It makes me smile when my hobbies turn out to be useful.

Learn Scheme. Whether or not you have any other programming knowledge, or even interest in programming, you need to get used to operating in a grammar fundamentally unlike that of English. At a bare minimum, take a course which uses this language to teach functional programming. Think hard about the differences between prefix notation and postfix notation, and why all those parentheses are really necessary. If you haven’t done so already, implement your RPN-input calculator in this language.

Next, take a Japanese 1 course, or self-study up to about JLPT 4 level. This will give you foundations in Japanese to understand the more advanced material to come.

Start reading additional work to supplement your classwork in Japanese. I’d start with Making Sense of Japanese, which is an excellent series of essays by a veteran Japanese teacher which expand and clarify the troublesome aspects of Japanese grammar.

Start reading and translating works intended for a Japanese audience well before you’re ‘ready.’ Manga might seem like a good idea, but it is too tempting to just infer everything from the pictures and gloss over the actual translation. Instead, start working your way through light novels. A basic dictionary and kanji dictionary will of course be essential. Depending on the amount of self-study and translation you do, you may find a grammar dictionary useful. Continue with your studies as seems best.

The major problem that people have with Japanese grammar is that they don’t have a mental framework which allows them to integrate those aspects which don’t translate naturally into English. Introducing them as part of a programming language makes them much easier to swallow, and helps build a generalized grammar model which is useful when learning any new language.

Of course, taking a Japanese course is one of the best ways to learn the language, but it is important to supplement the course with self-study as soon and as much as possible. The most important thing to remember is that, though there are significant obstacles in terms of memorization, Japanese isn’t just learnable; it is fun.

I had been proceeding up until now with the expectation that I would join my class within a week or two of Christmas. That was fine, if annoyingly long; it allowed me to sign up for the JLPT on the assumption that with nothing better to do with my time, I could study Japanese.

I went today to see the cadre member in charge of scheduling; if my start date were a week or two earlier than I had expected, I wanted to see if I could delay it until after the test. Instead, I received a surprise: the unofficial estimate by the man who will eventually make the final decision is that I will class up on October 10. This means that I’m likely to finish flight training by the end of January, and graduate from flight school perhaps a month after that.

This is great news, in the sense that it means that I’ll probably be out of Fort Rucker months before I had expected. On the other hand, it makes it unlikely that I’ll be able to take the JLPT. The universal word is that you have to study harder for your advanced aircraft than you ever did in primary. Consequently, there will barely be time to sleep each night, let alone study up in a foreign language. I could possibly switch tests and take the level 4 after two weeks of not studying Japanese; I’d expect to pass, but it seems kind of pointless.

Until I actually get a finalized start date, I’ll keep studying. Even if nothing else, I do enjoy learning the Japanese language. Still, I can’t help but regret yet another missed opportunity to get some sort of formal qualification in it.

The examinee has mastered grammar to a limited level, knows around 300 kanji and 1,500 words, and has the ability to take part in everyday conversation and read and write simple sentences. This level is normally reached after studying Japanese for around 300 hours, which is equivalent to completing an elementary course.

When I left Japan, I was easily at that point. However, I haven’t actually touched the language more than in passing since then. This is kind of a challenge to myself: in the four months until the test date, can I reclaim the “300 hours of study” I once had?

Why do this now? Unless something drastic changes, I won’t be back in actual flight training until after the New Year. The programming project I talked about earlier this summer is pretty much stillborn, and I’m getting kind of sick of just bumming around all day every day without any particular purpose. With any luck, the dual facts of having invested non-trivial money into this project and having a definite goal and deadline should hold my interest long enough to actually accomplish this.

Will this be useful? Probably not. Even if I pass, I’ll be submerged back in flight training shortly after taking the test, and after that ends I’ll most likely be caught up in the day-to-day Army life with little or no time to study with any real degree of intensity. I expect that by the time I’m out and able to focus again on studying with any real degree of intensity, whatever skills I gain in this process will have faded again.

