1. I often have foreign-language learning clients from the US and I would like to know what the usual offering at a typical bookstore would be so I can make it easier for them to find good books locally.

2. I am curious about the variety of books available and if there’s any novel approach to be found –– American foreign language textbooks are notably generic and sparse in comparison to European offerings.

While there were a few books that caught my eye, only one spurred me to make a purchase for its novelty — Learn Spanish with Frida Kahlo.

The good/unique parts about it

The book is ornate, the edges around each page like a coloring book, inspired by Frida Kahlo’s art. In fact, everything about the book, from the design to the example sentences, directly integrates this philosophy – you are encouraged to cut out and color the pages and treat it like art in itself; you learn the historical context of Mexico in Frida’s time; you see and read about Frida’s life, relationships, and paintings.

Like what is this??! Incredible!

A book for beginners that takes you through an entire concept-theme, a single person’s life and art. So rare! To commit to a singular theme in this way from content to design to activities is exceptional for a language-learning book.

The fact that the example sentences for the grammar/vocabulary of the lesson directly relate to Frida’s life or the context around it astounded me. For example, in an early section about the verb to be, you learn:

Es una pintura original? Is it an original painting?
No, no lo es. No, it isn’t.

Está la pintura en la mesa? Is the paint on the table?
No, està en los estantes. No, it’s on the shelves.

The focus of the sentences is on paintings because Frida was a painter. Durr! Amazing.

Throughout the book there are little puzzles, games, crosswords; links to more content online via QR code. Each chapter has plenty of exercises, and there’s a pronunciation guide and verb conjugator section in the back. You read excerpts of history, culture, and more as you go along…

Of course I had to buy it!

The somewhat disappointing parts about it

Now, despite my excitement, I still had to give the book a proper professional evaluation. Just because it’s unique and cool doesn’t mean it’s usable, and that’s what textbooks are (supposed to be) all about!

So, for or all of its joyous perks and uniqueness, I must report that it is still not a “perfect” textbook.

A few things that I couldn’t help but note:

• Although the book offers “audio clips” via the scannable QR codes, the audio offered is not comprehensive from chapter to chapter, which means you won’t find a corresponding audio file per chapter or section – the example sentences do not have an imitated pronunciation below, nor an online supplement.
  

• Without standardized audio clips for grammar or vocabulary, the pronunciation guide in the back is meant to be referred to often. While helpful, if you are concerned about your pronunciation while learning, you will have to make sure you check it often and find a supplementary listening material at your level. Of course, there are of course techniques to find good supplements if you happen to go with an audio-free textbook
  

• There are no “conversations” for you to study along and engage with. While you do learn vocabulary, grammar, and sentences in relation to Frida Kahlo and complete exercises that somewhat transliterate those concepts to everyday life or practical modern situations, you will have to be creative applying what you learn in the book to your real life in a fluid, conversational way. As with the audio clip issue, this is not necessarily a deal-breaker because you would never want to rely on a singular source for all your learning, but for someone seeking immediate dialogue-ready use from their study, they would need to look elsewhere.
  

• The language in the little history lessons and info blocks stays in English, although by the end of the book you should have learned enough vocabulary and grammar to understand simple descriptions in Spanish. I wish they would have put more effort into blending the languages, at least by offering both as the learner progresses.
  

• There are no “chapters” – you learn continuously. This is also a pretty unique trait for a language learning book, as they almost always want chapters as some sort of progress marker. Chapters often benefit the learner so they can pace their study by chapter/section, so not having them was certainly a choice. This also means that as you go along, you don’t have a predictable set of exercises or content to accompany the lesson – still, from what I see, there is at least one activity/exercise every other page. Still, studying with the book might be hard to “schedule.”
  

  • You know what, I’m not totally mad that they chucked the concept of chapters; mentally you should keep going and not “stop” arbitrarily just because a chapter has ended. Who says you’re done except for you? And sometimes, at least I found when writing my book about practical Japanese, it’s hard to say when I’m “done” with a section although it conceptually blends into the next. Is having chapters just a way to cheat my brain into feeling progress that isn’t really there? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
    

  • The more I think about it, the more I wonder why we bother with chapters. Fiction certainly approaches the concept flexibly, so why not non-fiction? Perhaps not everything needs to be sectioned off and clean-cut.
    

  • For this book, the table of contents shows where certain grammar is introduced, so it’s not completely guideless. Perhaps this would be enough — I suppose I’ll guinea pig myself with this book to see how it feels as I go along.

So, should you get this book to learn Spanish?

If I were to recommend this book to a learner, I would definitely search for supplementary means to reconcile the audio and conversation section deficits.

I can imagine that the concept of audio and conversation was rejected in this textbook as it would have to somehow relate to Frida Kahlo, and they wouldn’t have wanted to impersonate her or the figures of her story — still, I believe they could have just staged conversations between a “Frida Kahlo expert” or historian and a curious learner.

I’m thinking, conversations could be simple at first and force the present tense: (e.g. “Imagine you are living in Frida Kahlo’s time” or “Imagine you are traveling to Frida Kahlo’s time to Mexico, you are with a historian who knows a lot about her life…”) where the learner asks, “Where does Frida live?” “Where is Frida from?” “How old is Frida?” etc. and then the historian could answer and ask questions to the learner.

As the chapters cover more grammar such as the past tense, the conversation could grow in complexity. This way, the vocabulary and example sentences could have a more dynamic, layered application, and the reader could imagine themselves using the language and relating to Frida Kahlo’s life and story more readily.

I would also support a learner by figuring out a structure that worked with the contents/story shared in the book by overlapping with a good supplement. For example, if they’re learning about where things are in Frida’s studio are, they should also be doing exercises that help them describe their own spaces and what’s in them.

All that being said, I felt lucky to have picked up this rare style of book. Its sheer novelty made me want to dive in right away. But until I feel my Italian is more stable, I have to wait!

Spanish has been knocking on my door of late; I think the time is coming for me to finally start learning. When I do, I’ll definitely give this book a shot – and if you do, let me know!

So, let’s say you told me, Deanna, you need to learn Spanish from now on. You need casual competence in six months – enough to travel around, order food, ask people about themselves, and conduct yourself independently but not silently/passively.

After much trial and error (aka tears) over the years, I am confident I could make it happen.

That’s not me saying languages are easy or that I’m some sort of whiz, but I understand the kinks of the process and what I need to do as an adult to get my brain in the right mindset and help it retain whatever language I shove in it 🤠.

The reality – and crux of what I instruct my clients – is that anyone can learn another language, but most lack an understanding of what it involves, what to keep their eyes peeled for, and how they can make it a consistent, realistic part of their lives. So let me walk you through what I would do, and what I’d recommend you do, to learn another language from scratch :)

Step 1: Figure out your motivation a.k.a find your “boomerang” 🪃

The first thing I’d do is ask myself: where is this language spoken, and is there something I actually like about it? What could knowing it bring me? It sounds simple but it’s really important – if you do not have a true interest or motivation to learn the language, everything you try to put in your brain will kick its way out! Thus, finding what brings you back to the language no matter how hard it gets, is what I call “finding your boomerang.”

Your boomerang is something you can always go back to to fire you up about the language, or remind you why you’re bothering to learn in the first place. What does it look like in your head when you can finally speak Spanish like you’ve been dreaming? Your boomerang should be the trigger for those thoughts.

Thus it can be physical or, uh, non-physical. If it’s a movie in Spanish or with some Spanish that I thought was so cool or beautiful, I’d try to get the DVD copy and keep it near me when I study, or put it on my Desktop so I can check it quickly when I need to feel inspired again. If it’s a book, I’d keep it near, so I can flip through it quickly, perhaps before I start a study session, to remind myself that I want to be able to read it without needing a dictionary the whole way through.

You would want your boomerang to be easily accessible, and, to quote Marie Kondo, spark joy.

Your boomerang doesn’t need to be something you’ll understand at the end of your study period. It just needs to be something that makes you want to go back and keep fighting.

Step 2: Get your base textbook 📕

Now that I’m motivated with my boomerang, which right now is a memory I have of a trip to Miami where I heard and saw Spanish everywhere that I have encapsulated in a postcard photo of the beach there, I need to find a good foundational textbook.

OK – I know the word “textbook” or even “book” has a stigma around it. Who uses books to learn in this day and age!?? Well, there are plenty of benefits to having a book, a physical one, a few of which I will briefly mention here:

1. Physical pages, interacting with them, gauging where you are in them and what pictures, texts, exercises are associated with them, all of this lends to layering your memory, which helps your recall. When you remember a word you saw on the page, you remember the context in which you saw it, or perhaps you work from the context of the page to the word you’re trying to remember.

2. I like to see over time how much I've covered — flipping back to where I started, peeking ahead and thinking, if I keep going, in a few weeks I'll be able to understand this. I've done this little ritual with books ever since I was in school, and it's extremely motivating for me. I always know what I've accomplished and what's left. This keeps you focused and excited.

For all the good I can say about books, I am very much aware that text or images on a page are not the only things you need to learn another language, especially when your goals involve listening and speaking. Thus, my requirements for a good base textbook include having audio resources, transcripts, exercises with answer keys, and videos where possible.

So the obvious question that remains once you’ve decided to believe me and go for a book is, where the heck do you find one? Namely, where do you find a good one?

In Berlin, I go to a store called Dussmann. They have a huge foreign language section, and it’s the greatest, most heavenly place for language learners. I do most of my hunting there, especially as I find it hard to find good books online now, notably on Amazon. I do recognize that especially in the U.S., the foreign language section at bookstores today is quite limited and people will want to go and look on Amazon, but there is so much AI and money-grabbing slop there, you’ll just end up wasting your money. So please, don’t go to Amazon unless you’ve already found a book you like or know will be good. Many of the direct-to-Amazon publications are unverified junk.

Going in person to peruse through a book is worth it, but you can also contact me to help you find “the one” ;). I might already have it on my shelf!

Step 3: Start tweaking your media algorithm 🤳

My next step would be to start telling the algorithm — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, sometimes even LinkedIn — that I’m interested in content in the target language, Spanish. This is how I get Spanish in my everyday social media, where I’m already likely spending way too much dang time.

I’d start by adding and looking for what/who I already know, like artists, actors, singers. I’d follow those accounts, then go out of my way to search for keywords, or maybe even Google a few words in that language just to start pulling that kind of content toward me.

Even if the algorithm feeds me things I don’t necessarily like at first, if it’s in Spanish/my target language, I’ll probably engage with it anyway by liking or lingering on it. In this way, gradually the algorithm learns that I want similar content. Once my feed is more Spanish than usual, I start filtering toward the content I actually enjoy by actively liking or following it.

You should do this across all your apps, also to mix up the type of content you’ll get. The goal is to create regular exposure that is somewhat woven into your daily life that is varied and relevant to your interests.

A well-curated social media algorithm in your target language would not replace any other step, but it would allow your existing screen time to do a little more work to bolster your listening and reading skills and keep you receptive to new sources of boomerang-worthy interest or study material!

Step 4: Find some music 🎶

Good music is almost boomerang-level stuff, but it is very important to me to find voices and sounds that I like in my new target language. This is especially the case when I’m not sure I even like how the language sounds, because if I’m going to have to speak it, I want to hear and imitate the most beautiful voices in it.

Additionally, music is also needed so I have something to while I’m studying, or just have in the background, or read along with (most apps like Spotify and Apple Music show you the lyrics as they play and you can make this a part of your daily exposure/study).

For Spanish, off the top of my head I’m going to go ham downloading Bad Bunny. I know I like Enrique Iglesias, and I’m sure he’s got some goodies in Spanish… same for Shakira… hmm… I know these are pretty top level choices (may as well as J-Lo to this playlist amirite?), but even top level is all you need to start googling and having the algorithm work its suggestive magic. Anything is better than starting from zero, but of course you could do that too.

Once I’ve made my generic Enrique-Shakira-Bad-Bunny playlist, I would check the suggested artists or songs on Spotify or Apple Music, listen to their top hits, and gradually add to my playlist the newer stuff that’s perhaps more aligned with my usual music taste. YouTube is also great for this, where you can look up the top rock songs or pop songs or whatever genre you like in that language, and let it auto-suggest your next songs.

For those of you who might start from zero or for whom the language is completely out of your usual musical universe, in that case I’d start with a Spotify, Apple, or even Billboard Top 50 for a country that speaks the target language, and start previewing songs, adding the songs I like or browsing the top hits of the artists whose songs I like, and work my way down from there, letting the algorithm suggest me more and more until I have developed some sort of playlist.

Remember that you can work the algorithm to populate your playlist even with subpar songs just so you can keep discovering new ones and simply remove the less-good ones later. This theory works for the previous step as well, and for any social media platform!

Once I’ve put all the new language content I found into a new playlist, I have it on repeat when I study or go about my day, sometimes reading along the lyrics or mouthing along :)

Step 5: Find a show 📺

Watching a TV show in the target language is a great way to get even closer to it and to real people over a long stretch of time in a continuous story that’s still chunked out into pieces. The thing is, I’m picky about my content when I start because once you start delving into uncontrolled media like this, it is so easy to get overwhelmed and find yourself in deep, incomprehensible water that makes you feel bad.

I say this is important because when I started learning German, I remember seeing a recommendation to watch the show “Dark.” Minutes into the show I realized this was in no way shape or form something that would make any sense to a beginner or even low intermediate learner, if it didn’t somehow discourage them from learning German at all. This experience also helped me realize that most language-learning advice out there is trash misinformed :D

So I like to keep it easy by choosing slice-of-life, everyday life, light-romance-vibe shows. When I’ve got nowhere else to turn to, I put on Love is Blind, so in this case, I’d start out with Love is Blind: Mexico. There also looks to be a show Valeria, whose plot is: “Valeria is a writer who’s hit a dead end with both her writing and her husband. She finds solace in her three friends: Carmen, Lola, and Nerea.” Sounds up my alley!

On a related note, many people who want to learn Japanese often start in anime, which I also think is a mistake – the spoken language is hyberbolic and far too fast, the voices are over-emoted and expressions are not congruent to everyday spoken Japanese, and the content is often too complicated and other-worldly to be something you can take away and adopt easily in a real-life situation. There are so many better options out there!! (Ask me :D)

The platform is also something I consider when choosing my show – I really like Netflix because of the subtitle options, as it’s often the only streaming platform that offers a multitude of easily searchable foreign language content with multiple audio and subtitle options. I also have a browser extension for Netflix that lets me watch with both the English subtitles and the target language subtitles at the same time as well as toggle between them, which is really useful.

YouTube channels like Easy Spanish or Easy German etc. are also good resources. The content is mixed and not always beginner-friendly from the start so you need to know how to filter, but they’re worth looking into once you have a little footing.

Step 6: Add extra reading — only when you’re ready 🪜

I usually don’t reach for outside books until I have some degree of comfort with the language, which is generally until I’m at least halfway through my base book. I do this to mitigate the risk of picking too many different sources at different levels when I start out, because then I’ll get overwhelmed, or feel bad, like I’m not smart — so my first goal is to choose a solid base text and stay steady with it until I can make some sentences on my own.

And when I am ready, as I noted with my TV show example, I would not just pick any old book. I would not pick a children’s book, for example, as they tend to have a lot of fairy tale, whimsy terms that you don’t use every day.

