Kanji Amazingness

As you may know, I am mainly learning Japanese at the moment. I have other irons in the fire too but I'm principally concentrating on this one for now.

OK so why am I doing that? Well every language has its strong points and in the case of Japanese there are plenty of art forms that I'd like to know better, which will be helped by knowing the language. Also plus I know so many Japanese people by now that it's embarrassing that they have to speak in English just for me. Well, I like Hiroshige and I like Bashō so I will be able to appreciate them better with more Japanese skills (one because obviously he wrote in Japanese, and the other because although they are images, I'm sure there are things to read about them that don't exist in English). Who knows, after I know more about them, I might not like them any more! Perhaps I have an English idea about them now...

So I am doing Japanese and as with everything, I am taking the most difficult thing first. In this case, it is the writing system. For some reason, everybody thinks it's really difficult - and it is, if you learn it in a difficult way. But obviously it is supposed to make sense, so there must be a sensible way of learning it. In fact there is. For the Chinese characters they use (called Kanji, or "Chinese characters", which is a good choice of name), they either come simply or are more complex and contain several elements. In all cases, you can give a name to the different parts and make up a story about them that makes you remember them instantly. For example, "sushi" has "fish" on the left, and "delicious" on the right.

鮨

I wonder if you can see that. If not, here is another one. "Fish" and "delicious" are of course English, and nobody Japanese calls them that - we have just chosen one meaning to remember them by. (Each one is made up of other smaller parts too which we have to remember first, e.g. "delicious" has got "spoon" on the top and "day" on the bottom - it's **so delicious you can eat it with your spoon all day**).

That character is a good example because I have only seen it once - I have never written it down or practised it but I still remember it because sushi is delicious fish. It's not because I have a photographic memory, it's just because I have a memory, the same as everybody else in the whole world.

The normal method of learning Kanji is essentially to copy them out again and again until you remember them. In fact Japanese children take 12 years to learn all the characters they officially need for reading a newspaper these days. However in this way of learning, you only have to write it once - or even never!

Now each character has several ways of being pronounced, but if you learn all this information at one time then it is harder to remember because you are of course struggling to remember the character and the pronunciations. If the character is already familiar then you've got a "hook" to hang your pronunciations on. So that's why this method - the method used in James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" - concentrates purely on the one-word meaning of each character first of all. There may well be other meanings, but just one is required to get it in your brain for ever.

Anyway, I have been getting on with this and it really works. It's like magic. And this week I read my first sentence for which I knew all the characters. I can't pronounce it or understand it of course, but I think it's an important step! You can work out what things probably mean. E.g. "telephone" has two characters, electricity and talk. So that makes sense even if you don't know it is pronounced "denwa".

So this is a method which is slow at first - I can hardly say anything at all, yet I'm supposed to be "learning Japanese" - but really quite soon it should start going a lot faster. I'm astounded so far!

It's the same with learning anything properly. Everything is ruined in the beginning and you can't do any of it at all, but one day (if you do it every day) - you have mastery!

But without starting at the beginning, it is all a bit of a muddle - though it works, after a fashion, more or less.

You don't have to learn things in this long way at all, but it's so good to be in control of what you want to do. There's nothing quite like it!

OK bye for now!

When there's a twinge...

Finger and hand muscles are basically very small so you have to be very careful with them. Using them is not the same as using your legs, for example. Or you could think that it is the same, but on a different scale. Running a mile might be enough for one day, but for your fingers running a mile might be a lot less than a mile simce they are rather small compared to leg muscles.

Today I felt a small pain in my right hand so I know I have to stop until it is not there any more. But it is frustrating because I want to play 20 hours! And it feels like if you stop practising then you will not improve. BUT. If you continue injuring yourself then you will get worse, not improve. That's why I'm always angry with people who say they are injured but they still have to practise. Then we know why they are injured. You have to look after yourself better than that.

Well this is an extremely temporary problem, fortunately, because I do stop when I receive the signal to stop. It's called pain and it says Hey, you are doing something wrong here, please rest now. But many of us feel the pain but do not listen to it.

Where are you feeling a pain, and what is it telling you?

