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I keep working on Japanese, though my pace has slowed down a little bit. Not having the weekly tutor to force me to keep up means I study less, and with classes having started up again, my focus is going there first and foremost. I have, however, started supplementing my use of the Genki textbook with Rosetta Stone, which has been interesting.

Before I talk about Rosetta Stone, I should recap my studies thus far. I started studying Japanese about twelve weeks ago now. The first two weeks were me memorizing kana, specifically hiragana, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can just read them now. I’m not fast, but I don’t need a reference anymore. I spent the third week on katakana and some basic vocabulary and phrases. I really need to spend a lot more time with katakana, because it comes up a LOT in writing, and I really didn’t give it the same amount of time as hiragana. I find it a lot harder to memorize, because the syllables are visually very similar, and as a result my ability to read katakana is HORRIBLE.

After the first three weeks, I took about a month’s worth of lessons with a tutor, during which time we were able to blaze through the entire first Genki book. It was a whirlwind, and while I picked up concepts extremely quickly and can suss out grammar, the pace was too fast with too many new words being introduced for me to keep up with the vocabulary. After the last tutoring session, I took about two weeks off to process, which in retrospect was a horrible mistake. I didn’t lose much if any of the structural stuff I learned, but my already limited vocabulary atrophied, and my pronounciation suffered. I also lost my tenuous grasp of katakana, though I’d ingrained hiragana enough that I didn’t lose it, I just got slower.

Since then, I’ve been working with Rosetta Stone, and am going to return to doing exercises from the Genki workbook as well. Rosetta Stone is a very different structure for learning, and it works pretty well for me, but I’ve read a LOT of criticism about it. Since a few people have commented that they’ve liked to see my learning process, I kind of want to break down how I feel about Rosetta Stone, in case it’s helpful for anyone eyeing it but concerned about the (rather high) price.

The teaching method appeals to me, as I’ve mentioned before, because it avoids using English entirely. Pretty much everything is kana and images that you match or speak. I like this, because it removes all of the English-language distractions and forces me to connect concepts with Japanese directly, rather than using English as a go-between. You can pick up a free app that has the first handful of lessons for a variety of languages on mobile devices, to see what I’m talking about, and it’s what gave me my initial foothold into Japanese.

One of the interesting things about Rosetta Stone is that it doesn’t at any point explicitly tell you what you’re saying or what the pieces of the sentences are. It slowly becomes clear as you work, but you’re looking at hours of work before you can see the shape of a sentence, because you may or may not be picking up which words mean which things, and how they’re all fitting together. It won’t stop you from progressing in the lessons, but it’ll make it difficult to feel like you’re making tangible progress until you’ve put a few hours into it. It’s an intentional bit of design, it forces you to process the sentences as a whole and work to make sense of them, so you retain the information better. Rather than telling you how to say something, it has you say something and forces you to figure out what you just said from context clues. If I wasn’t aware of that style of teaching and how effective it is, I’d probably find it very frustrating. Certain critical reviews describe it as “nonsense”, which to me sounds like frustration with the style; everyone learns differently, and while this works for me, it likely doesn’t for other people.

I’m glad I have both the textbook and other translation aids available to me as well. It lets me see interesting things that Rosetta Stone teaches me how to use, then look up the structure, how they’re being used, and what they actually mean. It’s resulted in a lot of spin-off lessons, where I learn about the different ways to use pronouns because Rosetta Stone switched pronouns on me. A great example is when the book switched from using 男の人 (おとこのひと, “otokonohito”, man) to 彼 (かれ, “kare”, he), which changes the sound of sentences significantly but can be used functionally identically in a sentence. It uses a lot of the same basic sentences with various swaps to help build vocabulary while giving you a sense of structure.

For example, you’ll have one exercise where a sentence might be “The [boy/girl/woman/man] runs,” where the exercise is appropriately recognizing the words for “boy”, “woman”, “man”, and “girl”. The next exercise might be “The woman [runs/eats/reads/swims],” where the exercise is about recognizing the verb. It builds on the structure of the first sentence and swaps out a different part, so you slowly get a feel for all of the different pieces. The whole thing could probably use a tutorial, but once you realize what it’s asking you to do it’s pretty intuitive.

The real question is “is it worth $200+”? It’s not a question I can really answer for everyone, obviously, but I can explain my approach. I tend to look at how much content I’m getting and how valuable the content is. The demo for the software should give you a pretty good idea of whether or not the content is valuable for you; it may work well with how you learn or it might not. As far as amount of content goes, the program is structured in chunks. The smallest segments are called “lessons”, and range from quick, 5-minute items to 30-minute “core lessons”. There are a handful (six to fifteen or so) 5- and 10-minute lessons after each 30-minute “core lesson”, and after four core lessons and a final refresher at the end, you’ve completed a “unit”. There are four units, each comprised of four core lessons and numerous mini-lessons, all of which make up a “level”. The Japanese module for Rosetta Stone contains three levels. All in all, that’s 3 levels, 12 units, 48 core lessons. I tend to take slightly less time per lesson than the estimated time. By the estimated times for each segment, it works out to 60-120 minutes per core lesson+mini-lessons. If we lowball that and say it’s about 4 hours per unit (kind of a fast pace, but it’s close to the speed I’m going at), that’s on the order of 48-50 hours of lessons.

