土鍋 are staples for Japanese cooking! Sooooo many delicious meals at our house are cooked and served in one.
Not exactly the same as a dutch oven but it’s kinda the same idea.
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Once again! I now wonder how few lessons I need to learn before I can almost read zen-koans or zen-poetri? Other questions could be: how few lessons before reading child-newspapers, before reading Yotsuba&, before reading Murakami, and so on?
How do I / we work with Wanikani from: How few? :-).
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So glad to meet you! It is funny how sometimes our motivations seem so random; it is a reminder that at any moment we could stumble across a new experience (a job, a person, an object lying on the sidewalk…) that could change the whole direction of our attention and even our lives. I agree that I’m constantly impressed by the people I have observed in this forum!
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I suspect it varies by person. In my case, I started feeling more confident with my reading around level 35 or so. I didn’t have to look up nearly as many words or stumble nearly as often.
But one big caveat: I’d been having conversations in (broken) Japanese for decades before I started learning to read. I already had a reasonably large vocabulary and was often just learning to associate the kanji with a word I already knew. I think it would be much harder to read if I had been learning new words at the same time.
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The standard definition is:
Before you can have a line conversation with 30 people talking about the costume of your kindergarten kid without damaging your reputation unknowingly due to your total lack of nuances and appropriate stickers.
Why I know that? 
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Oh, you can’t leave us hanging like that. Now I’m dying to know what you said!
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I’d love to if I would know it 
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But that’s a question I would like to ask you:
How do you keep your cool in a situation talking Japanese to many people about doing things you have to do while you don’t like to neither do them nor how they are done with people you have to do these things with, people who don’t like you at a time where you don’t have time?
Like suppressing even the faintest urge to be just a little bit cynical?
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I’d just either not do them or be a whole lot cynical…but that’s the gift of aspergers… you don’t tend to do things you don’t want to do and you don’t tend to care a whole lot how people feel about that… 
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Is this the reason why you sometimes delete posts? That would indicate you DO care, no?
I usually don’t care too much about what others think but in the kindergarten they have your child ‘as a hostage’ as one Japanese mother put it nicely when ranting about the black PTA’s methods in Japanese schools on the internet.
But maybe it would be an idea to mention I have Asperger as an excuse, I might really have it I think to a certain degree… I never liked to follow social roles in groups and was a kind of outsider but not alone. Just not a member of a group. But in Japanese dynamics, I haven’t yet found a way to deal with how to position myself in order not to feel stressed out. I might need some clear visual sign showing that I am some kind of Nerd or something so they don’t expect anything from me from the beginning
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No usually it’s because i realize whatever I wrote was already addressed…like the last post I just deleted was because I said I wanted to hear the story then realized you wrote that you can’t tell the story because you don’t really know what you said…so i deleted.
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Uh … you’re asking me? I’m not the best person to ask!
I don’t have the thickest skin, but I learned a long, long time ago that I’m going to continue making lots of mistakes when speaking Japanese, so I’d better get used to it.
Counterintuitively, you’ll be better received if you’re jokingly loud, brash, and confident. Just plowing along with broken language and constant misunderstandings is far better than shy, hesitant, and painfully slow communication (just keep a smile plastered on your face).
I never even try to suppress anything whether cynical or not: I tend to just blurt out whatever I’m thinking. It’s not very Japanese, but most people seem to find it refreshing, and nobody would ever mistake me for a native anyway!
Prior employers often made me give powerpoint sales presentations in my broken Japanese to often skeptical people whom I didn’t know about pretty technical products. It was exhausting and not much fun, but it was good practice and it definitely helped me build my vocabulary (slowly). The hardest part was gauging the degree of puzzlement in the audiences faces: did I just make a small error or are they completely lost?
I take it back. The hardest part was that I never had enough time to prepare and the material was constantly changing.
The best presentations were invariably the rare occasions when I could give the exact same presentation multiple times, polishing as I went. Instead, the (English!) powerpoint material was changing constantly and I usually had to make it up as I went along.
One obvious thing that helped me tremendously were illustrations and visual aids. Fewer words on the screen (in English or Japanese) was ALWAYS best.
As for keeping my cool: I usually didn’t have time or energy to get emotional, no matter how contentious or difficult the meeting: every erg of brain energy was focused on communicating. Fortunately, Japanese audiences are almost always at least outwardly polite and forgiving.
One curious thing I learned: the more informal and relaxed the environment, the better my conversation skills became! On rare occasions (usually having drinks after a meeting) I almost forgot I was speaking Japanese. I’d never have gotten that comfortable if I hadn’t plowed through the difficult presentations and conversations, though.
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Yes, I’d like a T-shirt…It’s not like i don’t care at all…the older I get the more I care because i’ve put a lot of effort into working on communication skills, so when i offend and I can’t figure it out I’ll often ask now…when i was 16 I just had noooo clue that I functioned on a different social playing field…the rules are exhausting and I can only imagine that in Japan they are impossible and I would definitely need a sign around my neck saying I’m handicapped…lol. Thank god some formalities are built into the language…
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Perfect! Lol…that’s what I’m thinking, probably better to just be me (and where the handicapped Tshirt)
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Those memories just reminded me of a technical word I used all the time.
