Section 88 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 January 16 Friday.
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This morning, I was riding the train to work, heading into the center of Tokyo, when I saw a Japanese schoolgirl studying a textbook through a sheet of red plastic. That set me thinking about the breathlessly exciting topic of study methods.

I'd seen the red plastic sheet technique in use before. The girl was studying kanji (Japanese versions of Chinese characters) using a textbook which was printed in both black (for the questions) and red (for the answers). The sheet of red plastic makes the red answers invisible. Consequently, you can very quickly mask the answers and then reveal them again, and this is one of the favorite methods which schoolkids study by.

In all probability, the schoolgirl was cramming for a kanji exam. Pre-examination cramming is one of the bad study habits by which desperate-to-pass Japanese kids get their required scores. The problem is that it doesn't make for consolidated learning.

(Boy, do those kids ever cram! I've had to teach at junior high school the day after a big exam, and it's as if every kid in the class has been hit over the head with hammers. They're totally trashed. Exhausted.)

There are some Japanese kids (I've met some of them as adults, and they've confessed) who get through their kanji exams by cramming, but who remain unable to read most of the kanji they've supposedly mastered. This makes it difficult (really difficult) for them to do stuff like read a Japanese newspaper.

At the time I noticed the Japanese schoolgirl, I was studying kanji myself, using a pack of kanji cards. But I wasn't cramming. I've been carrying the same pack of cards around for weeks now, reviewing the cards on a daily basis. And that's the secret of study: daily study and daily review.

That's the kind of study you do when you need practical mastery of a language, as opposed to just passing an examination in a language.

That pious comment having been delivered, it has to be confessed that when I looked at the "Japanese study" section of my website, I found the last entry was back on July 19 of last year. Still, I have been studying Japanese rather more than that would suggest, if only because circumstances have forced me to.

Last Saturday, for example, I was sent to the supermarket with orders to get some pork mince, but couldn't find it anywhere. So I tried to explain what I wanted to a supermarket worker who was fooling with the meat display, but I didn't have the word for "mince."

I took a shot at explaining what I wanted, figuring that "minute pig pieces" might do the trick. I came out with "komakai buta niku bubun," aiming for "minute pig meat pieces," but this didn't do the trick. After trying a couple of other things, I gave up, excused myself ("Sumimasen!") and went off on a renewed hunt for the pork mince, which I eventually found.

When I found the pork mince I discovered that, to start with, my image of "mince" was wrong. When I think of "mince" I think of finely chopped pieces. But this was more like soft ropes of pork. Actually, if you put meat through a mincer, what you come up with is probably usually going to be more like soft worms of meat rather than "komakai" particles.

So later on I hunted up the Japanese term for "pork mince" (which turns out to be "buta hikiniku") and the results are now up on the website.