Assuming you don’t repeat any lessons (i.e. do each one once and never look at it again), for the currently-listed $209 for the software (Rosetta Stone site, cheaper on Amazon), you’re paying about $4.40 per hour. As a point of reference, an inexpensive Japanese tutor in my area is on the order of $30 an hour. It’s certainly not as personalized an experience as a tutor, and I’m really glad I spent time with my tutor because it let me focus on certain specific things, but as far as a time/money value proposition, it’s better than going to go see a movie. Whether that’s time/money well spent is probably up to the individual.

Currently, I’ve gotten to the point where I can watch subtitled anime and clearly hear sentence structure, though my vocabulary isn’t close to keeping up. I can tell when the translation is different from the audio, and I’ve started being able to pick up on nuances that enrich the experience for me. It’s really funny to me, for example, how in One-Punch Man, Genos’ speech to Saitama is hyper-formal and very precise, whereas Saitama’s responses are incredibly laid back and almost too casual. It lends a lot to both of those characters that I’d otherwise have trouble picking up on just from the text and the tone of voice.

I’m a little ways into the third unit of Level 1, so I’ve still got a ways to go. I’ll keep commenting here as I get to other interesting pieces.

Today I confused a friend during a conversation. The question was “what fictional weapon would you want to have, and why?” My answer was “a lightsaber”; she laughed, then looked confused when I said I wanted one so we could solve global warming. It made absolute sense in my head, a perfectly logical sequence, and it was jarring when my friend went “wait, what? That makes no sense.”

This happens to me a lot; it’s something I struggle with. I used to think it was a problem of me communicated badly, and while it is, it’s not poor communication in the way I thought it was. I’ve started calling it “skipping a few steps”. Here’s the full sequence of steps that led to my answer: a lightsaber is basically a ultra high powered electronic device that’s super compact. It’s power supply also lasts for decades at least without any real issues. Deconstruct one, figure out how to replicate the battery and however it recycles power/recharges, and you’ve got enough power to fuel a city in an object the size of your hand. It doesn’t seem to require fuel, it doesn’t seem to need frequent recharging, and it’s not fragile. Energy crisis is pretty much solved overnight, and the battery is small enough to power pretty much any device we currently have, with no emissions other than light, sound, and heat. That is AWESOME, and is way more exciting than having a glowy sword of dubious usefulness (as cool as it might be).

This is a (semi-)logical chain of thoughts that I went through in about the time it took for me to say “A lightsaber. I could solve global warming!”

I don’t think of this as particularly clever. It isn’t, to me, a particularly refined train of thought, and an assumption that I’ve had– that I’ve held onto for most of my life– is that anyone and everyone else is having similar trains of thought at similar speeds. They’re easily capable of making the same connections I am, and if they don’t, it’s because they didn’t think of it, not because they weren’t going to get there eventually. I wrote, a while back, about “being smart“, and in retrospect I can see that assumption in the text. When I make a connection quickly, my immediate assumption is that anyone around me can make the same connection, and to me it often feels like people who don’t are either disagreeing with me or questioning my mental capabilities. It leads to a lot of insecurity on my part, and a reticence to speak my mind, especially in person. It sometimes manifests as deep arrogance, when I’m convinced I’m right because I’ve followed a logical train of thought to its conclusion and just assume everyone else is on the same page as me.

It makes it hard to know when I’ve explained my train of thought adequately. A pet peeve of mine is having something I already understand explained to me, and I make a particular effort not to do the same to other people; it feels patronizing to me and I try to avoid it. As I wrote about above, I’ve spent a long time fleeting from the idea that I might be “smart”, because I fundamentally don’t believe I’m anything special. Some conversations and introspection over the last year, particularly as I’ve worked on becoming more open and communicative, have forced me to accept that, if nothing else, I make connections faster than some other people. It’s a testament to how ingrained my avoidance is that I’m conscious as I type this that the phrase I should be saying is “I have to accept that I’m simply smarter than many other people”, but the closest I can get is putting it in quotes, detaching myself from the statement and trying not to own it completely.