Even so, this seems like an opportune time to reach out and claim a milestone. It’s a more productive use of my time than I’ve been engaged in so far in this bubble, and it can only help my future goals, even if in a small way. Even if I forget everything afterward, it should be even easier to re-learn the third time around.

I like the Japanese language, of course; its grammar is simply better than that of any other human language I’ve ever encountered. I’m still not sure that I agree with the notion that kanji are inherently more efficient than spelling everything out, but the more I learn about them, the less I find them distasteful. Japanese is aesthetically pleasing in its structure, and an interesting challenge in its implementation. Even so, there’s no real need for me to study it; I have no need of it unless I return to Japan, and the most likely case in which I go back to Japan is the one in which I do so for the purpose of studying Japanese.

You’d think that the time I spent there would have been enough. I made some friends, proved to everyone concerned that I could support myself far from the safety of my family, got to soak in the experience of living in a foreign culture. I got to figure out that job satisfaction requires more than a generous salary for minimal work requirements. I even exceeded my own completely arbitrary minimal stay length by about 15%. All in all, it was a successful year-and-change abroad.

My current living conditions are closer to what I had when I lived there than any others I’ve had since my return. It is perhaps because of this that I most often find myself wishing I were back there. I live in a small, mostly rural town–but where Matsubushi was defined by its parks and paddies, Enterprise is defined by its giant strip-malls and chain stores. I live in a very humid, barely temperate climate–but where in Japan this led to refreshingly cool midnight bicycle rides, here I’m constrained by the knowledge that every day, I have to wake up again at 4 AM to get to work on time. During the bubble of non-training at least, I work almost as few hours as I did as a teacher while making more money, but it feels like my options for extracurricular exploration are far more limited here. This town exists because of Fort Rucker; it boasts large-scale generic commercialism, long roads of identical housing units, a few smaller stores supporting the local farmers, and little else. In Japan, I always felt like I could walk in any random direction and find something interesting, from a park to a shrine to an otherwise normal intersection done up in aesthetically pleasing tile patterns.

There are advantages to being in the US, of course. My apartment now is three times the size of the one I had in Japan, and includes amenities like a drying machine and a private toilet. I have a car here, and despite all my complaints about its cost of ownership, it’s still cheaper in every respect than its equivalent there would be. It is easy, unconscious, to socialize as much as I want with my coworkers here; there is no process of picking my way through the translation of both language and social norms.

The thing is, I think I would trade back those advantages to live in Japan again. It’d be difficult to go back to an apartment as cramped as I had last time, but the car and the easy socialization feel like incidental benefits that I could easily live without. The sense of being surrounded by fascinating things which make it worthwhile to get out and just explore seems a lot harder to replicate here in the US.

Perhaps I’m approaching this all from the wrong direction. I never really question myself for thinking that programming is an interesting and fun mental challenge, or that flying is a pretty awesome thing. I just accept that I can personally take those as self-evident facts even if they are not so to the general population. Maybe I should just accept in the same way that I’m fascinated by the prospect of returning to Japan any way I can, and that studying the language is rewarding in and of itself. There’s a nice sort of symmetry to it, if I can divide my interests into the Productive Hobbies of programming, flight, and Japanese, and the Personal Hobbies of books, video, and games.

The Holy Grail, then, is to find some sort of paying job which unifies the Productive Hobbies and leaves time for the Personal Hobbies. Such a thing, in this case, would be an odd job indeed; I can’t really imagine how it might plausibly exist. There exist jobs using various combinations, though, and those seem like interesting possibilities to investigate in the future.

I think I will take that approach. There’s the danger of sugarcoating my memories of my time there and rushing back to find a nation that would be quite happy without me, but I think it’s a risk I can take. In the worst case, I spend my interest in the place and language and end up with a much clearer picture of where I should take my future. In the best case, I love it again, and further my goal of living interestingly.