If I had the option every time, I’d find some manga in the target language. It would be some story I already know, or something simple that stays in that slice-of-life, light romance lane (nothing like One-Piece, Dragonball, etc.!). Manga keeps the descriptive writing minimal, and it’s really just conversations between people, with the visual context right there. They’re like visual movie scripts, and in this way they act as a more fun, accessible entry point for reading beyond the base text.

Children’s magazines/newspapers, are another good option if you want to go into non-fiction. They tend to cover many different topics — nature, pop culture, science — without going too deep on any of them, and usually do so in a more visual, simple, or fun way than usual instructional texts. Online newspapers or websites for children work the same way.

And if I were to move into the adult non-fiction world, I would likely pick some sort of self-help book relevant to an interest I have… looking now I’d try to read a bit of La riqueza que el dinero no puede comprar / The Wealth Money Can’t Buy.

In sum… it’s the same rod-ey-o each time 🤠

While I gave examples of my process using Spanish, I would follow these steps for any language, no matter Romance or Germanic or Asian or Nordic.

When I need to go deeper into a language I already know or get into focus-mode for an upcoming exam, I follow pretty much the same structure of finding a primary text and juicing up my social media and Apple Music library with the target language.

The thing is, picking the books and finding all the right resources can be hard — especially when you’re not used to it yet and don’t really know what you need or what’s “good.” It’s not always obvious what’s good for a beginner versus what just looks approachable, or which materials are actually going to fit your life, goals, and the things you like. There’s a good bit of trial and error involved, but I find this task to be a lot of fun.

It’s my personal obsession hobby to find good resources. I have bookshelves full of strictly foreign language “textbooks,” and a large portion of my Dropbox storage is similarly devoted. (I plan to share some of my most interesting – as well as worst – finds here!) Whenever I’m abroad or anywhere near a bookstore in any country, you can find me there, diving straight into the Languages section, looking for inspiration and guidance in a new book that could help me or someone else feel more excited and ready to learn another language.

So if you want to get started without having to do all of this work yourself – discovering your boomerang or finding the base book, good music, interesting show, relevant social media content, and other razzle-dazzle in another language – contact me!

I’d love to hear if you have particular methods, steps, or resources that help you getting into and staying motivated while learning another language.

I also have a hunch that certain steps of this process can be extrapolated to learning other things – at least the social media algorithm tuning step is one I use when looking for particular content for a prospective job or desired skill on LinkedIn! 👩‍💼

Leave a comment

Share

In my last post (in case you missed it it’s here), I wrote a bit about the popular and distorted viewpoint most language learning marketing has, that learning a foreign language is a “natural,” “immersive,” or “like a native” process. They tout that by using whatever app or program they offer, you'll be fluent before you know it, without “studying”.

I say: this is a bunch of hoop-la. Your brain completed the download of its first-language(s) when it was six and no longer needs another one. If you want to add another one to its repertoire, you gotta work for it. Why? Because language learning, like any other learning, is a skill.

Once you start treating it like a skill – e.g. something you get better at with more time, experience, and effort – then the whole world of foreign languages opens up to you.

You realize, I can learn that language I’ve wanted to ever since I was a kid.

I can start from now and make progress.

I don’t need bilingual parents or a bilingual family, or a partner who speaks that language.

I don’t need to live abroad to get the exposure or materials I need.
I don’t even have to leave my house.

Like Nike says, I just [have to] do it.

This is the realization I had about learning languages when I was struggling with Japanese, depressed and wondering why I could barely speak despite being in Japan during my study abroad semester.

It is the realization that pushed me to change my approach and eventually, pass the N1 exam, become a translator, start learning German, move to Germany, take and pass B2 level, move to Italy, start learning Italian, and pass A2 level with a near perfect score.

I most certainly don’t like to toot my own horn, and I am not a native-level speaker in anything else but English, but all of this is to say, there is nothing but a bit of good old fashioned elbow grease and prioritization keeping you away from learning whatever language it is you want, and making a job, hobby, or whatever pursuit you wish out of it.

I know that if I decided tomorrow to start learning, I don’t know – Russian, that I could create a plan for myself and get to some degree of conversational competence in a few months. (The real question that would block my progress would be, do I really want to learn Russian?)

So allow me respond to a few comments I often hear about language ability or how I obtained it that diffuse some major misconceptions most people have about language learning and, hopefully, encourage you to take the plunge.

“You lived in all three countries where the languages you know are spoken. You live in one now! I bet it’s so easy to learn when you just live there.”

Wrong. It isn’t!

In fact, I would highly encourage anyone deciding to move somewhere to learn the language there to do a good bit of pre-work beforehand, lest they find themselves drowning in their day-to-day as I did when I first moved to Italy and absolutely no f** idea what was going on around me.

I currently live in Germany, and as much as I so dearly wished it was the case, the reality is that there are no magical spores in the air full of, say German grammar and vocabulary, that just settle into your skin and become a part of your linguistic wiring just by existing here. Proof? There are plenty of ex-pats living here in Germany just as they do in Japan and as they do in Italy who do not speak very much German, Japanese, or Italian.

But you know what is here? Plenty of opportunity for me to actively look around me, ask myself what the words mean, look them up, see them in another place, take note of that, write it down, repeat. Or buy a book in German, or watch a movie in German, or practice speaking with a local, without having to look very far or spend a lot of money.

Expecting “immersion” to be just existing in some foreign language environment is going to set you up for a world of disappointment.

Why? Because you’re not a toddler anymore.

You are a fully functioning adult in a largely English-centric world.

No one is going to spoon-feed you words like your parents did nor are they going to correct you when you’re wrong. You already know what food is and how to buy it without needing the words. You know how to spot danger and cross the street without getting hit by a car. In a pinch, someone likely knows enough English to get you what you need, or it’s likely already written in it.

So if you want success in a foreign language, you have to be willing to be an active learner no matter where you are, and not expect that you will get better at a language by passively hearing or seeing it.

Subscribe now

“You must spend all your time learning languages.”

If I could make this my full-time job, you bet your bottom dollar I would be doing it all the time! Alas, I have had to live as yet another cog in the 9-5 scheme.

When I was in Japan studying my tushie off, I was doing so after I left for work around 7 or 7:30 AM, finished at around 6 or 7 PM, did private lessons til around 9 PM, and on alternating days went to the gym or went out.

In Germany, I was doing my master’s program and working part-time at a business school, while keeping up on my old job in Japan, and at one point was doing my master’s, part-time work, and a six-month coding bootcamp at the same time.

In Italy, I was writing my master’s thesis and working a full-time job remote.

Today I’m just as busy as ever. I am not just chilling spending all my time learning languages (although that would be the bomb).

But because I treat Italian and German or whatever other language like a skill, I schedule in my time to study just as I do my time for the gym or any other interest I have.

I have regular Italian lessons because I know I will be tempted to slack off otherwise. I’m not reading much for leisure unless it is in German or Italian, or watching a show without German or Italian subtitles.

I make the most of the limited time I have not working to get my exposure in and still have a ton of other things that take up my non-work or non-language time.

I’m putting in time and active effort as consistently as I can — and this is something anyone can do, anywhere they are, if they want to.

“You have some sort of language talent. You just learn languages easily.”

Another one I wish was true.

When I was a kid, I loved foreign languages just as I do now. I would buy books written in other languages just to flip through them in awe. I took out phrasebooks from the library and tried memorizing their contents. I took French in high school. I took Japanese in college.

But I never really knew what to do with the materials I had. As I said before, I went to Japan for my study abroad semester thinking I would be able to get around with what I “learned” and was horribly disappointed. And when I moved to Italy, I didn’t know any Italian. My landlord would blab on and on while I’d sit there with a blank look on my face, wondering why Italian, a romance language, was so damn difficult for me.

So what helped me? That good old fashioned elbow grease.

I wasn’t going to accept that I could never learn Japanese, which I found so beautiful, or German, which sounded so cool, or Italian, what I needed to actually integrate into my newfound Italian family life.

So I kicked my tushie to learn Japanese, bought a graded reader and textbook series for the N2 exam, and studied on the train to work, after work, in the morning. I hired a private tutor to meet once a week. Eventually I got N1. An acquaintance I met years after that semester studying abroad told me, “Wow! Your accent isn’t bad anymore!” 🫠

I studied German while I was in Japan and took two levels of tests before I left, taking lessons from a private tutor an hour a week, and continued my self-study course when I arrived.

I crash coursed myself in Italy for about a month after I got there so I had some of the basics down, brought my notebook to every lunch and dinner with my family, and studied after work and before work at the cafes at the beach, until I had to pause because I was too stressed with my Master’s thesis and full-time job. Now I’m back in Germany learning more Italian than I did when I was actually in Italy.

I could go on with examples, but the point is, none of this comes naturally to me.
I just don’t quit.

I’m like my cat’s fur on a black sweater, a cockroach in the kitchen, or Microsoft’s “check this box to keep you signed in” notification – no matter what, once I start, a language just can’t get rid of me.

So channel your inner cat, cockroach, or Microsoft notification.
Put time and effort into that dream foreign language of yours and don’t stop til you’re where you want to be.

Trust me, you’ll get there 😉

Share

Surprise Tonkotsu Ramen Quest Update 🍜

After the heartbreaking ordeal at Mizo Ramen last week, I needed to cleanse my palate at another place.

I went to Shisomen Vegan Ramen & Cocktails, where I was thoroughly impressed with the thick broth, perfectly cooked noodles, and simple but tasty toppings. HOWEVER. The cursed “beef” patty struck again. Had they been, say the tantan ramen “meat” crumbles, this ramen could have gotten a 4/4.

Final score: a warm and happy 3/4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’m surprised the vegan options so far have been beating out the standard ones in a dish where the “meaty” aspect of the broth is the signature.

I’ll see if the Japanese-run Takumi9 Tonkotsu can’t turn the tide this week. 😋

I should just be able to “absorb” a foreign language, right? 🧽

The other day I was speaking to one of my long-term English students in Japan about attempting to learn another language. I said I found it strange that all of these words are part of the marketing of most language learning software and programs out there:

• “immersive”

• “automatic”

• “natural”

• “effortless”

Why do so many learners expect that they should learn a language in this way and not like, say, how they’d learn a skill like web coding, some sport, or even a game like chess?

First thought — they don’t see knowing multiple languages as a skill in the first place.

If you think something should just “come” to you, you wouldn’t approach or learn it in a way that inherently takes effort, right? It should be like second nature.

Quickly, to note about this expectation for learning another language – the learner is either:

• A native English speaker, generally monolingual, wanting to learn any other language

• A non-native but fluent English speaker (bilingual) wanting to learn a language aside from English

The second group has a curious trait. I’ll come back to it shortly.

Much in the way that someone believes because they can already speak a language fluently, that other languages can be acquired in the same way. They, having learned their first language as a child, don’t have any recollection of putting effort into their language ability. They just always “had it.” It developed in and through their environment, without a dictionary or grammar guide. Naturally!

Well, I was reading a book called The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, and it says some very interesting things about how children gain fluency. Essentially, babies’ brains are wired for linguistic input. It is actively seeking and absorbing patterns of pronunciation and grammar it hears. This is an evolutionary trait humans developed, and in this way, learning our first language is as natural and essential to our humanness as is our brain growing and us using our limbs.

But here’s the thing — your brain stops actively seeking and absorbing patterns of the first language at the age of 6, because at this point, it is fluent. It has done the thing. Even at the age of 4, a child “uses mature grammar at near-adult levels”.

In other words, the brain now recognizes its mother tongue, say English, knows how it sounds, knows the major patterns of grammar and essential vocabulary, and can spit them out perfectly so that it may live and operate on its own. There is no need now for the brain to focus so much of its energy on language anymore (although it does continue to make continuous gains, namely in vocabulary).

“Once the details of the local language have been acquired from the surrounding adults, any further ability to learn (aside from vocabulary) is superfluous. It is like borrowing a floppy disk drive to load a new computer with the software you will need … once you are done, the machines can be returned.”

This is not to say it isn’t possible for a child to learn later or for anyone else to become fluent in another language. I am merely stating that native fluency, in the same “automatic” way that common belief assumes is the expected way to learn even as an adult, is capped at a very young age.

Once you pass that threshold, fitting another language into your already survival-ready brain takes skill. Acquiring it, understanding it, and using it well is going to take the same effort learning how to play chess would – there are rules to learn, there are patterns to get familiar with just as there are tricks and snappy ways to move, but all in all, the more you play it, the better you get.

One more quote from this book that helps put it into context why:

The question is no longer “Why does a language ability disappear?” but “When is the learning ability needed?”

Now, this brings me to the second curiosity I noted before about the abundance of fluent or very good second-language English speakers in the world, among even those who could care less to “study” in the conventional sense. What makes English the exception to this skill-rule of attaining competence?

My observations from traveling and living abroad for so long now have shown me:

• The countries with the best and highest concentration of non-native English speakers have either a history of colonization by monolingual English-speaking nations like the US or UK,

• OR use English as a de-facto language for travel, financial, or simply utility communication with their neighbors as opposed to learning all of them (see: Europe, where a Frenchman would sooner learn English to travel to Germany than German, and the same for the German, who may also go to Italy, or Greece, and not wish to learn all of them just to order a coffee)

• English is everywhere, and used often as decoration or as complement to the native language (see: a restaurant in Germany using a sign saying “OPEN” or “CLOSED”)

• High-quality English language content is accessible and thanks to Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Netflix, and all the other major production studios of the world in the US, UK, and Australia, not to mention the music industry, you can and will hear or see English content no matter where you are in the world

• English grammar, aside from its countless idioms, is comparatively simpler than Romance, Germanic, Nordic, and Asian languages

• English uses a small set of a mere 26 simple characters for writing, which is the standard of the internet if not all technology in the world

• Students learning English abroad in monolingual countries such as the US, UK, or Australia, are less likely to be able to use their native language as a fallback, and are much more likely to be disadvantaged without fluency

• Many countries offer English as part of their primary education

In sum, these are some of the reasons you will find many excellent English speakers around the world, and fewer the other way around for a particular language (such as French, German, Chinese).

I would also guess that these learners did a degree of “study”, whether that be translating using some dictionary or remembering the basics from their school days, and with heavy exposure over a long period of time (given the ubiquity of English all over the world).

Ok, so what am I trying to say here? I’m saying that if you are trying to learn a second language, and if you haven’t been exposed a lot over a long period of time to that language in your primary language environment, or are over the age of 5, you are going to have to approach it like you would any other new skill or thing you’d like to get good at.

Which is actually a more optimistic conclusion than it being an “automatic” or “natural” process, where learners who find that they aren’t “absorbing” their target language like fluent children become discouraged and think poorly about themselves, because it says instead:

“Hey! You can learn any language you want to. You don’t need bilingual parents or to live abroad! You don’t need to be a child! You didn’t ‘miss the boat’! If you put in some time and effort, just like your gym routine, you will get it.”

Now that sounds pretty good to me! :)

Share

Fun final distraction: my hunt for decent ramen in Berlin 🍜

Before closing out this long overdue post, I wanted to share with you my recent quest to find the best tonkotsu ramen in Berlin. And that it is waaaay harder than it should be.

