing someone say that repetition is key to acquiring new knowledge. Again, I gave it up after a few trials, seeing no noticeable results in terms of enhanced fluency.

However, I do acknowledge that some of the learning methods I employed have indeed been effective. For instance, using flashcards to study vocabulary was a very powerful method for me. From high school through the first half of my university years, I crammed tens of thousands of English words and phrases into my head using flashcards, and as a result, by the age of 21 I was able to read English novels without feeling the need to reach out for the dictionary.

Looking back, it was an extremely intense period of putting upwards of five hours each day into acquisition of vocabulary, and it made a world of difference in improving my comprehension of the language, so I’m really glad I stuck it out.

Another method that I personally found effective was to memorize verbatim passages of written text in English. When I was in my early thirties, I challenged myself to memorize one page worth of text from an English novel each day, word by word. Although I was much younger back in the day with better memory, it still wasn’t easy. I used an IC recorder to check my recitation, and didn’t stop until I was word-perfect for each segment. In the end, I memorized 300 pages’ worth in total, significantly solidifying the foundation of my grammar skills in the process.

Fast-forward to the present, I practice expressing myself in English by writing a journal entry at regular intervals and having it proofread by ChatGPT. This AI tool is a game changer in terms of providing instant feedback on my written English, enabling me to identify my problem areas with pinpoint accuracy. I have persisted in this practice for almost a year and a half, believing that this is the most holistic and surefire method to improve my fluency in both written and spoken English.

Like I’ve previously mentioned, during my language-learning journey I’ve had my share of setbacks or even cringe-worthy experiences in my attempts at achieving fluency in as short a time frame as possible. If I’ve learned anything from my past, it’s that while it’s unavoidable to have failures every now and then, if you keep exploring you are bound to find a few methods that really suit you. Afterward, you simply need to persist in those approaches to achieve success in the end.