Occasionally you have to keep going through pain, and sometimes it is not a true pain, just something new. But mostly we need to listen to this voice.

The Magic of Words

Words have a magic all of their own.

They can tell the truth. But you must test for yourself if it is true, because words can also twist your mind to embrace a lie.

Without words, many things would be different. Would a rose smell as sweet if it had no name? Or even sweeter perhaps?

Today I want to mention the magic of the written word. That is something important to take notice of.

There is one particular thing that written words can do that we sometimes find difficult.

Written words can remember things.

When you write a to-do list, or your list of goals, you are using the magical power of written words to change your reality.

Because the words are helping you remember and helping you direct your energies in a certain way.

They're not just words.

To-Do Lists and Goals Lists are important for this reason.

When you need to remember a goal that you want to achieve ten years from now...you can check the list every day and it will remind you even though you could forget without help. The world gets very busy and things try to deflect you from your preferred course. This is when your list could help.

If you need to remember who you were ten years ago, you can look in your diary. People change - sometimes deliberately - and if you have made any improvement, it is often difficult to see that. So it's good to have something to compare it to, a bit like the height marks on the frame of your kitchen door. When you were six, you were this tall. Now look how much you have grown!

But if you are planning to grow a certain number of inches, or the spiritual equivalent, then you need a similar kind of aid to plan your course. Memory is, of course, the thing that will do this for you. But when you are beginning, as I said, it is sometimes rather hard to remember in the face of a lot of confusion. So that's when making lists comes in useful.

Things you need to do. Things you want to do. Things you have to do. Things you wish you could do? Things you need to learn how to do. Things you have never done. Places to go, people to see, things to do. Things to say. Things to sing. Music to play. Games to play. Games to win. Battles to fight. Enemies to befriend. Friends to take care of. Flowers to grow. Children to meet. Your success is here. Plan it now, by saying one thing: I will do a little more each day, and I will do it a little better each day.

You can make a list if you want!

Spotify used for Classical Music

Spotify is a type of software designed by Swedish people. It enables you to listen to music on your computer rather like you might listen to the radio, except you can choose what you want to hear.

To make it work, you just go to the website, create your account by typing in your desired account name and password, as well as a little personal information about yourself. Then follow the download instructions, and it will work.

When you search for music, e.g. "Beethoven", or whatever it is, you get choices that match your search. Then because it is a P2P application (Peer-to-Peer, like Skype) there is no appreciable time delay in downloading the music, because you're not really downloading it - it's being shared with the network and therefore they are getting it to you as fast as possible.

Used for classical music, it's a simple way of getting to hear what pieces sound like. It's free and easy to use. There is quite a lot of choice so far as pieces and composers go (e.g. they have Finnissy and Xenakis as well as more famous people), though you may perhaps only have a choice of one recording. This is different to more popular music where often the one recording is the work itself.

It's the new fastest way to hear what a piece of music sounds like, if you don't know it. And you can hear all of it, so that's helpful.

I don't really listen to music - for some reason - but if you do then it could be useful, especially if you don't much care who is playing the piece you want. If you are a music lover who just wants to experience music without paying anything then it must be wonderful!

Thank you to my colleague for introducing me to it.

Real People

It's hard to imagine old black-and-white people as real colour people. All the old people - Busoni, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Alkan, Chopin and company - they were all colour people.

And then it's hard to hear old recordings as real performances ("colour"). I hear Rachmaninov tearing away at 300 mph in his 3rd Concerto and wonder what he really sounded like.

I'm sure we can get closer to imagining what it was all really like.

They were people, like all the people you see today. Not monochrome prints.

Something must be done to invite them to step out of the page...

Rogue beast

Mobile phones (cellphones) can be used to send text messages (SMS). In predictive text mode, the phone guesses what word you are trying to write (sometimes not very well, if it doesn't have the word in its dictionary). More than one letter of the alphabet is allocated to each key, so even if you know what you are typing, the phone doesn't! That's why we get messages that say "I'm on a cup" (=I'm on a bus) or "See you at mine" when you mean See you at nine!