First thing, you might be wondering, what is tonkotsu ramen and how is it different from, uh, ramen?

Well… I’ll keep it short.

Ramen is originally a Chinese dish. The Japanese took it and did their own experiments with the broth, noodle, and toppings.

So depending on the restaurant you go to, if you’re getting Chinese ramen, you’re getting a broth of what I think is shoyu or soy sauce, and it’s a golden brown color, or you’re getting Japanese ramen, which may be shoyu (soy sauce), shio (salt-based), miso (soy paste, usually a whitish cream color), or tonkotsu (fatty pork-based broth).

I do not care for any other ramen except for tonkotsu because to me, all other ramens are flavorless and weak. Other broths are too watery, thin; my American love of stews and thick chili soups and all that jazz inclines me towards the tonkotsu broth that is thick, fatty, and flavorful.

The caveat to this love of tonkotsu is that it is not easy to find abroad (probably because it is so hard to make deliciously), so seeing that I live in a major capital of the world, Berlin, and can’t just zip over to Japan anytime I like for the real stuff, I started on my own quest of finding all the ramen-only restaurants in the city and rating their tonkotsu offering.

Now, having lived in Japan for many years, I am a particularly critical judge and I take no prisoners.

Real tonkotsu is like this:

• Rich golden yellow/brown broth you can’t see through

• Visible pockets of fat in the broth

• Simple toppings such as green onion, nori (seaweed), a soft-boiled egg, and of course, chashu pork (thin-cut marinated slices)

I have a list of 13 locations on my RAMEN TASTING map of Berlin, and have tried three so far:

• IPPAI NO RAMEN Berlin (⭐️⭐️/4 - No gyoza side dish offering, noodles were weird and probably not cooked properly, but the broth was good)

• Limori Ramen (Vegan) (⭐️⭐️/4 - For vegan, the broth was pretty dope and the noodles tasty. But they used “beef” patties that were disgusting and wtf is anything “beef” doing in my tonkotsu anyway??")

• and today’s venture, Mizu Ramen (⭐️/4 - I’d give this a 0 but that goes for the absolutely inedible – the ramen was topped with oddities such as sliced carrots, uncooked spinach, fish cakes, and wakame!??!!)

A final note on Mizu Ramen: What the actual f—! For 15 euro I almost cried. The interior was so cute and the menu promising, but that ramen just made me sad.

I took this one for the team – Don’t go there, guys. Save your money.

I’ll let you know when I find a legit spot. Or, do you know any? 😬

Subscribe now

While they’re here, my high-octane schedule continues on. I’m letting them take my apartment, so I’ll be couch surfing at friends’ places. Still have work (we have our main event, the annual career fair), still have three-day-a-week bootcamp, still have to make some degree of thesis progress and study German.

Speaking of, I’m currently 6% behind on my German course. Last week was new levels of busy, and given that I usually always do my German in the morning, when I sleep in and end up having to run from bed and out the door, it’s more or less nixed from the schedule.

My week in a nutshell: My job in Japan had me occupied in the mornings, as did my job at the business school in the afternoons, and before code class I was trying to help my dad out remotely with his internet (and money), I had to make some big decisions about my Italy paperwork translations, I had to create and send out promotional materials for the JFKInterviews event we have next week (JFKInterviews is the career development program I run at uni), then I had code class, and on one of those days I spent a very very long day at uni meeting with professors for the JFKInterviews thing and then about my thesis. Let’s not count the hours I spent preparing for each of these things…

Social Media Sugar Pops(?)

This meant that I had also neglected my morning meditation, cooking, and dishes. I was just so tired when I finally got home. Then I would spend some time “relaxing”, which meant an episode of Air Crash Investigation and time scrolling Pinterest for focus or Instagram reels for laughs. Like little doses of sugar.

I will say, the evening Pinterest scrolls have become a pleasant part of my thoroughly exhausting days. They show me glimpses of how my life is going to look once I get through these next few months. Or if not so soon, if I stay on track. I’m going to have a lovely apartment and space for hosting my friends, and go on a lovely trip to a warm place with blue water and waves to surf. And stay in a villa there with good friends and sip sparkly wine and feel secure, safe, and stable. They say that a new habit has to excite you, or reward you in some way. Pinterest took note.

I’ve also been scrolling on Twitter, too. The algorithm on this platform knows that I want primarily web dev content and so that’s what I get. It can be overwhelming with everyone posting threads on the “Top 10 Things to Learn to Become a Pro Fast” or whatever about instant side-hustles or best practices for this and that, so I have to control how long I go through the feed. But I have found some interesting stuff and feel like, thanks to my code camp, I can understand more. Speaking the language, so to speak 😉

Italy Citizenship Progress: Translation Phase!

The biggest and most arduous task of this whole process is getting all the paperwork you need in the right format with the right certifications. Some people have to quit outright because they can’t get a particular vital record from their main (ancestral) line, and I have been lucky to acquire all the ones I need with relative ease. I say relative because hindsight tends to romanticize things, and getting my mother and grandmother’s paperwork was in reality not so easy.

Luck continued to come my way when I found out that my NARA (naturalization documents) for my great-grandfather had received its federal Apostille (certification). I was worried this would take another month or more (the federal government cares for no one’s timeline!), and any issue or delay with it would set me back entirely as it’s probably the most important document in my application.

This means that, with all the documents obtained and apostilled, I can move to the next phase: translating. I got an estimate for in-Italy translation from the advisor I’m working with, and got another from a translator in DC I know via a contact I met through a Facebook group. The difference is about $400-500, so I decided to go with the DC translator, although this means more sending documents internationally — ie, entrusting everything to FedEx 😕. But I really like this translator, she works fast and professionally, replies with understanding, expertise, and wit. Very glad I met her, and I can say the same for the advisor I’m working with who will be my main lifeline when I eventually move to Milan.

Which is, holy crap, in only three months!! **paaaanniiicccc!!**

What’s left then is: translations (by translator in US) → translation certification (by DC Embassy) → move to Italy (i.e. get residence permit, find apartment, fill out application, etc. etc…)

Thesis

It’s almost the end of January and I still don’t have my 15 pages (the goal for this month) written. With my family coming in a few days, I don’t see this changing.

I did however make progress on the topic, and found out that a good friend of mine wrote her dissertation on a similar one, so this means I can use her work as reference and even build on it. She’s been very generous about offering her help and support.

Unfortunately, since my trip to campus on Wednesday where I shared all my plans with my advisor (which went over well, thankfully), I haven’t had any time to take the next step with the research. This means narrowing down my data timeline, the sources, the sampling, and so on. It comes down to how much data is available in the first place, but since digging through databases can be a quick mental life-sucker, I need to block a proper session for it. So, that’s tomorrow.

One thing that has helped so far — I ditched my chaotic Google Docs method of writing notes and sorting my thoughts out to using Scrivener, an app more often used by novelists but one I used for a draft of my book Japanese for Anyone. It’s great at handling documents with multiple sections, and I can write synopses (index card-like things) and notes on all the docs I’m referencing as I’m writing the main content, all in the same window. Very cool. I’ll show a screenshot of it next week once I dig into it a bit more.

Web / Code Stuff

Last Sunday I started working on a new portfolio project making a full-size website layout. This one did not go as smoothly as the first, and even though I worked on it today, I’m still not done. But I’ve been learning a lot. I am going to become a CSS Grid and Flexbox master in the coming weeks, I know it.

After I finish the layout, I’ll make it responsive, then add Javascript interactivity to it.

A few cool things I learned from last Sunday and today’s project:

• CSS has a “counter” property that automatically adds numbering to elements (no more manual typing!)

• I found this great web developer/designer guy Ahmad Shadeed and his articles helped me do a really cool trick with this line and alignment of the numbers [it’s flexbox and a pseudo-element! Also, I used the counter property on the left FAQ list 😊]:

  

• I fiddled with absolute positioning AND the counter function to make this “ghost” number on the upper left of every card in this sequence:

  

And in my bootcamp, we’ve been making apps with Ruby on Rails, and I think I actually get it. An example of the stuff we are learning is this, where you can add, edit, and delete things in a database and have them display in dynamic ways across a site. We made a clone of this, and the next project we do this upcoming week is a clone of Yelp and AirBnB. I need to make sure I sleep enough…

Sleep is my favorite thing.

I can’t get enough of it. I yawned for two hours straight during my lecture yesterday. I’m starting to think I’m the type of person who needs 10 hours of sleep a day. I know I’m a monster of a person if I have less than 7.

A Book Recommendation

Needing a break from screens, I borrowed the book I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. It was a great read that made the trips to uni, work, and Soho slide by. I highly recommend it, and as it’s the only book I’ve read front-to-back within a week in years, I think that autobiographies are my thing now. Namely those on paper, because I’m sure my eyesight has gotten worse the past few months. (I wonder why…)

An Album Recommendation

If you know me well, you know that Utada Hikaru is my favorite singer of all time. She has a beautiful and unique voice in both English and Japanese, she inspired me to learn Japanese, I mirror all my teachings on Japanese phonetics and syllables on her voice, and she’s a deeply relatable writer and musician. She and Taylor Swift are on the same songwriter tier is what I mean. Her latest album BAD モード is yet another masterpiece. It’s a smooth and introspective blend of pop, dance, chill house, and R&B. I was listening to “Somewhere Near Marseilles” as I wrote this post — definitely a fun track for doing work.

Alright, that’s it for this week… if you have any suggestions for Berlin sights to show, things to do, or places to eat with my Japanese family in this strangely wet and cold winter weather… bitte, bitte, bitte hilf mir. 🙏🏼

Ciao!

Subscribe now

Last week I wrote about my slow climb out of the deep Well of Sadness and Confusion that I was stuck in all of December, if not a good part of the months before it. I do feel much better this past week, and that comes down to a few big reasons:

1. I’ve managed to keep the habits I started during the holiday break in my usual schedule,

2. I discovered a feasible, interesting, and meaningful thesis topic to pursue (hallelujah),

3. I’m gone all-in on code and even completed a little project today (which you can see below!)

How to keep doing something you know is good for you even when you don’t “feel” like it

Consistency with these habits, or any habit, is hard once you’ve proven to yourself you can do it for a time. I’ve been, for example, very tidy, diligent about my meditation and sleep, and never leave a dish in the sink. I study for my German B2 exam every day, at least 1-2% of the online course I’m doing (it has a handy progress bar at the top so I can easily measure how much I’m completing). I also write in my journal every night before bed. Aaaaand, as from today, I will complete a code challenge/project once a week to build my portfolio for that dream job.

But there have already been days when I come home from bootcamp tired and just want to eat something and sleep, and don’t want to clean, don’t want to study. Want to just stare at the ceiling and pretend to float away. But I know how it goes when I skip once. I’ll say ah I can do that tomorrow. Then I skip tomorrow. Then I do it maybe the next day, but it’s a hassle, and a lot more work. Eventually, I lose the habit and slowly fall back into the Well of Sadness.

So it is really important that I maintain these habits, like even writing here, no matter what. I definitely do feel better, and each habit has already reaped some key benefit in this past week alone. For example, writing in my journal one night led me to my new thesis idea. Cleaning the dishes doesn’t make me dread cooking (it’s not like I cook anything complicated anyway, but it’s one less daily stress) and I don’t feel tempted to go buy something pre-made. Money = saved! And so on. It’s just easy to give up once I think I’ve made enough progress to get out of the big rut I was in, but the whole point of this all is to not get back in that rut. So we are putting the brakes on that now and for good.

Miraculous and Utterly Relieving Thesis Progress

A pertinent example of the challenge of consistency is the progress I’ve made on my thesis. After dreading what I had written before, I started thinking about the themes that have reoccured in previous papers I had written and the topics that I wished to know more about, or make an impact in somehow. I figured if I start there I could find something that was at least interesting on a deeper level to me, and made me realize just how far off my other ideas were from that – I really don’t care thaaat much about why Hillary didn’t win the presidency, at least not enough to write my capstone thesis on it. 😬

So I came to the topic of healthcare. I’ve been lucky enough to live in Japan and Germany, where I’ve been insured by public providers and never had to ask if a doctor I went to was “in my network” or if a service would be paid for or if I met my “deductible” and so forth. The fact that I grew up in the US with the idea of needing “a good job with good benefits” just to have proper health insurance absolutely boggles my brain now. It isn’t ethical to pair health insurance with your job, and I also bet it’s a serious pain in the arse/burden for small business owners to provide to their employees or to find serious employees who will work without it. It’s just objectively a stupid system that even feels anti-American and the antithesis of freedom.

And since I had already written a paper on American views of taxes and another on the state of education & teacher pay, I figured healthcare was a logical next-topic to cover, also given my tendency to analyze politics with sociology (as I did in those previous papers).

I originally thought to do a media frame analysis of healthcare coverage in states where single-payer coverage was implemented or failed to be implemented, as in Colorado and California. [I chose media frame analysis because I once wrote a paper using this theory/technique that got a high grade and that I thoroughly enjoyed working on]. But I couldn’t keep myself from thinking, these systems look just like Obamacare, which was meant to be a stand-in, makeshift intermediary step before the more equitable and affordable Medicare for All kind of system was implemented. These programs aren’t training wheels, like supporters hope. They’re just patches over punctured tires. For many reasons, they’re a waste of time that may do more damage in the end.

I wrote about how frustrated I was with the state plans in my journal, and then wrote okay, why not write about Medicare for All? It was a eureka moment; immediately I’ve got ideas for the data sets and research questions flowing out of me.One night as I was trying to fall asleep I got an idea for an opening paragraph summarizing the reasons why Medicare for All was worth studying and got up to write two whole pages about it. Finally, I feel some relief and clarity.

On the other hand, I again run into that consistency problem. I’ve made so much progress in the past week that I would usually start thinking, “Okay, I can take it easy on this now.” 🛑 Uh, hello!??! I still have a lot to do if I’m going to write this whole thing in three months, so that’s not an option, and I have to keep acting as if I still don’t know what I’m writing about and that everything is going to be difficult to put together / the data will take forever to analyze and compile, blah blah.

So I’m going to spend a good part of my days getting the data sets and major points together, and aim to have the proposal – one I can be confident about – finished and submitted by the end of the month. Pray for meeeee.

Code Progress — I finished a project!!! Yayyy!

Now that I have the *~dream job~* clarity, I realize I need a portfolio, and that while I’ll have some things from the project weeks at my Bootcamp, I would prefer to have a more confidence working on projects I start on my own. My idea was to draw up layouts on my own then code them out into little mockup sites, but drawing up layouts takes a lot of time. I decided to use my Pinterest to find nice website examples and choose one each week to imitate i.e. make a mockup website out of.

With each project, I’d choose the layout based on its complexity or what skill I want to practice (Flexbox? Grid? Bootstrap? Javascript? Pseudo-elements? Dynamic images?) and make sure I could do it in a day. Then I of course conform to best practices and screen responsiveness, and put it up on Github to my “portfolio”.