I mostly worked for computer storage companies, so the word for “compression” was quite common and important. I soon learned it phonetically as あっしゅく.
Today I realized I had no idea how it was written, so I looked it up: 圧縮 — two characters I know and can now read and understand easily!
If only! My life would have been so much easier if Wanikani had existed several decades ago.
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I see. I am more on the ‘paranoia’ spectrum it seems. Whenever I see: (post deleted by author) I get the impression that it was an insult that the author deleted in order not to be banned, so automatically I feel like I wrote something offensive first 
What was it about? (This is going to be a completely useless rant so please feel free to ignore it
It’s hard to sum it up in a few words, but a situation like this:
Summary
In the kindergarten we had to form groups of mothers of ten kids to ‘sew’ a costume for a performance. We also had to design it. The other mothers took this event EXTREMELY serious and unfortunately I thought it is a bit (like 200%) awkward. Not only the song that was chosen, Reiwa from the Golden Bombers, but also the way they made a Kimono out of non woven synthetic paper, aka plastic sheets, and tape. I am unfortunately good at sewing so I couldn’t not comment on some ideas to improve the technic and they where pretty offended I think. And there was an issue about the fact that two ボスママ’s from rivaling fractions (both very scary actually) where in my group and there was an intense power fight going on which I didn’t realize at that time because I wasn’t aware that something like an ママカースト even exists. So I thought the frosty atmosphere has something to do with me being a foreigner and…having a baby at that time…corona epidemic starting…sewing machine broke down in an unlucky moment that gave the impression I try to sneak away from my responsibilities…50-100 LINE messages a day for about two months I had to parse because sometimes there where important questions about the ‘costume’ and if I didn’t answer they would send me a mail ‘didn’t you read it?’…
I could go on forever about this sorry. I just realized this was the eye opening moment for me to understand it is better to use the Japanese technic of ‘duck and cover’ in situations like these.
Like dealing with the Yakuza it is better to let other mothers do their dirty job. If you see someone with a tattoo or an electric ママチャリ in Japan:
- lower you eyes slowly
- change to the other side of the road without making unexpected movements
- hold your breath and get the hell outa there.
It is not about this particular situation I think now, more about the dynamics of these kind of forced groups where people don’t do anything useful but have to show each other how dedicated they are. I try to avoid it like hell. But it is difficult, because everyone else also does secretly. That’s why there is a lottery (!) for PTA positions in the schools.
I would be honestly interested how such a situation feels for a person having Asperger.
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I think this is the best approach, unfortunately I went down the ‘trying to become Japanese’ road which is a cul-de-sac in the end. Somehow I have to reposition myself to make clear I do speak Japanese but I shouldn’t be expected to ‘act’ Japanese. Which is a difficult endeavor because it takes a lot of trial and error to get the nuances right and if you ‘error’ there are usually pretty long lasting social consequences arising from it.
I mean it really starts with basic strategical decisions on how to dress.
T-Shirts often work amazingly well to influence peoples expectations from you.
I tried to avoid sending signals about my inner self to the outside so I usually wear basic minimal clothes from Muji. It might work better to just intentionally dress a bit more like a foreigner. It is really like working with the subconsciousness of people, potentially dangerous, but also necessary, because I think I realized that trying to ‘blend in’ takes a lot of dedication and money even for the Japanese and probably even if you would succeed in an enormous task of blending in fashion- wise there could be more unintended problems arising from this than the problems it would solve actually.
I just realized that the situation is actually very similar to being autistic outside of Japan. Maybe I should check out forums on camouflaging techniques.
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Absolutely not. You’re one of my favorite posters. I would have nothing bad to say.
Well for me …you would have lost me at kindergarten and mothers…
I definitely stay away from all situations like this…I would not even be able to begin to take it seriously …in all honesty I just wouldn’t have participated. I don’t think they would take it out on a child…maybe try selective mutism? These are situations I do not and cannot understand. I try to draw parallels by replacing the word child with golden retriever…would I put up with crazy women emailing me multiple times a day about the costume for my golden if I thought they might exclude him or be mean to him if I didn’t play along??? Maaayyybeee…
or maybe i’d try emphasizing how inept I am at costume making while praising their superior costume making skills…
My gut instinct is that my social avoidance would kick in hard core and I just wouldn’t go…I mean, do they kick you out of the school for non-participation in costume making. I realize that this would further alienate me but it sounds like people I wouldn’t have a thing in common with anyway so wouldn’t see it as much of a loss.
yup…this…this is how it would feel for a person with Asperger…lol
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And the exact day for the seasonal change… 
I’ve had great success by blatantly feigning ignorance toward even the most obvious aggressively-polite rudeness. Nothing frustrates the bossy types or entertains the witnesses more!
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what is this exactly…is it like when my gramma went on and on about how much she liked my new haircut and then said “the bangs cover your big forehead so nicely”?
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