In the course of the last book, I encountered the phrase ‘jikan no muda’ in the context of a numeric game found in a newspaper. Since my Japanese dictionary happened to be within arm’s reach, I looked up muda, and laughed, because Pratchett is a professional at writing humorous books. Then I realized that I had just put myself into a rather small category of people by getting the joke, and that the subcategory of people who got the joke and then intended to write about it online was even smaller.

Then I figured that since I was thinking recursively anyway, I might as well go for broke. Terry Pratchett is a very funny writer, but he has no idea how far some people go when they decide to waste time.

I don’t know when I stopped believing in Santa Claus or other childish fantasies. I may never have really believed in a red-suited old man carrying presents. Even as a kindergardener, I understood that the Santa who appeared at Youchi Park’s Christmas events was a fake. I think the children around me realized this as well, and that the teachers saw his costume for what it was.

The jobless old men who only seemed wise during Christmas were members of a whole class of beings. Space people and future people; ghosts, poltergeists, and evil conspiracies; these are the subjects of anime and manga and special effects films, but neither they nor the heroes to oppose them exist in the real world.

Well, I’m pretty sure I figured out the truth. There’s really only one thing I didn’t figure out. But from the bottom of my heart, I truly wished for some evidence of space people or future people; ghosts, poltergeists, or evil conspiracies.

Compared to the ordinary world of “wake up in the morning, sleep at night”, there’s something charming about the worlds inside anime, manga, and special effects films, isn’t there?

I was born in this world. But that doesn’t mean this is the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where maidens are kidnapped into garangutan transparant pea pods by aliens; a world where people travel in time with raygun in hand to reform history for the better; a world in which phantoms and spectres carry out their supernatural vengeance; a world of secret conspiracies and psychic battles. I want to live in that world!

No, wait, calm down. What would I do, supposing that space aliens or anything else on that list came to raid the earth? It’s not like I’m some master swordsman.

What if a person were to join my class–a person with a mysterious power. The space aliens and time travellers and so forth could all be hiding behind the scenes, just waiting to emerge and do battle with that person. I could enjoy becoming embroiled in their battle–not as the main character, but as a follower. I am a smart man for thinking up this wonderful scheme.

Or this might be interesting: what if I one day was awakened to previously latent mysterious abilities? Teleportation or psychokinesis; that sort of thing. Presumably, shortly after my powers manifested, I (and others similarly talented) would be inducted into some secret organization to wage war against would-be despots and rogue super-powered people. Maintaining the cover, of a normal world devoid of super powers and extraordinary circumstances, would of course be one of our duties.

However, reality is surprisingly strict. Somehow, no exchange students ever came to my class, and there were no UFO sightings. I loitered at any number of local haunted spots without meeting any sort of ghost or poltergeist. I stared at a pencil on my desk for two hours in desperation: it didn’t move a micron. I glared at the back of the head of the girl in front of me for an entire class period: I couldn’t read a single thought.

As my appreciation of the laws of nature grew, my zeal for the “UFO Specials” and “Paranormal Editions” on TV disappeared. I realized with chagrin that my desires simply weren’t realistic, but at the same time, I came to appreciate the elegant construction of reality. Even so, no matter how much I grow up, I will always cherish the hope for the supernatural.

The transition from youthful dreams to the ordinary world of adulthood happened around the time I graduated from middle school. 1999 brought forth all sorts of millenial dreams, but none of them came true. In the dawn of the 21st century, humankind still sits reluctant to travel as far as our own moon; a far cry from the dream that within my lifetime, it might be a day trip to Alpha Centauri.

These were the things I was absent-mindedly musing about as I became a high school student—-and that’s when I met Haruhi Suzumiya.

If you’re interested, there are complete translations available elsewhere online. I’m translating this for myself for two reasons: I’m not convinced that the other translator is more accomplished at Japanese than I am, and it’s an eight book series which I (in theory) might fininish before the other guy does.

Google’s (beta) Japanese-to-English translator renders it as follows: “Yesterday, it occurred to o’clock of 2.”

Is it insanity when mispronunciations necessitated by the lack of proper phonemes can drive an entire classroom into uncontrollable laughter for a good five minutes?