Sundays are my most free days, so I did my first one today, using this image as the template:

And I made a working version that is responsive (looks good on all screens) and uses all kinds of little CSS tricks! I’d show you the website, but I made it on my local machine. One day I’ll put them all on my official website (whenever that’s done, ha). So what does it look like, you say? Well, it looks like the image!! 😅 For real! 😂

Nevertheless, if you’re interested you can view the GitHub here 👩🏼‍💻 (I somehow also figured out that, and how to make a pretty ReadMe file). You could also go see the gif-post about it on my Instagram :)

I’ll definitely make time to continue doing one challenge each week because I do need the practice (this project took me like, 3-4 hours) and also want to showcase these skills during the bootcamp project week (meaning my portfolio will look extra impressive… look, I want that job!!).

Coding camp itself has been going well too. We learned how to fetch and push data using APIs and I am thankful that I’ve been learning in this structured classroom way because it’s not easy and, given what resources I’ve seen on the internet, I would have never figured it out on my own with any confidence. Maybe not never, but still. I am a strong believer in structure no matter how or where you learn, so I’m glad that at least one big investment from last year has been paying off. 🤗

Perhaps I sound very happy and as if everything is honky-dory now. I am happier, but I know that there isn’t much that separates me from the Well of Sadness. I would prefer not to have as many trips down there as I did last year although I know the occasional dip is inevitable. Happiness now means rationing my social battery and protecting myself from situations where I might have to be vulnerable. I still have no desire to go out and meet new people, or to go out in general. I prefer to be at home. I still have two jobs to stay on top on, so I am putting all of my mental efforts into maintaining my new habits and continuing to make progress. That being said, I feel hopeful that if I can keep this all up, I’ll feel better than I ever did before.

Last week a few readers reached out to me with advice and resources on dealing with anxiety / sadness. Another recommended me a book that would help me with my thesis. Some sent me funny and relatable memes to cheer me up and encourage me. One friend said that reading my blog encouraged them to do more for themselves. And a good number also told me that they too were struggling like I was. 🥺

First, thanks to you all for a) reading this and b) for your support. I was so happy to hear your feedback! I don’t write this thinking I’m going to become the world’s next famous blogger nor do I think I’m an expert on any of the stuff I talk about here, so it means a lot to have readers who care and who also feel inspired by or interested in the things I churn out.

Also, if you ever want to reach out to me, you know I’m there!♥️

‘Til next week 👋

Subscribe now

It might be because I’m getting older and becoming increasingly aware of my surroundings and my own behavior, but 2022 was an especially trying year of growth. Even December hit me good, where up until New Year’s Day itself I had almost daily a new life lesson to learn.

I wasn’t writing here at the time because I was, not to use the term loosely or lightly, depressed. I could not manage a single positive thought about anything for what felt like a century. I wasn’t making progress in anything. I felt like I had woken up at the bottom of a well and decided to just make do there. True, I fall into these ruts fairly regularly and always climb back out, but it felt like this one hit more intensively. I have been gradually losing the will to fight them, so they now last longer. I’m lucky to have a great support system of friends. Yet still, shit hurts.

After wallowing in it so to speak for a few weeks, I felt that I’ve got to take a closer look at what is stressing me, making me sad, and what I can do to fix any of it in any way, because I cannot stay this way and let the sadness eat me up like it does.

So, as for what has changed since Christmas day is considerable, as I’ve now:

• Set a personal (and perhaps Tarot-reading inspired) date to complete my thesis: March 7th

  • Source: An uncompleted thesis may stand in the way of my newfound dream job (see below) and add stress to my move to Italy, so time to get it done. And the Soho tarot reader very accurately described my past year(s), so I trust her March 7th premonition (no, I’m not an astrology nut, but I’ll take the external motivation because why not?).

• Changed my home routine, which now includes fastidious tidiness and aversion to “extra” plus a morning 5-minute very corny meditation you never would have caught me doing any month before this one.

  • Meaning: I wake up, vaccum, meditate, study. Feeling down? Time to gym. Pomodoro timers for all tasks. Clothes/things — don’t wear or use it? Sell it or donate it. I’ve gone through all my cabinets and cleared everything that doesn’t spark joy. And most miraculously, when I finish with a dish, I wash it immediately, which I’ve never been able to maintain for more than a few days, but I’m almost two weeks into my habit, and I’m not breaking it.

• Set my sights on a dream job, dream company, and have scheduled in plans to make a bomb coding portfolio to get it

  • Source: In an attempt to clear the notifications off Slack, I went into the Careers channel for my Bootcamp program and started reading the recent postings, and found one that I could see myself doing full-time and being happy doing — which has not once happened to me since I got my job translating at TRUCK

  • This discovery has brought me immense clarity and relief. Until now I have been pressed to answer where I’d work after I graduate or finish my bootcamp, or what I’d do. Now I know, and it feels excruciatingly powerful. Yet another sign that stability is to be the word, goal, motivation, and zest of 2023.

• Improved my sleeping with a Green Noise 10 hr video I play in the background at bedtime and also sometimes while I’m working.

  • Source: I went to an experimental, loud art exhibit called Dark Matter with a friend and fell sound asleep like a just-fed baby in one of the loudest, brightest installations. This indicated to me that I need some sort of strange, soothing staticky noise to just, better peacefully exist in my own head.

    • = Recent sleeping issues have since been eliminated! 🥳

    • I also sleep with a cute longcat body pillow that was gifted by a dear friend, which has helped :)

• Lost all motivation for social gatherings beyond the reaches of the friends I already have. Party/ mingle / chat with new people? Nein, danke. I’m staying home (except for the gym and work) and enjoying every second of it.

  • Read: Please don’t invite me anywhere.

• Rediscovered the motivating power of Pinterest boards and created a new one with cheesy “luxe life” and positive affirmation pins and another with web designs I’m going use to make dummy versions of for my portfolio.

  • Source: a friend gifted me a customized Pinterest board (very thoughtful and original, might I add!)

Now let me regale you with a brief status update on all the primary projects, as I need your input:

Subscribe now

Master’s Thesis

• Intended completion date: March 7th but generally before April

Current topic: Uhh… the American Dream… women … marriage… okay, so how does this title sound to you:

• “It started with a husband.” Women, Power, and Marriage in a Fickle Meritocracy 

  • context: Hillary Clinton had objectively the most qualified resumé for the presidency and years of self-accomplished experience in various government offices, yet many women (namely white) didn’t think it mattered. One reason? “It started with a husband.” She didn’t seem self-made enough because of her marriage to former President Bill Clinton.

    • It’s not exactly an isolated incident — in 2000, Bob Dole (a Senator)’s wife Elizabeth Dole ran for president, and her campaign suffered because of the blatantly lack of support her husband showed

    • And what does the media think of MacKenzie Scott, philanthropist who is “only rich” because of her ex-husband Jeff Bezos’ success, or of Melinda Gates, who is now an ex- and independently rich?

• Other possible topics include some combination of the terms:

  • “self-made” / women / classism / President / American Dream / deservedness / politics / sociology / universal, unilateral social programs & education funding

• Alternative research question with no catchy title yet: about the phenomenon of “Pluralistic ignorance”, where for example, you say you’d vote for a woman but don’t think most other Americans would, so when you go to the voting booth, you end up choosing for another candidate so as not to “waste” your vote, especially as elections become more polarized and competitive.

  • Why? It may better explain why Hillary’s loss was so unexpected, why Bernie’s campaign suddenly lost steam, and even why Trump won (few thought he would actually win, ie. that others would vote for him, so they voted who they wanted to and didn’t disclose it to pollsters beforehand). And so on. May explain voter behavior.. also has a media effect tie-in…

  • Also: Polls often ask “Is America ready for a woman president” where most respond yes, but there is no follow up question about what “ready” means

  • This phenomenon also seems to explain support for action on climate change but unwillingness to vote for politicians or policies that would actually impact it

I’ve been going off of interesting titles to generate thesis ideas as they tend to inspire me to want to write something compelling enough to justify the pizzaz. So if you have any interesting ideas or comments combining the above topic mumblings, I beg you to please comment or PM me with them no matter how ridiculous or minuscule or whatever you think it is.

I’ve got only three months to write this so… I need your support!! 🙏🏼

Italy Move

Nothing new here. I’m waiting on the apostilles from the US State Dept. that hopefully arrive in January, so I can get all the documents translated. This will likely be the most expensive aspect of the process, but I can’t afford to have any problems with the translations, so I’m hunting for a reliable and somewhat affordable translator. They have to be in Italy though, because if they’re done in the US, I have to get them approved by the local consulate, which would take weeks and means I send my originals overseas and back… it’s just too risky.

Expected move date is still around April/May, to the Milan area.

Excel Project

I spent some time working in Excel on the Invoice problem I maybe mentioned here a few weeks ago, where I kept making mistakes manually writing items in work invoices and decided to figure out a way to automate the process in Excel because that shit was getting embarrassing.

Well, I managed! Hooray! I’m slowly building the database because we have a couple hundred furniture items and fabric/finish/spec combinations, but the formulas work!

Next automating task is for the estimates, which will prove to be a greater challenge as I have to import an external table and match multiple data… but hmm, now that I think about it… it can’t be that bad…

What’s ahead is weekly code challenges (to build my portfolio) and hopefully 15 pages written of whatever thesis topic I manage by the end of this month.

Bootcamp resumes this week as well so, it’s back to the grind as they say, and as much as I’m not looking to leaving my apartment, I am excited for January to see if I can really stick to my guns like I say and mean. I guess you’ll also find out 😉

I hope this year, and namely this January, is a great start for you. ‘Til next time!! 👋

I was out until 1 am then waking up at 3 for Bootcamp, staying up til 12, taking a nap, then driving seemingly all the time to everywhere only to have to do the same thing the next day and the next. Mostly I was driving around, sorting and collecting documents for Italy, getting them notarized then certified, and sending them off; I was watching code lectures as I brushed my teeth, waking up at 7 and returning at 11 or 12 that night if at all.

Driving everywhere meant I couldn’t do anything in the meantime, no email checking or sending or code review, so to me it quickly felt like a royal waste of time to have to drive 30 min to an hour just to do one thing or see a friend, and was more exhausting than I remembered. And it was expensive! I had to rent a car, and my personal advice to you and what I wish I had done ever since I’ve started renting cars for return trips home is, pick one company and start collecting reward points and perks.

After a beyond shoddy experience with a cheaper company, I wish I had stuck to the first one I had used. My boss has a Hertz Gold membership and he gets all kinds of perks (like returning the car at any time with no extra fee and free upgrades), while I sit around getting charged a whole extra day for returning the car an hour late. With all the renting I do when I go back home, I’d likely be at a similar membership level. Lesson learned: pick a company, stay loyal, reap the rewards. I’m doing this for everything I can now: airlines, rental cars, you name it. Got any recommendations for me, by the way?

Subscribe now

A few brief observations from my time in the US before I do a quick recap of how my other projects are going:

• Driving. How do you people enjoy a drink anywhere? It’s no wonder houses in the US are so big — they have to be, because gathering anywhere requires a huge time and driving commitment to and fro, and if you’re drinking at all, you cannot drive, and what are you going to do when the bar closes at 10 or 11? Uber your way back 20-40 miles home and pay $80 one way, then do the same tomorrow and hope your car wasn’t towed in the meantime? The logistics if living and enjoying in this country are hopeless with the lack of sufficient public transportation.

• On that note, you can’t drink outside?? I always forget this because in Japan and Germany, you can go to a convenience store or grocery store, get a drink, and walk right out with it. Pop it open, enjoy in the street or on a pretty day at the park. Again, no wonder houses in the US are so big — you can’t have a lightly boozy get together in public anywhere. This rule just doesn’t make any sense. Is this a property law thing? It can’t be about drunkenness, because if any issue needs to be remedied, it’s the requirement that you have to drive somewhere and back just to enjoy a drink.

• I could not escape a casual meeting with anyone without hearing their opinions on taxes and the poor. It was quite astounding how many misconceptions there are about taxation, where money is going and where it comes from, and how other larger systematic and structural problems (like transportation, to stay on theme) contribute to the experience of being poor in the US. Those I spoke to had a markedly bleak outlook on the current situation, and expressed a lack of faith in any politician or party. I would also like to add that I did not ask anyone for their opinions on politics or taxes; the topics were brought up organically.

Okay, so back to the usual project-update-programming.

Italy Citizenship

My goal in the US: collect all the remaining documents including my amended birth certificate and my mother’s birth certificate, and get them all sent in for apostille. Apostille means “internationally certified”, so that a foreign government (Italy) would recognize that the documents are valid. A state Apostille is needed on state or locally issued documents like a birth certificate, and a Federal apostille is needed for federal ones like naturalization papers.

Corona really screwed up this process for me, because walk-ins are not allowed anymore and perhaps the offices are happier having fewer requests and everything sent in the mail. But needing to send everything in – all original documents – and wait days or weeks or, in the federal apostille case, months, is terrifying. Before corona, I could have just went to Annapolis, handed over the documents, then got them back with the seal. The same for Federal apostille - just go to DC, wait in line, get the apostille, sayonara. But no, I’m stuck with the mail option. If you write anything wrong on the application or forget something, you’re screwed. Payment by check or money order only – who has those?? Sending documents with tracking? Minimum $20 one way, and you need to pay for both ways. I believe in total I paid $150 for all the documents I currently possess.

This process was thus complicated and costly, and each apostille had their own separate requirements depending on the document type. For example, I had to get a few documents notarized then certified by the local court before I could submit it for apostille. All the running around and checking and confirming I had to do for this… ugh.

Okay, so final result? All documents State Apostilled. Hooray! EXCEPT…. the original birth certificate of my mother was deemed too old to get the apostille. Wtf, right? It’s from the 50s, not 1800s! [I want to add that it cost me $40 to learn this because of the mailing to and fro]. The worst part is that I had went to Vital Records a week before with my father to obtain a new, fresh copy of her birth certificate, after confirming multiple times on the phone and on the application itself that my dad, the surviving spouse, could get it, but the staff was so unfamiliar with the request that they said no, and that he needed a court order. *mental explosion*

When I found out the apostille request with the original was denied, I was in Berlin again, and I was furious. I called Vital Records again, explaining that my mother is dead and my sister is estranged and is guarding our family documents like a gluttonous, evil dragon. Guess what they said? Your father can get a copy. I nearly snapped my phone. I will not divulge here what an absolute ordeal it was to get my dad and the documents together to go to Vital Records that one day only to be rejected despite knowing he could, but it was mentally and physically too fucking much.

So on the phone, I made another appointment for my dad to go and get my mother’s birth certificate, and pre-printed every document he could possibly need to prove that he is eligible, and told him to not even think about leaving until he gets a copy. So everyone, please join me in prayer as he, the most unreliable person I know, is entrusted with this extremely important mission to complete tomorrow. *deeeeeeeeeeep breath*.

And to add to my frustration, I have learned that getting the federal apostille for my great-grandfather’s documents could take another 3 months, and that getting his USCIS (citizenship paperwork) plus the apostille could take an additional 7 or 8. This throws a huuuuge wrench into my Monza plans, which means I may have to choose a different city with a more lenient city office/process.

I have also considered just staying in Berlin and doing the German citizenship route, but the working visa restrictions are even messier… I don’t see the worth in it while I have already done so much for Italy.