Obviously the phone manufacturer has decided which word is the most likely for each combination of keys. Very good and clever. So how is it that when I type 9-6-5-3 it picks, not "woke", but...wolf? How likely is it that I'd be saying something about a wolf more often than saying when I woke up? It's very odd.

Or did Little Red Riding Hood lose her phone?

Local Colour

I have been wondering about the colour in my photographs. It often seems a bit pale, making me wonder what's going on here when I think of the vibrant colour you sometimes see in glossy panoramic travel photographs and the like. What is the cause of it, I am not sure but I'm confident I will get to the bottom of the situation. Nevertheless, I had a look at some highly thought-of colour photography just to see what the difference was between that and my deckchairs from yesterday (see below).

The colour deckchairs is a picture I like, speaking for myself. I suppose it reminds me of light-hearted seaside England a little bit, as well as being on the other hand part of my view of nature - a conflict between the natural world and what we use it for, more gently considered than cynical, I think. Now the weather was not able to decide what it was doing, alternately a sunny day breaking out of the dark chrysalis of night (as you might say) and the typical English approach that turns an August day a different colour by liberal applications of November rain showers. So in fact the in situ colour was not particularly bright, so in a way this is reflected in the colour you see in the picture. But the point is I am trying to understand how to control the colour: I am happy to have colour-feeling X, Y, or Z but would like to achieve it deliberately, thanks! (Apart from that we might be a little bit over-exposed in the sky at top left, also.)

The issue of controlling the image will become clear, I am sure (I already know you can't fully control anything! That's what makes good pictures a surprise - though you should be able to have technical facility and preparation just as with any artistic endeavour - thinking of the piano here, for one). Whatever is causing whatever-it-is, it will be possible to find out about it, like with anything. Now let's look at what I felt was missing - deep, vibrant colour.

I already know that things that on the surface are rather alluring are not always of much interest once you start thinking about them (all that glisters is not gold, as the saying goes). Again, think of the piano: it's easy to get a particular sound that people love (there are several styles) and keep going for it, but what happens to the music? What music, I'm an artist, comes the answer. So in other words let's not be too worried about making beautiful photographs that are widely admired, and try to show the beauty that already exists in the world rather than adding a more instantly attractive coating.

Let's have a look at a colourful picture. Steve McCurry is a photographer well-known for his use of colour. Here is one of his pictures:



You can see more at the website.

Well there is colour here and it is deep and attractive! And we can look at lots of similar pictures with more or less colour in and have a similar feeling about them. I notice from the website that the pictures they show are from all over the world - well, when I say all over, I mean of course all over except for where "we" live. That means where Steve McCurry lives, and I presume that is North America. The pictures will be consumed by "the West" and will largely be images of things that are outside that. I mean, this is not so bad. Photographs are only worthwhile if they show something nobody has seen before, so that makes sense. Look at his biography too - this is a serious person! My feeling about the colour is that it is telling us that the world outside the cities of the West has something we lack: mystery, the famous exotic magic of far-away places that people have been getting so excited about for so long. Where there is colour, there is life, and city life lacks something that we are trying to find when we say "wow" on seeing one of these pictures. They all have an internal consistency of image, too - the colour is deep and lets deeper levels of association catch on the film grains and their prints. They are good pictures. But basically I felt that colour is here too, that "over there" in India or wherever, the local people do not find their lives so strange or exotic, and that while the strong-coloured pictures will inevitably draw the attention more and sell the photobooks, we shouldn't be distracted by all that. It's bright, alright, but it's not the only kind of life an image can have.

What I think is this: we could go to Afghanistan or on a similar adventure, but we shouldn't forget that it is not the same level of adventure for the people who already live there. Is that to say that it is not really interesting in foreign places? Maybe - most places are mostly the same as each other except for some superficial differences. But on the other hand, there really could be the same level of adventure here as there. It's not less exciting over there, it's more exciting over here! We should be making travel pictures of our own street.

With their own appropriate level of colour of course!

Anyway, colour is good and I'm glad to see some for once. I don't see a lot round here!

NOTE: now I know the sky was simply overexposed! The eye can adjust to wide differences in contrast (bright to dark) but the camera has a more limited range. (November 06)