Motivation​

I have long battled my internet service providers, and they have waged war on their customers for many years as well. Poor customer service, data caps with obscene overage charges, and many other issues have plagued me for years like many other Americans. Like many of these people, I’m stuck with only one viable option for a provider due to their monopolistic practices. Recently, I was forced to upgrade to a more expensive monthly plan after going over my data cap three times non-consecutively over a year and a half period. Rather than charging me the usual absurd per-gigabyte overage charge, I’m now stuck paying more per month for the remainder of my time with my ISP.

Getting Started: Convention Over Configuration​

This software development paradigm has become prevalent in many modern frameworks and tools. It can be described as streamlining and standardizing aspects of development similar to all or most projects while specifying configurations for those that deviate from the established convention. For example, most Node.js developers call their main file server.js. Let’s say that I want to write a generic deployment script for Node.js applications. It’s much easier to include a simple command like node server.js than to try to determine the developer’s intended start file. This simple agreement saves a great deal of time and configuration details. The emphasis of this paradigm is that the knowledge will hold for any team or company, and so organizations full of old tribal knowledge become a thing of the past.

It feels strange waking up in the Lower 48 again. When I left Alaska, the sunlight was already making people and plants manic again. The grass that was dead for months bloomed vivaciously in a matter of days. The snow was long gone, but the rain hadn’t shown itself quite yet. The midnight sun was already creeping and beaming over me.

My company’s office building is located in the heart of downtown Anchorage. This shimmering, golden beacon of American capitalism seems to cast a shadow over the Downtown Transit Center and its transient residents. Many are drunk and high; many are homeless and hopeless. Some even sell their bodies either for a quick fix or as a means of survival. They spend their dark days on the cold streets of Anchorage.

On Saturday night, I handed in my last final exam. Honestly, it was an extremely anticlimactic ending. The final had no bearing on my graduation or GPA for that matter, so it wasn’t really the concluding push that I envisioned being the end of my undergraduate stay. After a brief test, I said to my professor, “終わりですね...” and stole away into the chilly evening.

My blog is nearing its first anniversary. Admittedly, I have failed to maintain it as I would have liked to over the past year. My instinctive response is to attribute this to a lack of time. As my college graduation swiftly draws near, I’ve been obsessed with the notion of time lately. With classes, work, side projects, and graduation rituals at hand, I find myself constantly thinking that there’s just not enough time in one day. Not to mention that my exercise routine, Japanese studies, and myriad of other hobbies have suffered as well. Inevitably, there isn’t enough time to do everything, but as I found myself updating my old articles about Japanese study, I realized that what I was trying to teach others about language study I should be applying to my own daily life.

Cold air fills my lungs as I inhale deeply and behold this marvel of geologic time. I feel introspective and insignificant as I imagine my short life span juxtaposed with this ancient, undefiled landscape. I try my best to take a mental snapshot of this moment near the peak, knowing fully well that nothing can ever recreate this moment. Gazing down over the untrodden path that led me here. Imbibing water to replace the icy sweat now soaking my clothes. Savoring a brief reprieve from a steep journey. Noting some clever metaphor. Solving the profound, metaphysical intricacies of life.

I finished the first thousand kanji recently, and I can honestly say that in addition to learning a slew of new characters, I learned a lot about my study habits as well. I wanted to share some of the knowledge I obtained along the way:

There is a wealth of tools, applications, and media available to facilitate the study of Japanese. It is truly amazing people managed to learn without them. The following is a list of these tools and brief description of how I integrate them into my personal studies.

Without the neatly defined classroom aspect the first couple of years of Japanese study, it may be unclear what you should be doing or even where to start. So, let me define a formal outline of how (in my humble opinion) one should approach Japanese literacy.