Master’s Thesis

Oh lordy. I’m really running out of time with this one. I only thought about it and shared my ideas with some friends while I was home, which helped give me more confidence in it. Now that I have a better idea of what I’ll write about, which I hope to share with you soon, I need to do some fine tuning first. I’m meeting with my advisor next week and hopefully will be able to buckle down on writing, since it is now somehow almost December (!!) and I have nothing written, nor has my thesis proposal been submitted. But now that I’m feeling back into my routine here, I should be able to get started in the next weeks.

Bootcamp

Keeping up with my class three days a week including all day on Saturday tested the extent of my Energizer-bunny-like stamina because I had a six-hour time difference to contest with.

While that sounds just fine on a Tuesday or Thursday when the class would start at 1 pm EST, if I was anywhere short of someone’s house with a stable Wi-Fi connection, it was almost impossible to join in. Cafes I went to were either too loud, too small, trashy, or had no wi-fi; my dad doesn’t have a large place nor one with wi-fi; it basically meant wherever I was, I had to drive back to my residence in the county to be there, and if I had an appointment for anything, I had to make sure I did it very early or the latest time in business hours because it took so long in traffic to get from A to B and back. Logistically speaking, doing all the Italy paperwork stuff plus Bootcamp absorbed most of my time.

Then Saturdays, where I had to wake up at 3 am and stay up til 12 pm, were a particular challenge since wherever I was staying I had to make sure I had good wi-fi and space to work without waking up anyone else. Since it was the weekend where my friends were finally free, I would usually be out quite late on Fridays. Overall, I was quite sleep-deprived in those two weeks.

Nonetheless, now that I’m back in Berlin, bootcamp has been a lot more manageable. We are learning SQL and very soon learning Ruby on Rails. Although I still don’t know what kind of job I’ll have at the end of this, I like what I’m learning, and I’ve been meeting some cool people. The network is large and diverse, and I think that that will in some capacity make it worthwhile no matter what.

Subscribe now

Workshopping

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here before, but I also run a student group at my university focused on career development. We had a big event this past week where a well-known business coach led a workshop on personal branding. I was so glad to have a team helping with the set up and cleanup, and we managed to have a turnout of 30 students. I also did a little speech at the beginning, and I believe that the more I do this type of thing, the more I think that it’s my calling. Motivating people! Organizing events! Making stuff happen!

Our guest suggested that everyone do this thing called the CliftonStrengthsfinder to figure out what you’re best at and capitalize on those strengths. Luckily, I got access to the Top 5 Traits quiz through my part-time job. I did the quiz in a half an hour and it gave me the following results along with a few tidbits from the descriptions and suggestions I highlighted:

• Learner

  • “You love the challenge of a steep learning curve”

  • “Be a catalyst for change”

  • “Become an expert in an area that interests you”

• Activator

  • “You have an ability to spark action and momentum in others”

  • “Help your friends make a decision and start moving”

  • “Consider becoming an entrepreneur”

  • “Get enough sleep”

• Focus

  • “You understand that life is about choices”

  • “Recharge yourself to avoid working yourself to exhaustion”

  • “You may get frustrated with incomplete projects and groups that don’t seem to get much done”

  • “Find a leadership… you have the talents to make decisions for the group and to get stalled plans back on track”

• Individuality

  • “You want to have the best fit between who you are and what you do with your life”

  • “Tell your friends and roommates about the great talents you see in them, and encourage them to follow their dreams”

• Responsibility

  • “People rely on your because they know you will complete a project – and do it right”

  • “Have you considered running for student government? You may feel that if you can make things better, you should make things better”

Wow. Accurate, much?? These are all things that I have especially been pondering over the past few months and realizing, yes only now realizing, are my strengths. I also found it interesting how I keep going back to certain things like leadership positions or politics or always signing up for courses (I literally just bought one on photography this morning…). This is who I am. In 2023, I’m going to absolutely make the most of them and get the job, money, and projects I have always wanted and known I could do.

I encourage everyone to take the quiz and find out your strengths! As I was taking it I couldn’t believe that the questions would be able to develop such an accurate profile of my personality and strengths but I’m definitely sold. And it wasn’t just this one guest who suggested the quiz, a previous guest from the German Marshall Fund also highly recommended it. Here it is if you’re interested: https://store.gallup.com/p/en-us/10108/top-5-cliftonstrengths. If you take it, drop your results in the comments please! I’m so curious!

Wrap-Up

Okay, this was longer than I expected. I had Spiderman 3 playing in the background since I started writing this and now it’s almost over. A few fiiiinal notes:

• Been trying to automate a few work tasks with Excel. The lack of practical and well-explained tutorials online is absolutely astounding. How can this program be so popular yet so mysterious, and all the tutorials/guides so dreadful?

• My German needs to be actively improved but I am admittedly proud that I can understand most day-to-day writings and conversations. I truly never thought I could just a few years ago. And the same goes for Japanese. That I can read it so easily still, man, young me would be in utter disbelief.

• I recently bought a water-flosser thing because I’ll be getting a permanent retainer soon following my DrSmile (i.e. Invisalign) treatment, and wow, what a cool product. My mouth is so clean!! My electric toothbrush and the new travel-sized electric one I got in the US were also well-worthwhile purchases. Health problems, especially dental ones, can be so expensive, and even this little cosmetic treatment was a hefty investment, but I believe preventative and long-term care in this stuff is the best investment you can make in yourself.

And that’s that for this week! Thanks for reading this far and being my cheerleader!

EXTRA::: My 31st birthday was last week, and I had a little party at my friend’s new apartment. My favorite people in Berlin and one of my best friends from London were all there. Lucky me!

Subscribe now

Let’s just jump right in!

How to show up and do the thing.

Now, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I do not overwork myself. This means, I don’t skip essential things like eating, sleeping, exercising, or being there for my friends in order to complete tasks or achieve some goal. For me, it’s just not a sustainable model, and in all things I pursue, I believe consistency is not only the hardest thing but the most effective. So even on a jam-packed day, I make sure that it is made up of the things I need to keep the proverbial train running.

That being said, consistency is a huge pain in the ass to maintain. I respect it, I know it works, I know its value, but still, doing certain things (like studying German or writing my book) takes a lot of mental willpower. This past week, I’ve been especially struggling to tap into it, and had to ask myself Why but naturally then find a solution.

Subscribe now

I’ve read, like you probably also have, those inspirational quotes that are like, “The first step is showing up,” and it is likely that you, like me, already thought past the showing up and think of the pain of actually doing and then lose all the will to “show up.” Or perhaps you, like me, haven’t really understood what it means to “show up” when the thing you’re doing doesn’t have a specific place, like a gym, to show up to.

Here’s what showing up for a thing you’re trying to do consistently means, whether that thing be learning a new skill or writing a paper or making a plan for something. This is at least what it has meant for me in this past week where there were times I felt like my brain was literally about to slip out of my ears.

The pomodoro (aka pomo method) has been a great aid for this, since it doesn’t depend on what time I do the thing, as long as I squeeze one pomo in somewhere for it. But even the most determined can find their way to wiggle out of this, like how I noticed myself knocking off one pomo when I had two or three planned.

But when I do make a pomo plan and stick to it, it goes like this: if it’s for writing, no matter whether or not I feel like writing, I have to do nothing but sit my butt in front of my computer and look at the page. I review my notes. I spit out any words or sentences I may have wanted to write, regardless of whether or not they make sense or if the order is wrong. Making content is hard and it sucks and it takes so much effort, and it’s much easier to edit or destroy pieces later. Whatever I do, whether it is actually writing or not, must involve the theme at hand during the length of the pomo.

It is usually in the course of this that something good actually happens. Eventually I just get tired of looking at the white page and spit out some crap that ends up sounding okay. Or good enough. It can always get written a little better later.

And in those moments where I really truly madly cannot get in the mood to write, where I’d rather be anywhere else doing anything else, I have learned that I must make myself a small universe to submerge my brain in. I usually play music when I write or work, from the speaker in the other side of the room, and sometimes I have none at all. But there’s something counter-productive about the atmospheric music or sound. The other day when I absolutely dreaded my writing pomo, I just stuck my earphones in and somehow this flood of music and sound perked me right up. I managed to write a whole section!

So I’d say, showing up means making time, staying on topic, and closing yourself off.

Enjoying the first — and last for me — fully in-person semester at Uni

I had to go to my university this week to present to the first year students about the career development group I founded, JFKInterviews. It was nice to see people on campus, to see some of my favorite professors, and to meet new students who were excited that my group existed! They were also shocked to learn that I was doing it all for free, as one student asked me if I had an office so they could come to me and ask questions. Oh boy do I wish I had an office!

I took the question as a compliment, then later, after hanging out at the Econ office and inadvertently offering advice that saved them $200 or so, I went to the graduate school advisor to inquire about a class I wanted to take and threw it out there that it would be great if I had an office. I said it as a cheeky joke, but he said, well, there’s a room upstairs you can use whenever you want, just come to me and I’ll let you in.

If I wanted a key however, I’d have to be affiliated with the university in some way like a student assistant or graduate student, of which I am neither, but I then said if he needed a bit of help, I’d help him when I come in (which would only be once or twice a week), for the title. Anything to get that key to the office. I know I could just go and ask him to let me in, but I don’t like being a bother, and prefer to do what I can by myself, so the key would be nice.

I also like the idea of the key/office because this is technically my last semester. I had such a lovely time on campus, and I truly like the professors and friends I have there. Even though I’m not taking any classes this semester I’d really like to be at the building when I can. Perhaps if I had my own office I could do work on my thesis there, and my advisors would be there too, so I could ask them things in person… it’d be great! So I hope it works out, and I think I’ll try to go once a week regardless.

I almost wish I was doing a PhD, but I don’t believe it’s right for me. I’ve always felt a connection to my universities and had some strong compulsion to help, to make them better, or to share with students how great they are, but I don’t think me doing research as a PhD student is the way to go. I will find a way with my other skills and my future website skills.

Coding logic is hard.

Which, speak of, I really hope I have by the end of this bootcamp! Part-time is intense enough, so I don’t know how the full-time (3 months, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm) students manage. It’s amazing how long simple tasks take to program (right now I’m learning Ruby) and how frustrating it can be.

Again, when it works, it’s like magic, so I find the challenge satisfying, but still. I’ll look at a problem for two hours, write up this step and that step and have 15, 16, 17 and counting tabs open, then find the solution only has like two or three lines of code.

Thus, the real challenge is thinking like a programmer and knowing what the program can and can’t do, or how it does things. This logic is, well, logical, but it’s not exactly how we normal folk think through things.

At any rate, the bootcamp is laid out well and I like my teachers. I can handle this pacing as it is, as long as I keep asking questions whenever I’m super stuck. Which happens often, but I have no shame in opening a ticket or calling my teachers over. That’s technically what I’m paying them for, right? (So if anyone ever asks me why I didn’t just do a Coursera or whatever course instead, that’s it! Because this isn’t as easy as copy/paste. The logic is the thing you must learn, and I wanted to learn it from a bunch of other humans and not indirectly from randos on Stackoverflow.)

Upcoming travel!

I’m going to the US from this Friday and I’ll be hella busy, already slammed with plans to visit friends. The issue is: I have no car. Renting is going to be expensive but I don’t like the idea of being landlocked/stranded anywhere.

So… this whole year I’m just calling “investing in myself,” since codecamp is expensive, as is this trip in light of all the other costs that have cropped up, and since I won’t be going back to the US for at least another year and surely not again for Christmas… ah well. I invest in my friends, in whatever I have left in the US… and of course, I continue my bootcamp, which means I’ll be up at 3am Saturday mornings to participate at the same time as my fellow coders in Berlin. Whew.

I’m looking forward to being home regardless as there are many people there dear to me and who I miss. One of my best friends has planned us a trip to Atlanta, and another offered to pick me up from the airport and let me stay at hers my first night. So lovely!! I am blessed.

Next Sunday I’ll be writing from eastern standard time and hopefully after viewing a Ravens game! Til then, ciao!

Subscribe now

First I’d like to start off by saying, I’d like for this little newsletter-update thing to have some sort of cohesive theme that you can better predict and scan the contents of, à la Neville Medhora’s fantastic weekly “S.T.U.P.I.D” email [which stands for Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing]. I thought about it over the week, and really haven’t come up with much… I thought like NIBS? New, Interesting, Bought, Serious? Or BISH, Bought, Interesting, Strange, Helpful…? Anyway, nothing has really stuck, so you just get this smorgasbord of updates in your inbox for the moment. Thanks for reading anyway 😬

But that’s not to say this smorgasbord of updates isn’t connected in some way. This week especially, I think they are. So let’s go in order of the updates I posted in the description. Note: this post is a bit longer than usual, but so many big things happened this week, and this blog’s mission is to be transparent about my progress, so feel free to take breaks as you go along ☕️

I know what my destiny is 🔮: Career Coach [????!!!!!]

Here it is: I’m destined to be a career coach/advisor/guide/shaman for humanities and social science folk. This is just one of many paths I think I’ve always been wanting to take but couldn’t convince the more logical part of my brain to pursue it, so I’ve just shuffled it off despite subconsciously running back to it at various points in my life.

For example, when I was digging through some files on my old old Macbook, I found a 15-page proposal I made as an undergrad for the UMD English department to revitalize the Careers section of their website. I didn’t think what they had was practical or particularly informative, and it was most certainly not pretty, so I laid out a mega plan to reorganize, rewrite, add, and beautify it. I had huge, tangible plans for the non-existent career services department. But of course, nothing happened with it because they didn’t think it was important at the time. And probably still don’t, seeing as they don’t have any page for it on their current website…

Now, at the uni I’m currently studying at in Berlin, I run a series that I started called JFKInterviews, where we run career development programming like Q&A’s with successful humanities/social science professionals, internship panels, and workshops (like in personal branding and career search). For fun I also made a whole presentation for my team to get them on board with outreach called “Ask and you shall receive: A Guide to Cold-Contacting Strangers & New Acquaintances On the Internet” and I loved spending all that time making it.

In fact, I love Powerpoints. And nothing grinds my gears more than a bad one. I have a whole section of notes with an outline for a powerpoint I want to make about making a good academic presentation. For example, I recently sat in a presentation where the speaker threw up a slide that was filled with words, then the speaker nervously laughed and said, “Look I’m not going to read all of this out to you, you can read it later, but I will say…” and I was like ????? Why do you include information on a slide that you’re not going to read?? This is a common phenomenon, as I’ve sat in many presentations academic and professional alike where the speaker assumes this is some really cool, self-depreciating method of connecting with the audience, but I just don’t get it at all. That’s not what a presentation should be!

And there was another presentation at uni I had heard, where the speaker had a single slide up for ten whole minutes. That is way too long!! It was jammed with text, and no one was paying attention anymore. But there’s an easy fix — just make more slides! Stick one piece of info on each one. The flipping through to a new slide keeps people awake! Get with it, people!

Anyway maybe it is now clear this is something oddly close to my heart. And yet another little stepstone on this career path I’ve unwittingly drawn for myself, because I also happen to work at the local business school in which department??? Career Services, for pete’s sake! And one project this past year I spent an absurd amount of time on was revamping the Career Guide’s headings and subheaders. And I liked it.

Not like that wasn’t enough to confirm that I should become a career advisor of some sorts, my idea for Critiqualia (hmm, long story short, a semi-academic project I had in mind to develop for ages now), has now transformed into a resource hub and job board for humanities & social science-background folk.