The avoidance harms my ability to communicate effectively with people. Denying my own aptitude makes it harder for me to communicate with people and connect with them. It’s a work in progress, but it’s hard to figure out feedback. I’ll occasionally have a spark of inspiration and share it, and I have a tendency to inundate people with text or words as I work my way through the thought process. Most of the time, what I get is silence, even among close friends. In my head, this resolves to “there goes Tam again, babbling about something or other”, and since it tends to kill conversations, I avoid sharing a lot of the time. The reality is that I spend a lot of time in my own head, and external feedback keeps me sane. It lets me continually ensure that what I think are logical trains of thought actually are.

For my entire life, I’ve tried very hard not to be that person who “thinks he’s so smart”, to the point where I’ve gotten really good at denying any evidence to the contrary. Impostor Syndrome is real and present for me, and haunts literally every single thing I do. As I’m forced to actively re-evaluate myself, I realize that denial is just as harmful. It’s hard to know where to go from here. Work in progress.

I’ve laughed with a lot of games lately. It makes me realize how high the writing bar for games has risen over the past few years. Whereas I’m seeing a lot of indie titles and smaller games play with fourth-wall meta-humor, at the other end of the spectrum I’m seeing a lot of high-production-value AA and AAA titles really focus on the quality of their writing, and branch out in different directions. One of the directions I’ve been most impressed by is humor. I actually had to step away from Tales of Zestiria today because I was laughing so hard at a particular scene.

Something I’m seeing a lot more of is topical, in-world humor. There are, broadly, two ways to get a laugh in a game. You can set up a joke that’s funny for the player but isn’t actually a joke in the context of the game, and you can set up a joke that’s funny in the context of the game and makes the player laugh, too. The second one is much, much more difficult to write, yet I’m starting to see it more in games.

As an example, KOTOR’s HK-47 is an example of the first kind of humor. HK-47’s thinly veiled menace and explicit, utter vehemence can be pretty funny, for you as the player. As the character standing right next to HK-47, he’s concerning at best and outright horrifying at worst; there’s no laughing along with his lines without being an utter psychopath. HK-47 separates you from the game world, and nods to you as the player while ignoring the character representing you in the world. In a similar vein, pop-culture references and other, similar in-jokes are another example– funny to you as the player but meaningless or tasteless for the character. Both are a LOT easier to write than jokes that are funny in-context.

In-context jokes are the kind of thing that would legitimately make a character in the game world laugh if they heard them. A lot of times these are one-liners, but you can get a more deliberate setup. They’re a lot more difficult to write because you have to have spent a lot of time setting up the game world’s environment and character personalities and, in general, laying down the ‘rules’ for how the world works and what social mores exist before the joke makes sense. Even then, it can fall flat if the player isn’t invested in the setting, or if you get the timing wrong and have an NPC laugh just a bit too early, or the wrong way, or deliver a line anything less than perfectly. It’s pretty rare that you laugh alongside an NPC in a game, because getting that timing down is not easy.

Mostly, this is the result of witty banter between characters, but sometimes it’s even subtler than that. Recently, I played a game where the characters ran across a landmark and, while looking at it, one of my party members made an absolutely awful pun which was followed by another character firing off a snappy quip, which made me chuckle. What got me was having yet another character, randomly while walking a little bit later, pipe up with “OH! I just got it!”, sparking another snappy quip that I (alongside some other party members) laughed at. A little bit later, that character pipes up AGAIN, having just gotten the original snappy comeback, and I found myself waiting for the other (third?) shoe to drop as we caught up to the last joke made at her expense. Just as I’d nearly forgotten about it (this is minutes later, as I wander through a dungeon), the character making the quips checks in: “Did you… not get that last joke?” as other party members (and I) snicker. The game actually waited until I was in combat, fighting for my life, to have the character go “OH! THAT WAS THE JOKE!” in response to the boss saying something vaguely reminescent of a previous quip.

Put another way, any time you “had to be there” for a joke to work, it’s probably an in-context joke. They’re a LOT harder to pull off, yet I’ve seen them in a bunch of games lately.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a bunch of credit not only to Tales of Zestiria for making me laugh, but also Knights of the Fallen Empire, the new SWTOR expansion. The writing team really nailed the humor in that expansion pack, and it really works through a lot of the content. It manages to balance serious characters who I legitimately look forward to bringing down with moments that crack me up or just make me happy in general. Pacing is really important, and having some laughs throughout the experience really helps.

It’s something I really notice when I go back and play older games. The writing quality just isn’t there, most of the time, and the sense of timing and pacing is much, much poorer, when it exists at all. I suspect a lot of it has to do with modern games’ shift towards voice acting, which helps deliver comedy a lot, but it isn’t just that. We’ve gotten better at writing, for the most part, and so when writing isn’t quite as good it’s really noticeable. I do a lot more laughing *at* older games than laughing *with* older games.

All of that having been said, I’m glad to be laughing as I play games. Delivering depressing sadness and yanking at heartstrings in all of my game releases has gotten a bit old; I can see the setups coming a mile away at this point, and I’m getting numb to them. A good laugh, though, catches me by surprise. It’s great.