And because there’s a lot less room for jazz to be played and heard these days, I do find that basically all the horn players who get any exposure come from that world where theory and technique are 90% of the music. When we get together online and trade tips, they’re almost all about this or that scale, arpeggio, etude, or “reified abstraction.”

So jazz, which of course originated in the “African way,” has become almost completely taken up with the “Western way.” Along with a fair bit of Anglo-Saxon masochism (search this blog for that term) – as a professional, you may not practice it, but you don’t question its results in others.

By the way, just started reading your blog (learnt through Benny – Fi3M), and I love it! Bookmark added!

Like other people here said, I learned English just by watching shitloads of Cartoon Network as a kid. Like hours a day, every day, for a couple of years. English was actually one of the few subjects I liked in school because it was so easy – I already knew it. I could chill out during class, not study a damn thing and consistently get great grades. The teachers didn’t bother me either because they saw I knew my shit. And all because of cartoons. Who would’ve thought, huh? 😉

Anyways, you nailed it with this post. Then again, you do with pretty much every post 😀 Keep them coming. I’m off to watch Live free or die hard in Japanese. [OK, side note. If some of your are poor fucks like me or jewish, you can find Hollywood (and Japanese) movies dubbed and subbed in Japanese by using Perfect Dark. Google it. Khatz, I’m not sure what your policy about blatant pirating instructions in the comments is, but I guess we’ll see 😀 {Side note 2 – I have nothing against jews xD}]

It is also how I do to remember the Kana and Kanjis: Learn the character first, see if I can remember it naturally, and if I don’t, I look for a tip to remember it (like あ looking like an Apple) and practice it until it becomes natural enough that I don’t have to remember the tip.

The problem with me learning the “African Way” is that I think too much with logic. If I find logic in something, I remember it easily, while if I don’t, I rely on my memory which is very bad. And this is why learning Japanese is hard for me, it is not a language of logic. But I persevere, and try to immerge myself more and more often into japanese.

I’ll take the points on board and keep on ploughing towards what I want to do. Hoping to take the JLPT N1 in December, pass and improve my job chances. Getting out there and doing it is the best option though, regardless of race, sex, age, circumstances and education.

 Need to work on being more ruthless. The one ability I seem to lack unless pushed.

そう言ったかっただけだ。

ね、勝本、こんなに古いポストの新しいコメントさえを見るのか？

One example I can think of is computers/cell phones. My father (who is a reasonably tech-savvy man) reads the manual and still has trouble getting something to work. I (who admittedly have a degree in computer science, but no personal familiarity with the actual issue at hand or anything really close) fiddle with it for a minute, looking through menus and options, trying things out, and maybe looking at the manual once as a reference on a specific nuance. And I figure it out right away. xD Most of this stuff is not as hard as we make ourselves think it is, or if we make small mistakes, it’s no big deal. Again, the only time it’s really necessary is when a small false step can have catastrophic consequences (like nuclear physics), so we have to be careful and paranoid before we do anything.

I still like linguistics and analyzing language stuffs, but that’s more for fun and context than for practical use. /geek