Sometimes you just gotta face the music, as they say. I should stop trying to escape my fate.

My Japanese book might not end up being a book. Holy crap, what??!

Ok, so ever since I had the idea to write this book about Japanese, I have heard without fail the question, ‘Why not make an app instead?” or “Why not make an online course instead?” And every time it just blows my brain. Now, there are many reasons why these questions have irritated me, but I learned this week, it has all come down to serious misunderstanding about why I’m writing this thing in the first place.

A quick recap. I’ve been on this journey with this book for a few years now, and it has become a personal source of torture as well as well of immense, boundless passion. The idea of publishing a book is a lifetime goal of mine, but it’s also extremely terrifying. It’s permanence, it’s physicalness, they are the appeals; but they also make every word I write feel heavier and more significant than perhaps they should. But that is the nature of a book, and it’s something I respect greatly. So naturally this is not a task I’ve taken on lightly, and as such, when it is questions à la “Why not make an app?”, I get really irritated.

And I got really irritated again this past Thursday, when a very good friend of mine sent me a message asking me if I had considered creating an online course alongside my book.

I saw the message and felt sick to my stomach. Lord, here we go again. I don’t want to be Duolingo for pete’s sake! was what I immediately thought.

Now if you read my friend’s question as just an innocent, normal question, well, bingo, that’s how a normal person should have interpreted it. I did not.

I asked her why she asked. She said she had seen something on Twitter about creating an online course for passive income. I said okay, and tried to forget about it.

But I stayed irritated about it for hours.

And this time I thought, why the heck am I so irritated? Come on, your friend knows you. She’s asking you a simple, normal question. She doesn’t think you’re an idiot or question your methods. So why the hell are you so irritated?

I pondered this for hours because I couldn’t shake the grouchy feeling. Then I put the proverbial shoe on the other foot. Ok, so why don’t I make some online version thing?

Then it smacked me in the face. Right, square in the face. Why don’t I make a custom, badass website. Why not make it look GORGEOUS? Holy. Shit. Are you not about to do a web dev bootcamp thing, you idiot?????

My brain immediately went snap-crackle-pop and I felt like I had found the holy grail or something. It was so painfully f**king obvious, it was so clear that that was what I was meant to do, that it was the perfect culmination of everything I’d been working towards, what I love about websites and learning and teaching and languages, just … Jesus. And it would be entirely my own way.

So I’ve got an extra spring in my step. I can already see how it would look online. My brain is absolutely buzzing. This is something my therapist notices right when I walk in his office on Friday morning, and there I tell him why I’m so excited, the whole story about my friend’s question. And he explains that my friend’s question was indeed innocent, then proceeds to ask me the following question, “So why are you writing a book?” and I felt really stung about it again somehow.

As I attempted to answer, I actually ended up with the best and more earnest explanation I’ve ever had, and one that I’ve never been able to quite translate into my book introduction, because of my fears about the medium (and a whole host of other hibgab hangups I have).

So, this is how it went (my therapist is German so I explained all this in relatively simple and probably broken-ass German but he got the gist, and what follows here is the best to my memory original flow and order of my responses):

["Why are you writing a book?"]

When I first moved to Japan, I could hardly speak Japanese. I cried pretty much every day because I couldn't understand anything around me and I couldn't express myself at all, despite the classes I had taken before in the US and during my study abroad in Kobe. I couldn't understand why I wasn't getting it. I didn't know at the time how to learn – I think most people don't know how they learn. They just think, I'll take a course. I'll listen to something. I'll write something. Then boom,  I'll learn it, that's learning. And that's what I tried in Japan, and it wasn't working. I'm not the type to just live in Japan without knowing Japanese, so not knowing frustrated me so much. There are in fact people who live in Japan without knowing any Japanese, but I'm not that type of person.

[Here my therapist interjects and asks, "Can't people speak English there?"]

No, no. Very limited English, if at all.

["Like the French people in France? They speak French, you must speak French, kind of thing?"]

Yeah, exactly.

Anyway, I didn't want to be that person. I knew that there had to be a way for me to learn, because I couldn't accept anything else.

It was through my experience teaching, teaching English to these Japanese people, while I was trying to learn Japanese and was living in Japan, that really made things click in my head. That I finally started getting it. They didn't know how to learn English. They were doing exactly what I was doing, writing words down and going through word lists and taking a class, but they weren't making any real progress. They weren't really learning. And most people don't know how they learn. I definitely didn't. But at the time I could see why my students weren't learning and where their mistakes were coming from. How the differences in the way they were thinking about sentences and making them was fundamentally different from how I was, and I had to, as their teacher, think of some ways to explain why it was like that, and how to change the way they thought about their sentences so that they came out more English-y. And this going back and forth between the languages, breaking stuff down and putting it back together and explaining it, is what finally gave me some clarity about Japanese.

Then I realized, all that stuff I had read before in the textbooks or learned in my classes, it was just really poorly explained. The phrases were too long, too polite, too complicated. They were stuffy, and the content wasn't interesting to go through. And through my work and studying and living in Japan, being really aware of my surroundings, I was realizing that in some ways, actually, Japanese can be a lot easier than other languages, even English. Especially when it comes to everyday stuff. And all that long, polite, complicated stuff in the textbooks and other resources I had was not necessary in my everyday. I had never used it, and it was why I was so frustrated and confused every time I went out! And no one told me that, it wasn't written anywhere.

And these experiences helped me learn, figure out how to learn… like I know how to learn new things now, I know what I need to do to get good at something and I know what's wrong when I'm not or "can't." So I want people to realize that it's not about what you're learning, like Japanese,

["Which seems to be the hardest language of them all, right?"]

Yeah, that it is more about the explanation, how something is explained to you, how you think about and approach something, how you learn. And I also think Japanese is super cool and fun, and that's why I wanted to write this book, I want to give people hope that they can learn it, but also want them to see how cool and fun and interesting it is, I mean how all languages are really, and to enjoy Japanese for what it is.

[Then it came back to the first question, why I was so bothered about the app/online course thing: “Why a book?”]

Well, I think people have this idea that you should, or that the only way really to learn a language is interactively, like how an app works, where you click on something and something happens and it's more, active per se. Which yeah, it's nice, but people use Duolingo all day long and still end up not being able to speak whatever language they're studying. Because it's more than that. It comes down to how one learns, which most people don't really know, they just think they know. And I suppose they have become used to the way things are in textbooks, where there's a rule for grammar or a list of words, then some exercises, and that's it. But then, to me, it comes back to explanations, how one is showed or taught something. Like I read a really great blog on copywriting, and another now for German, where the explanations are just amazing. They change the way you think. I'm always looking for good explanations of stuff, actually, and aspriing to write in that way, because I know that's the trick. And the typical way things are taught just kind of sucks. "Here's the thing, here's the rule, now use it." So maybe people just automatically think "book = shitty, boring explanations" or "explanation for language = lame and old-fashioned", which I totally get. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and I'm definitely not writing my explanations for Japanese like that. What I mean is, it's less the medium, it's what's on/in it. And people have a lot of misconceptions about learning and their ability to learn something, which I feel is my personal mission to quash. 

When it comes to books, the physical things, I just like them. I like their permanence. I want to leave something behind. So I like books and not a fast, quickly depreciating app. No matter what this Japanese project ends up being, I'm going to publish a physical book. But when people suggest to me oh an online course would be so much better than or an app would be better than, I just, can't agree with that at face value.

And this whole conversation changed everything.

I love a good explanation for something. People need explanations, actually, otherwise they don’t do something or don’t do it right. A wild example, you know how on airplanes they always tell you to life the covers on the windows for landing? I always thought it was an annoying request. Turns out, it’s in case an emergency happens:

“From a safety standpoint, open shades help improve situational awareness,” says a rep from the Flight Safety Foundation. “For example, during an emergency evacuation, flight attendants or passengers need to be able to see outside to determine whether it's safe to open and use an emergency exit. Source

So now I get it, and won’t complain to myself about having to open it even when it’s super sunny and it hurts my eyes.

Same pertains to everything else. And a good explanation can simply change how you understand something fundamentally, like when it comes to language learning or even just accepting cookies on a website, an annoying yet inescapable part of browsing the web in the EU. Take now for example this really cute explanation for cookies I saw on a French website, which I loosely translated from my stagnating memory:

Blah blah blah Cookie! Fine, ok, these cookies are neither sweet, chocolatey, nor melty. But they allow us to get to know you better and suggest you content that you would love. And that, that is worth all the cookies in the world.

After I read that unique little explainer, I clicked “Ok pour moi” (Fine for me!). Just because I appreciated the explanation.

In fact, I love good explanations so much, I am this close to buying a domain name to later stick a whole collection of things “gut erklärt” (German for “well-explained”). People — do I do it?? 🤔

So, in the end, now the idea is to make the most beautiful, amazing, practical Japanese-learning website ever, which will also have a printed, physical version. I seriously feel like a fucking genius right now. And please for your own sake, don’t tell me you told me so 😜.

An excellent *purchase*: a better office chair! 🪑

So I’ve had a crappy office chair for a while now (about two years). I bought it deep pandemic for 5 euro off the internet and while it was an improvement from the standard chair in my apartment, it still sucked. I recently realized the chairs at my work were a lot nicer, and I emailed the building if they had any extra, old chairs in storage they were willing to sell to me. Happens that they did! And now I am the proud owner of a chair that doesn’t hurt my butt, keeps my back straight, and looks nice. I’m actually happy to sit in front of my computer all day now that I have it. Everyone, don’t suffer an uncomfortable work chair!! It’s not worth it.

Also, I guess this goes back to the little presentation I made before: “Ask and you shall receive” 😏

Week 4 Wrap-Up

I have a bit more I wanted to say, but I think that’s enough for now… plus, I’m sure I’ll have more to share after week two of my bootcamp (P.S. I chose this bootcamp specifically because I like how they explain things, see how it’s all connected!?!). But now it’s time to go and enjoy a bit of this lovely, sunny Sunday ☀️.

If you’ve made it through to the end of this post, thank you sincerely, and also:

Do you know of any websites or books that have just absolutely baller explanations for stuff, especially things you thought were hard, complicated, or impossible? I’d love to check them out and start collecting for that potential domain name 😬

Please share in the comments, and have a lovely lovely week!! ✨ And subscribe to this newsletter if you already haven’t :)

Subscribe now

~Deanna

P.S. A heartfelt thank you to Magdalena, the friend who asked me the question that started this week’s huge, mega-revelation chain of reaction. 💞

Anyway, here is my weekly project recap! Little bits of progress on everything, so I'm 100% believing that slow but steady wins the race.

Lessons in Time Management & Working Environment

As I discussed last week, since I’m adding this webdev bootcamp into my schedule, I have to be on top of how I allocate my brain power and when. I’ve been using the pomodoro method, which is assigning tasks a number of 45-minute focus sessions per day, but one can not simply wildly fill their day with tasks and pomos. This week I experimented and learned my limits.

• Writing (not researching, but actually writing, like I did for my book this week): 4 pomo max / day

• I cannot write first thing in the morning; so no AM pomos for JFA (the book) or on days I work at the business school = only 2 weekdays and 1 weekend available

• Gym can also not happen first thing in the morning = it’s either after work or after thesis writing on Mon/Wed

• Heavy brainload stuff like studying and writing do not go well after around 4/5 pm = my working days are from 8:30 - 5pm max

• Bootcamp, which falls outside of those working hours and also all day on Saturday, has the benefit of me going to a new location and not learning at home, so I think I can still manage. Also my code brain works better in the evenings, because it’s darker outside

• I cannot go out for drinks or stay out late during the workweek. It ruins the morning schedule for the next day = soon, with bootcamp, Saturday will be my only “relax/stay out” option.

• Sundays I may try to squeeze in 2 writing pomos early, but I’m worried if it’ll be too much

And finally, I’ve realized the importance of changing my location, even if it’s just to the other table in my apartment, to give me more energy to work in between tasks. For example, as I’m usually tired as hell after writing, I don't think I’d have it in me to stay at the same place in my room to do another mentally draining task like working on my thesis. To keep the flow, I write for my book in the mornings then go to the library to work on my thesis.

Little things matter. I have to pay attention also to how bright it is in my room. When it gets all dark and wintry here in Berlin this won’t be much of an issue anymore (and I’ll likely complain about how not sunny it is), but I just cannot work on my computer in my room when it’s bright. So now that I have my new Macbook Pro (the 14’’ was a great decision), I’ve been doing my bootcamp prepwork on the other, more dimly-located counter in my apartment. It instantly feels like I’m somewhere else. I spend a lot of time in front of my computer so, being able to change my location even slightly, like to use this counter again or go to the library or Soho, to do work helps a ton.

Finally feeling secure about my Master’s Thesis idea

Last week I went to the US Embassy in Berlin viewing of a new (and must-see) documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, where filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein were scheduled to be present and do a Q&A. In the end Ken Burns didn’t show, nor was the Q&A open to the audience (rather moderated by a prominent German historian author), but I still managed to meet the other two creators, ask them a question, and do a little networking. Never miss an opportunity!

A few fellow JFKI students and I remained afterwards for the reception and ended up speaking to a worker for the US Embassy. She asked us about our theses and so forth, and I ended up doing a little elevator pitch for mine. She didn’t seem to feign interest, but me just presenting it and doing so engagingly gave me much-needed confidence. I actually am quite terrified about the whole thesis-writing task.

Most of this new pitch version came from last Monday’s research so I’m glad my library sessions are actually producing results. It’s the benefit of the pomodoro method — even if the time isn’t be actively writing something, I have to be doing something related to the task during the whole pomo, which usually ends up with me finding unexpected new leads (this time being in business and behavioral science/medical journals).

Beginning Web Dev Bootcamp — Prep Week

I did the thing – I signed up for web dev bootcamp, sent my deposit, enrolled in the Slack, Github, and everything else. Now I’m doing prepwork before the course officially starts this upcoming Saturday. It goes over the basics of HTML, CSS, Javascript, Terminal, GitHub, Ruby, and Figma so that we know generally how they all work together by the time we start.

I’m impressed with the style in which these concepts are introduced. I’ve tried self-learning Javascript, for example, and always had the hardest time with it (which is why most of my web-dev dreams crumbled), but now I kinda get the concept. And I never thought I’d learn a language like Ruby because I had such issues with the syntax R in my stats class last semester. But I managed to remember some fundamentals (like what a variable is and how to manipulate one) and funnily enough, my recent Excel-learning spree rendered some expected perks. Somehow, both the Ruby commands and Javascript arguments are structured a lot like Excel formulas. Crazy, right?

Signing up for this camp was definitely the right decision. I can finally have the hard skills I’ve always wanted and be able to create somewhat workable mockups of the many, many ideas I’ve had churning in the back of my mind all this time. I think you really have to pay attention to how you feel about something and how and why you go back to it. For me, I’ve always loved code but thought I didn’t need to become a code “master,” and that it would to be too difficult for me. Just the ideas I had were enough, I thought.

But look at my apartment. I’ve got a souped up Mac Mini, multiple displays and apps for web dev, and notebooks full of website ideas. Why did I think I’d be fine relying on someone else to make them? Why was I avoiding the inevitable?

