Hello everyone, my name is Xenops, and I’m a perfectionist.
(and everyone says: Hello, Xenops!)
Because of my legalistic background, I grew up to be the absolute perfectionist—I always cared about how my actions might be perceived by others: “what course of action would look best? Which course would get the most approval?” This line of thought dominated all others, and I left little room for personal traits or desires. In fact, I hated interests that others wouldn’t approve of. Including loving the Japanese language and culture, and really wishing I didn’t. I felt like God was giving me temptations I could not overcome, and that he could only be a cruel God.
Imagine my freedom of sloughing perfectionism. This has dominated my thinking for so long. It affected every single small detail in life, to the point that I felt bound by my grandfather’s observation: “if you don’t do anything, you can’t fail!” For I felt failure equated with shame—I am a horrible person if I can’t perform correctly.
As a consequence of being more free each day, I can give myself grace to fail, and ultimately grace to experiment. I felt hindered to play with the languages I’m learning, because I’ve been afraid of mistakes. I only relied on text books that give the answers, and then found frustration because textbooks are boring. Now I feel I can enjoy the mining of each vocab word more fun, and see the language learning process as exploring a culture rather than performance to be kept.
Now an interesting benefit: the pull of wanderlust has decreased. Because of perfectionistic ideals, I have felt the need to study more than the two necessary languages, and I wasn’t sure how I would accomplish this. Take Korean for example. I do have a curiosity about their comic industry, and about their culture. But now I can accept that satisfying this curiosity would take more time and energy than I have available. Japanese and Norwegian are hard enough.
Now, about those languages in particular, or rather finding media in said languages.
JapaneseI recently got a V. P. N. And I’m not sure why I waited so long. Actually, yes I know why, it feels illegal, but oh well. I found it most fruitful to set it to Japan. That was the final step to my being able to purchase Kindle Unlimited from the Japanese Amazon. I’ve had so much fun browsing their art and comic technique books, and I found 2-3 books I want to purchase for keeps. Also, the price of buying a Kindle book is nearly half of buying the physical book and having it shipped here.
I’ve also explored Japan Netflix. I thought it was interesting that they have all of the current seasons of Attack on Titan, but the American version only has the first season. They have a bigger anime section than the American one, and many have both Japanese and English subtitles, so I’ve been using Language Learning with Netflix extension.
With my tutor, I started something different: I want to be able to read manga, preferably manga I like—Yotsuba! Isn’t my cup of tea. So I have both the Japanese and the English editions of Bakuman, and my tutor and I have been analyzing the grammar and vocabulary. This is a manga I regularly read, and it might be the only slice-of-life one I like. I also figured it might need more guidance than using Attack on Titan, where the dialogues consist of:
Erwin: Attack! To the left, retreat!
Eren: I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill them
all.
Levi: Clean that speck of dust, you #%!
Mikasa: Eren.
But I love it anyway.
NorwegianAmericans, and probably other groups, have this image of Japan being closed to the outside world: we can marvel at their language and entertainment, but we can never become a fellow human, walking beside them.
Norway fits this image better. Honestly, it’s been frustrating trying to find media to consume. I saw that the basic newspaper added an additional payment option to Vipps—Klarna--but still I cannot purchase a membership unless I provide a Norwegian address. I tried getting memberships at Discovery+ and Viaplay, but they both require Norwegian credit cards, not international ones. I was really disappointed with the former, because they had Avatar and MLP, presumably in dubbed Norwegian.
I tried switching the V.P.N. to Norway, and the Netflix selection for Nordic shows is still pitiful. I’m guessing they don’t have much influence there yet. The Swedish Amazon site didn’t look promising for Norwegian content.
I guess it’s really impressive that I can purchase books from Bokkilden.no—previously I bought a textbook, and an audiobook to go with my Bokmål bible. The past couple of days they have a sale on kids’ graphic novels, so I bought a couple of series. One series is on their best-selling list.
So I’m not seeing myself using a lot of TV series for language exposure. In combination with my textbooks and tutor, I will probably study Det Nye Testamentet for my visual/audio feed. I’m actually more familiar with its content than HP. The approximate number of unique words in the Greek New Testament is around 5,000, so the Bokmål translation will give a decent amount of vocab.