And if the underpinning belief of my Japanese book is that it isn’t about what you learn, it’s how you learn it, then why was I telling myself I couldn’t ever be great at making the websites I was dreaming up? And why did I keep waiting?

No excuses now. I’m going to f***king do it.

Subscribe now

Italy Citizenship

Not much happening here at the moment; just waiting for Maryland to send my dad my mom’s birth certificate. The waiting makes me nervous, since not getting it means I can’t make the amendments on my own birth certificate, and that’s pretty much the only document left.

I’ve also been thinking about how crazy it is that I’ll be moving to Monza next year. For perhaps around six months! It’s starting to hit me, and I think it’s because I’ve been so happy here. For once I feel like settling somewhere, and then I have this actual big plan to move to another country less than a year away. But it’s for the right reasons. Citizenship means ultimate freedom for the rest of my life, so six months is nothing, and I’ll definitely make new connections there and learn Italian. No loss whatsoever! But still, I’m finding it hard to focus on the now.

Japanese for Anyone

I wrote two sections but I don’t know how I feel about them. I guess that’s what editing is for! Never accept a first draft; just have something on the page to work with later. And moreover – don’t stop moving into other sections!! Just write, damnit!

It’s a relief I spat something out although I can already feel the imposter’s syndrome creeping in. It happens every time has likely been the greatest impediment in getting this thing done. Nevertheless, I’ll keep the course and try to get out the remaining chapters of the opening section done this Monday and Wednesday. It’s slow progress because of the other commitments I have (and the whole brain-power-pomo-method I described before) but at least it’s consistent, and happening at all!

—

Grazie mille for reading this week!

And thanks for the web links a few of you sent me last week, by the way :)

I need your input again for something — have any of you ever used HelloFresh or other meal-prep delivery services? My cooking/nutrition have been especially poor lately and will likely not sustain my brainpower with this schedule of mine, so someone suggested to me that I sign up for HelloFresh. But that can’t be the only service, right? And is it worth it?

If you have any pointers – please don’t suggest I get a cookbook, I need the ultimate non-cook-friendly alternatives – send them my way. Otherwise, I’m legit going to start paying some friends in my building to cook for me!

Of course, I’m stoked to go home to the US this year, but Berlin/Europe is, I realize, mine. I’m eager to see where things go over the next years — but first, with all these projects (plus a new, exciting one!).

Italy Citizenship

I needed a copy of grandmother’s (GM) baptismal certificate to confirm that her name changed from Lucia to Lucy on all the documents following the creation of her birth certificate (#immigrant-name-problems). I contacted the local church via email and sent them the photo of the original that I have, and they were thankfully speedy about giving me a certified copy with a cover letter, mailed to my aunt’s local address. Whew!

I’ll need to get this one notarized then apostilled (a fancy word meaning certified by the issuing state for international purposes), but then I only have two more documents left – my mother’s birth certificate (which I hopefully get in the mail with no hitch!) and my own amended birth certificate.

German

I went out most days and nights with German-speaking friends this week, which is cool because I sensed gains in my confidence speaking and understanding, and when I went to a planetarium show on the weekend I was able to interpret a good deal of the talk in English – an unexpected feat for me. 😤

But still, now that it’s Sunday, my brain feels quite fried and I can sense my speaking abilities crumbling when I talk. My weaknesses (I still mix up which preposition to use for what place, and then akkusativ and dativ) jut out more to me, and because of this brain pain, I am forgetting or misusing words I know I should know. It’s frustrating, but a part of the game.

I understand it as a symptom of lack of (regular) reinforcement: I haven’t been correcting my own output or reviewing the vocabulary and expressions I use most, and namely not on a consistent basis. Thus, I repeat the same old mistakes. I broke my formal study streak as I figured my brain was working hard enough trying to understand and participate in this week’s social outings, but this week I need to dial it back a bit and work on regulating and perfecting my output. This means more morning/evening repetition drills and writing practice.

Japanese for Anyone

I spent time writing outlines for the first section of the book. These are the hardest parts of the book to write because they set the stage for the rest – the tone, the attitude, the style, the contents. I also have to be careful that my explanations aren’t redundant (meaning the same explanation in different sections), so planning here is key.

In the past I had instead dug into the middle and then went back to the introduction section, but this resulted in an inconsistent style between the two that meant I ended up going from middle to introduction and back to the middle again to make it all fit together properly. Huge waste of time.

This upcoming week, I plan to write the drafts of the first section for which I made the outlines for.

Work @ the Business School

My endeavor to learn Excel well enough to “automate” the profile book data cleaning process was a success! On Tuesday I stayed late at work to finish my part before passing on the manual editing part to my supervisor — but even then, I was reticent to allow any “manual” work on the document. Excel should do it all! And Word / Mail Merge should too! But my supervisor insisted I did enough, and by the end of the day on Tuesday my brain was too fried to continue.

I honestly became perhaps too obsessed with figuring out Excel’s secrets. I mean, I even went to bed thinking about what formula I could try next to make the desired result appear. 🤓 I’m determined to become an Excel/Word wizard by the time my contract at the school is done.

And, this experience with Excel made me realize, perhaps I should just do that web development bootcamp I’ve been eyeing up for the past six months…

New project! Web Development Bootcamp

I’ve always liked making websites and the whole art and science of it. I actually already own 6 or 7 domain names and pay for hosting yearly, even though half of the domains don’t even have splash pages and I don’t do much to maintain them. I self-taught myself HTML/CSS/Bootstrap and other web dev basics, but I’m not at a level I feel comfortable making websites for anyone aside from myself, and even for myself, my skills have not been sufficient to bring my ideas to life.

But what about Squarespace, you say? or Webflow? Or Wordpress?

Well, they’re all quite expensive (Wordpress if you buy a nice, fully customizable theme) and they never quite have the functionality or look that I really want. Or perhaps they do. Doesn’t matter: I simply like writing code.

The Excel project at work made me realize how into it I get. I think it’s magic and I feel like a powerful wizard when I write code that works. When I think about all the things I could do or show if I was better at it, my mind starts spinning. I could spend an entire day fiddling with the CSS of a website and forget the time completely – which is basically what happened when I made the website for the first major draft of JFA: https://japaneseforanyone.com/

Even that process could have been better automated and standardized (by, for example, using SASS).

So I have decided, from October 8th to the end of March, to enroll in a web development part-time bootcamp here in Berlin that will cost me an arm in money and leg in time. I just can’t shake the feeling that I should do it and that I can make it happen even with everything else going on.

But! This then means:

• I will have to work/study when I’m in the US.

• I’ll need to wake up earlier (7 AM on the nose, minimum).

• I’ll need to manage my workweek time better, especially the days I have to go into the business school, so that I’ve mental energy in the evenings still.

• I’ll need a new laptop, because my dear old 2012 Macbook can hardly keep a Zoom call steady at this point.

• I’ll need to eat more and better, as my poor cooking lately has been making me miserable (I don’t eat something if I don’t like how it tastes) and I’ll need more energy to sustain my longer days.

• And sadly I’ll have to cut down my social life or mix it with other essential tasks, like “We can hang out but only if we’re eating dinner,” or “Let’s chat while we run and lift at the gym.”

I’ve never been one to lose sleep over work or personal projects because I think it’s tacky to burn oneself out and damage one’s health in this way (yolo), but since I’ll be paying so much for this bootcamp, I will have to be really on top of my time. I refuse to have my other projects and health (ie. nutrition, gym, social life, relaxing, sleep) suffer.

An old hobby revisited: drums

This time last year I started taking weekly drum lessons and going to a practice space near my apartment 2-3 times a week with the goal of playing Silversun Pickup’s “Panic Switch” in one year. Weeellll, long story short I didn’t get that far. I ended up quasi-quitting this past February/March.

Sadly, since then I haven’t even gone in just for fun, because my nature is to play to improve or not bother at all. But this past Friday, I didn’t feel like going to the gym and instead had an impromptu 1-hr session at the practice space. I found I can still play the songs I had laboriously learned last winter, and I even made some progress playing Fuel’s “Shimmer.” Or maybe I didn’t and just thought whatever I had come up with sounded right enough 😁. Still!

I would like to go more often to the practice space like this, just casually playing and trying to decode the sheet music I have for my favorite songs without making it a serious undertaking to jam in my schedule like I do everything else.

And that’s it! 😅

Before you go: I’ve been thinking a lot about all the cool things I could do with my web dev skills once I’m done with the bootcamp, so I thought I could end this week’s post by asking you about it:

• Do you have a personal or business website or web app, or would you like to have one?

• What are your thoughts and experiences with creating a web presence for yourself outside of social media networks like Twitter/Instagram?

• What websites or web apps do you know of that really knocked your socks off?

I’d love to hear your your answers and thoughts in the comments! You never know, maybe one day soon I’ll be able to make something just like it , or for you! 😎

Japanese For Anyone (JFA)

A sort of disaster like that all comes down to data management, and rarely does one know how exactly an author goes about writing and organizing their book. What app(s) do they use, how is it sorted, where is it saved? I read Stephen King’s On Writing a while ago in hopes of finding that out, but he didn’t go into the detail I had hoped, noting that he used a typewriter for Carrie and had a board of notes above his desk for reference. The only way he could have lost 16 pages of his outline would be if someone had physically thrown them out.

I, on the other hand, have been using Word. I don’t like it much but I had watched some LinkedIn Learning videos on creating long documents in Word and thought that it would work (and double as a workplace-valuable skill to flaunt). I also didn’t really have a feasible alternative. I had once tried writing in TextEdit to avoid getting caught up with the page design and just spit words onto the page, but the final product was too ugly and inconsistent, thus too difficult to review and edit. Google Drive/Docs has an inefficient data management system that, to me, is not smooth or intuitive enough for my needs. So I was stuck with Word, which I believed was what every other author in the world was forced to use anyway.

In Word, I started making an outline in Outline view, filling in each section as detailed as possible. The LinkedIn Learning video recommended that I only have 3-4 “levels” of text (i.e. Chapter > Section > Subsection > Body Text), but mine wound up with 6-8. So last week when I decided to break the chapters into separate but linked documents (i.e. “long document format”), Word broke. There were odd section breaks and irreversible tab stops everywhere. But I figured, that’s just how it is in Word, and trudged on. I didn’t notice then that an entire section had vanished from the main outline view, until this Monday.

The little plus sign for “Topics” toggled to an empty bullet point, and not the meticulously organized sections filled with all of the relevant vocab and culture tidbits I had thought for so many drafts now to include. The Topics section was meant to follow the grammar and vocabulary Primer and show how the Primer contents could be used and supplemented to work in all these different daily situations, like ordering at a restaurant and asking to try on clothes in a store. It’s a challenging section to write because it’s easy to get bogged down in all of the specific expressions for those situations and have tens more words to learn that you can’t recycle in other situations. Wishing not to overwhelm the reader, I managed to figure out a way to present the new and specific vocabulary alongside the recyclable Primer vocabulary, but this relied on how I ordered it — and that was now all lost.

In my panic, I cried. There were no other saved versions to retrieve. Word didn’t have an error and close on itself, which would have created a retrievable auto-save document. Hours upon hours of work had just straight up vanished.

Sometimes this isn’t a bad thing. They say that the second time around is usually better than the first. And a part of me thought, perhaps I have lugged over this section of the book too much already and a fresh start might do it good after all. But the issue was, this isn’t the second try for me at writing my book or this section. It’s the fourth or fifth. And I was truly certain that this time, after all the trial and error of the previous drafts and realizing why I didn’t like them, this outline had it right.

So I took an hour to mourn my loss before digging back into the files on my computer again. And boy do I have a lot of those, bundled up in folders labeled indiscernibly like “Draft1” or “revamp 2022”. Document management for this book and my thoughts has always been hell, and I realized that this system I have, of all these separate documents and folders and this stupid Outline view on Word, sucks. I had to find something, anything, else.

I remembered that for one of my previous drafts, I used an app called Scrivener. It seemed like the perfect solution then, but I didn’t fully — or even partially, really — utilize its power because I skipped right through the tutorial. And skipping the tutorial of this awesome powerhouse app meant I was merely using it like a glorified Word, and so after that draft ended up not being to my liking, I switched back to the OG. Once again I had to learn my lesson.

I redownloaded Scrivener’s free trial just to test and make sure Word wasn’t the right one for me for sure. As I looked mournfully through my Word outline again mulling over how I’d migrate everything over, I noticed that the new section breaks the long document mode created linked to a folder that, although the source no longer appeared in the outline anymore, contained all of the individual sections of the “Topics” chapter. Thank. You. Jesus. A few clicks and there they were again! I was so relieved to have them back. Yet no matter what I tried, I could not get them to link back up to the outline I made in Word, and I now had nine additional and seemingly separate documents to fiddle with and cause more folder/organizational mayhem.

Back to Scrivener I went, first taking the time to go through the tutorial, then back to my Word outline, then spending the rest of my afternoon migrating those contents into the magical all-in-one system of Scrivener. In the end, the outline looked better than it did before and made more sense. Although the shock of almost having lost a huge section of my book hurt, I am so happy to now be using Scrivener again. No more effing around with Word.

The remaining pomos for JFA this week went to migrating the outline, adding notes, and reordering it all. Somehow and thankfully, Word being a true-to-form major pain in the arse ended up leading me to a better system that I luckily switched to before it was too late and too cumbersome to do so.

Pomos, OneNote, and my iPad Mini: How I digitally organize & plan everything

“Pomos” refers to a “pomo” which is shorthand for a “Pomodoro” which is Italian for “tomato” which refers to a particular method of time management called the “Pomodoro technique.”

Now I don’t know why a tomato is connected to time management either, but the idea is that your brain works best in concentrated spurts buffered by short breaks. The typical Pomodoro timer is 25 minutes of concentrated work offset by a 5 minute break, then repeat. On my app, TomatoOne, I set my spurt to 45 minutes. So one pomo = 45 minutes, two pomos is two 45-minute cycles, and so on. Instead of organizing my day by time (e.g. I wake up at 8, I study German from 8:30-9), I set goals for the morning and afternoon/evening and measure them in pomos. So I write something like this in my planner: AM. German. Pomo x 2. JFA. Pomo x 3. PM. Thesis. Pomo x 2.

This method works really well for me because I have never been able to adhere to a hour-based schedule. Something always gets in the way, or I wake up a bit too late, or even too early, or take too long to eat or don’t want to eat when I’ve planned to, blah blah, and once the plan is broken I tend to shuffle tasks off to other days. It’s much easier for me to fit a pomo in to do something and turn off my phone notifications for that whole period than it is to make a definite time frame that I might end up not having the energy for.

Another thing I use is OneNote. Like Scrivener, this was an app I had used in the past but didn’t fully utilize. This year I noticed how my coworker was using it to organize her tasks: she puts them in simple tables organized by month and marks or reorganizes them as she checks them off or moves them to other time periods or sections. Given how all-over-the-place my method of keeping my thoughts together has always been and desperate to fix that, I thought to retry using it especially because it syncs with all of my devices.

Now I have Notebooks for each project: JFA, MA Thesis, JFKInterviews (the student group I run at my university), ESMT (the business school I work at), etc. The first Page in each section is called “Log”, which contains a dated mind-dump table. The Log is where I track my thought process or idea-adding over time.

For example, today on the way to Soho House I might get an idea, which I jot down in my iPad GoodNotes notebook, and when I get home to my computer, I toss it into the Log of the corresponding category, so for example JFA, and give it a date. There’s another column on the right that I leave blank, and later when it’s pomo time for JFA, I will put that idea in the outline or wherever it needs to go and mark it OK in the Log to show that I had “completed” or addressed the task. It looks like this:

I’m also using the Log for my thesis, but there it looks a bit different. I have the same three columns, but because I’m still in the idea-development stage for the topic and research question(s), I mainly write my notes and ideas as I work through the pomo. It’s more of a stream-of-thought style. I plan on using the third column when I review my notes to mark which the best leads are for the topic/RQ.

And my iPad mini, being so cute and compact, can be taken anywhere, and so I’ve been using this “idea dump” and planner function of it far more than I did my larger iPad Pro. I don’t even use my Moleskine planner anymore. My iPad mini purchase was totally worth it.

MA Thesis

My goal this week was to have a topic sorted. Unfortunately, I didn’t accomplish this task nor did I dedicate enough pomos for it. This week in particular I’ve been busy at my part-time job at the business school, basically staring at the screen trying to learn and figure out Excel to make it do magic for me, so I could only work on it Monday and Wednesday. With the migrating of my book outline to Scrievener and emotionally recovering from the near-loss of my data, I had even less mental energy for my thesis.

I did find more interesting and relevant articles to reference, but the caveat is that I can see myself already “rabbit-holing.” This refers to my tendency to read and collect too many source materials without actually making progress on my own thesis/RQ. I have downloaded over 30 separate papers at this point and I know I need to recenter on what I want to write about and filter the paper collection accordingly before downloading anymore but… perhaps this is just how the brainstorming stage goes?

Either way, can’t let it go on much longer, because there’s the risk of the other tendency I have: “tail-chasing”, which refers to finding articles on the same topic and coming to the same conclusions about what I want to write about (or don’t) without, just like rabbit-holing, making actual progress on the thesis itself.

Work @ the Business School

Early in the week, there was a welcome event for the new Master of Management students that I and some of my coworkers attended. This is the class for which I am responsible for making their “profile books”, a process that entails getting all the students to fill out a survey then clean that data and format it to migrate from Excel into Word, making a final PDF we distribute to prospective employers and so forth.

In previous years, this task was a major undertaking. There’s 120-something students who all fill out the survey in their own unique formatting and style and a good chunk who don’t fill it out at all, so they have to be “chased” and reminded and their data collected all before the publication deadline. I was warned about it over the summer and secretly dreading the prospect of doing overtime to complete it.

But I was given almost complete control over the introduction email and survey formatting, so I took the liberty to use as many copywriting zinger techniques and a quirky writing style in to rewrite the email (and subsequent reminder emails) and reformat the survey so that there was as little room for error as possible, within the constraints of the survey software we were using, Qualtrics.

The result? A 100% response rate and a mostly clean survey dataset. Hot damn!

Now I was really excited about this, but what really was the cherry on top was that one of the new MIMs came up to the Career Services table at the event, introduced themselves, and asked, “So who wrote that excellent email?'“ referring to the introduction email I sent the entire class. I was so plussed about the compliment that I said, “Me!!” and he then went on to tell me how descriptive and helpful it was. Woohoo!

Then later in the week, I watched some more Excel tutorials on LinkedIn Learning and ended up coming up with a formula that would solve one of our most difficult Excel-to-Word data migration problems like magic. Man, I do love Excel (although it continues to kick my ass and be annoying and finicky). It’s so cool to create formulas that do all this dirty work for you. I absolutely refuse to do anything manually anymore, because it’s just too powerful of a program to excuse it, and no matter the task, take the time to learn the formulas and tricks now or so help me God.

Instagram also knows I like Excel videos (whose tips have been a great help to me IRL) and fills my FYP with them. I can almost guarantee you that a good chunk of my absurdly long list of Following accounts are now Excel-tip related and I’m not even mad about it. (This means yes, if you see any corny Excel-related merch like a shortcut mousepad or mug, I want it.)

Italy Citizenship

This week’s task was to complete the paperwork to obtain my mother’s birth certificate and sort out what needs to be done to obtain my grandmother’s. They share the same issue: names not being written correctly from vital record to vital record, which obscures the clear line of descent.

But with both my mom and grandmom having passed, it is difficult to obtain their documents. My dad, being a surviving spouse, could get my mom’s, but he could not get his mother’s. And without my mom’s birth certificate, I cannot get my own amended, which also suffers from an incomplete name (my parents’ middle initials are written, not their full middle name, which also somehow obscures the line of descent).

And my dad, love him, but he’s not reliable, and so I could not set him to do this task by himself. And with my brother having also passed and me being estranged from my sister who would likely know the other information I need to get the birth certificate, like my mom’s parents’ names, I had to dig online and eventually (luckily) get a hold of my only uncle on my mom’s side (who I haven’t spoken to in almost a decade) to fill out the details in the form.

By Friday, I managed to fill out the forms, instructed my dad to get a money order, made him send me his ID photos, and got it all together so all he would have to do is sign his name and stick it all in an envelope that not even him but my aunt would send out for me. Even that was a big hassle, but it is now done. Let’s pray now that they don’t ask questions and just send me my mom’s birth certificate!

Being abroad and collecting these papers means I have to rely on my aunt a lot, which I don’t like to do because it’s not her responsibility, but I am very thankful that she is helping because otherwise this would be impossible. And there’s still so many other documents to get, and all of them have cloudy timelines. Once I send in the request for my mother’s birth certificate, when will it come? Will they call my dad and inquire him? (God I hope not.) At any rate, it’s all in the works. One document at a time, they say…

German

I’ve set one pomo per day, in the morning, to study German. This involves going over my vocabulary notes and now listening to and repeating out-loud a video on B2 conversation.

Reading or repeating out loud is exhausting. It takes a lot more effort than just reading or listening obviously, but it is the most rewarding way to learn especially when you do it for the same audio/video multiple times. In some conversations this week I had in German, I noticed myself using words I had repeated from the video (and my textbook, for which this technique also works) because I could hear them in my head already.

And as tiring as this exercise is, I think I’ll continue with it this upcoming week for one pomo each morning, but I will need an extra pomo in the afternoon or evening on certain days to practice more grammar and review. I will need to take that B2 exam at some point, but I also just like being able to keep up with conversations with my now growing group of German friends without having to revert to English so much to talk about my work, projects, or social life. And for that I must continue training…

Week #1: A success!

I’m honestly glad Word almost lost my data. Moving to Scrivener was the best move and I think it’s going to make the writing process ahead even better, as it already has. I do need to dedicate more pomos to my book and thesis, though. It was hard this past week and likely will be this upcoming week because of the profile book project at work that takes all of my serious mental energy from the day, but hopefully once that task is completed I’ll be able to dedicate more post-work pomos to them.

In terms of socializing, I was also quite busy in my evenings, and I went to the gym twice, so all in all, I had a relatively productive week. I must say, I feel so much more confident about my abilities and having this blog helped with that a lot, so thank you for reading / subscribing. Til next week!

~Deanna

I have become increasingly flustered trying to answer it of late, never knowing where to start and my response never seeming to end, so I thought that by starting this blog, I could update interested parties and also keep an active log of my doings and thoughts for my own sake – because God knows my memory alone cannot keep with all the chaos that seems to follow me.

When I say chaos, I refer to how I manage to work on multiple things simultaneously and still continue to add more. For example, this blog will chronicle my experiences as I:

• Write my book about learning practical Japanese: “Japanese for Anyone, Really!”, whose summary you can read on the site I made here

• Work for TRUCK Furniture as translator, PR person, sales rep; any and all things English- or international-related at the company

• Work at ESMT in Career Services

• Write my Master’s thesis for my degree in North American Studies, concentration in Sociology and Politics at the FU Berlin

• Apply for Italian citizenship recognition via jura sanguinis (descent)

• Study German (B2 level)

• Develop ideas for a start-up / consider doing a web-dev camp

I write about these things primarily to demonstrate that none of this, in my humble humble experience, is linear. Or even circular. It’s an endless, indecipherable scribble.

Every other blog I read about people developing their books and start up ideas or whatever is written retrospectively, with all the gritty challenges, mishaps, mistakes, and general realities all tidied up and glossed over. Sure, they tell you it’s tough, but you don’t really know what that means. But here, you will. One day I’ve got a brilliant idea for my thesis, two days later I’m fifteen browser tabs deep in Google rummaging for any semblance of relevant data and teetering on the crisp edge of snapping my laptop in half as I’m forced to toss yet another golden eureka moment into the trash. And when you read my thought process here, you’ll know why.

In addition, I’ll write about other random topics, like how I’m a shoddy cook — how do you SURVIVE, Deanna?? – and am trying to learn how to be an okay one while still being roughly as cheap and lazy about it as I’ve always been. Or my all-time favorite, can’t-imagine-life-without purchases, like the little baby iPad Mini that I can’t help but gush about when I take it out. Or my personal theories about learning and teaching.

In sum, this is not a diary. It’s a progress and reflection journal for myself and those who care to follow along. And I’d be really happy to have you there with me.

More Formal Introduction Time

For those of you who don’t know me, or perhaps haven’t been in touch with me for some time: My name is Deanna, I’m 30, I’m from Baltimore, Maryland (USA), and I currently live in Berlin. I say currently because as a single ex-pat, residences never seem permanent. I told myself every year of the seven (ish?) years I ended up staying in Japan that it was my last one. Now I *plan* to stay in Berlin indefinitely, but I also am planning a brief move to Monza, Italy next year so that I may apply for my Italian citizenship directly. Will I ever move back to the US? Honestly, I have no idea, but I’m quite happy in Europe and especially Berlin at the moment, or rather, currently.

So how did I get here? Whew, good question. It all started with my big move to Osaka, Japan.

Why were you in Osaka, Japan and what did you do there?

Once I graduated from university, I figured that the predestined route following my English degree was to become a teacher, but I also wanted to move abroad before I got “stuck”, so I found a job teaching English in Japan. It was at a private company that had two branches in Tokyo and Osaka, and I was originally assigned to the Tokyo branch. I was vocal about my resistance to Tokyo — when I did a 4-month study abroad to Japan, I was in Kobe/Osaka, and I didn’t want to move to the more expensive, crowded, and unfamiliar Tokyo all by myself. I mean, I would have been fine, but I enjoyed my time in Kansai (the region containing the cities Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto) and wanted to go back to what I knew. The company ended up informing me about a vacancy in the Osaka office, and I gladly took it.

For the first two years, I was self-studying Japanese intensively while teaching English at local companies and later elementary, middle, and preschools. I was also doing private English lessons for more money. Eventually, I got tired of teaching — for reasons I’ll have to dedicate a whole separate post to — and since my Japanese had improved significantly, I began working part-time as a translator for a furniture company. This is another long story short, but while doing private lessons, someone inquired me about doing a voice-over for a project, and this person wound up being surf photographer Tatsuo Takei, who I became good friends with, who knows and used to surf with the owner of the furniture company. We met at the company-owned cafe and — another long story short — he hired me to translate his furniture Backstories and help the staff with international emails. In the end, I pushed him to hire me as a full-time employee.

During the remaining five (holy crap) years working full-time as the in-house translator, PR rep, assistant to the boss, and English teacher with the furniture company, I got ideas for writing a book about Japanese (the “Japanese for Anyone” project I am working on now). I was also doing a lot of random little side jobs, like doing backstreet bar tours of Osaka, interpreting for an old-school bookmaking workshop in Kyoto, posting on a website answers to questions about English explained in Japanese, editing the film and art section of a local English publication, and even translating and writing with credit for Tatsuo’s book, Authentic Wave.

Why are you in Berlin now?

So, the thing about Japan is that it’s a lovely, beautiful, clean, and interesting country. The food is the bomb; public transport is top tier. You can easily live comfortably, cheaply, and happily. But it’s also quite stagnant as a culture. Things don’t really change much, and I wasn’t happy with the social networking opportunities I had. Japan, even for expats, is not a place for the ambitious. At least that’s not how I found it, and I didn’t see myself growing in the ways I wanted to or expected to anymore, so I decided to leave.

But where to? When I thought about going back to the US, the decision quickly overwhelmed me. Back to Baltimore? Stay where? Do what? When I looked up jobs I was interested in, none of them seemed to care about international experience and all-over-the-place skillset I had. They wanted Master’s degrees and years of work experience solely in that one field. With only my Bachelor’s degree, I felt behind, and when I considered that I still had debt from my undergrad, getting a Master’s in the US was a ridiculous idea. And what would I study anyway? To even apply I would first need to take the GRE, and study and prepare for that, and I would need to get a high score for scholarships so I could afford the degree, but what degree? What would be most cost-effective and interesting to me? So I kicked around this idea for about a year, wondering what else I could do, and in the meantime I took a trip to Berlin.

I stayed for two weeks with a family who I had met during their visit to my furniture company in Osaka. I had a lovely time and felt some sort of familiarity and comfort with the city that I hadn’t felt in other cities. I made friends; I liked German. I knew I wanted to come back. I bought two German textbooks to take back with me and made that my next goal.

But moving to Germany, to Berlin, brought up similar angsty issues that moving to the US did. What would I do? My failsafe was working as a tour guide for Japanese visitors, but I didn’t feel fully comfortable with that idea as I didn’t want it as a career. I dug around, and somewhere found out that German universities are basically free for international students. You read that right. Free! But, obviously, most schools teach only in German, so that’s a big catch. I managed to find a few schools that taught courses in English and offered a North American/US studies program. My goal was/is to use the knowledge and connections from my degree to start an organization that would combat social and political polarization in the U.S. Yet another long and complicated story short, I applied to three schools (FU Berlin, Humboldt University, and Leipzig University), got in, chose the FU Berlin, and moved there the following year (January 2021).

I asked my boss at the furniture company to keep me as a remote employee, because I didn’t want to leave them nor my regular salary, and he agreed, but I took a deep salary cut. So after about a year of living here in Berlin on that, I got a part-time job at a business school here, where I work as an assistant in Career Services.

And now, here in Berlin, I’m doing all of the things I mentioned at the top of this post, plus going to therapy, being physically active, and making time for my truly fantastic network of friends all over.

So what’s next, and why should I subscribe to this newsletter?

I am going to write every week from now on detailing the “progress” of my aforementioned involvements, so if you subscribe to The Blonde Prerogative, you will get a new post like this one in your Sunday inbox.

By subscribing, you

• get weekly content that you find interesting, relatable, or insightful

• learn for yourself about the process of writing a book and a thesis, and founding a startup, and applying for foreign citizenship from someone who has never done any of those things before

• give me confidence and validation that what I write actually is interesting, relatable, or insightful,

• make me accountable, so that I keep up with my goals and not skimp on writing and reflecting on them,

• help me better understand what I need to do, or need to stop doing, in their pursuit,

• and encourage me to become a better, more consistent writer.

Subscribe now

And I must say, I am truly stoked to start this progress journal and share it with you! Thank you for reading this far, it means a lot!

But there’s one more thing before you go – tell me, which long story short would you actually like to hear the whole long story about? Comment below and I’ll make a post expanding on it as you request.

Til next week!
~Deanna