littlewonderlog

The last course of our holiday family dinner is apparently looking through Netflix.

As part of learning Japanese and part of exploring food culture, I’ve landed on an episode of the “Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories” to watch with my family.

I’ve watched a couple of episodes of this show before, yet now I see a clear difference between this show and the “Solitary Gourmet”.

The “Solitary Gourmet” is 80% about food. Goro-san looks for a restaurant, agonizes over the menu choice, orders, and savors several different dishes while talking to himself.

The “Midnight Diner” is 80% about people. Specifically, the guests of the restaurant. The story is pretty much about those people’s lives.

Unlike the overall vibe of the show title, the “Midnight Diner” rarely shows the cooking scenes or talks about the dishes. I mean, it does, but not so much, at least to the extent that I would like to see.

Since what I’m mostly interested in are those scenes and conversations, I don’t think I’m ever gonna watch another episode of the “Midnight Diner”. I think.

On this peaceful holiday night with a happy full belly, I’m one step closer to my well-structured language-learning guideline.

The Solitary Gourmet (2024) ⭐ 7.1 | Comedy, Drama

1h 50m | PG

Shinya shokudô (TV Series 2009–2014) ⭐ 8.6 | Comedy, Drama

24m | M18

As part of the holiday routine while visiting my in-laws, we went to the market to look around. Not really to buy anything, but just to window-shop. It’s packed as usual and you’re now in a game of avoiding getting hit by other people’s shoulders.

As someone currently living without flour, coffee, dairy, fried foods, and sugar, there’s really no snack to nibble on while roaming the market. It’s a shame, but it’s fine. Well, it’s not really fine, but it’s fine.

Something catches my eye on this crazy bustling street, and it’s the hot stores.

There are some hot stores even though their products are not particularly better than those of other similar stores. They are extremely kind, or extremely enthusiastic, or both. It’s not 100% the case, as there’s always an outlier, yet it’s mostly the case.

In those hot stores, there are interest, smiles, and vitality. It’s not just for today. They are always like that.

I get this energy while observing those stores.

The energy of interest, smiles, and vibrancy.

The Lunar New Year holiday has started. Well, technically, the actual holiday hasn’t started yet, but the weekend makes it feel like it has anyway.

The holiday was all joy and fun when I was young. We gorged ourselves on the great food coming out constantly, had a blast talking to family and relatives, and got to receive the valuable snack money at the end of the holiday.

Now, it’s a bit different.

We not only gorge ourselves on great food but also prepare it, make sure family and relatives have a blast talking to each other, and at the end of the holiday give away those precious bills to the future of this country.

And another thing, the change in daily routines.

The usual routines such as morning workouts, reading, writing, language-speaking practice, etc. are all affected due to the change in daily schedules.

As the time, space, surrounding people and the environment change, my daily habits need temporary adjustments.

Maintaining certain routines every day is no longer a hard task, yet adjusting them is still a little bit of a challenge for me.

During this holiday, I will be that person who is less unskilled in regards to those adjustments.

…one of the best learning opportunities.

Being pushed into a corner forces us to find a solution.

Being pushed into a corner forces us to commit to finding a solution.

Being pushed into a corner is not as bad as it looks.

Being pushed into a corner causes change, and change causes new opportunities.

While writing something in either Korean or English, I find that there are certain tones of voice and word choices of my own in those writings. It shows even more clearly when I reread them for proofreading.

When I read my writing from the perspective of another person (reader), my own personality stands out more clearly to my eyes. Writing something and reading something I’ve written are completely different experiences.

However, when I ask AI to proofread my writing, it just changes it completely. It not only revises grammar or spelling errors, but pretty much rewrites the thing in the name of suggesting better words and natural phrases. While those revisions tend to be better and more natural in a way, the revised writing doesn’t feel like mine anymore. You see, I haven’t come up with those phrases, yet I don’t really use them on a daily basis anyway.

I therefore try to use AI as nothing more than an error-checking tool. I’m open-minded to those better and more natural words and phrases AI suggests with a learner’s attitude, yet I would rather keep my rough and a bit unnatural writing. Why? Because that’s more like me.

One of the reasons for learning a language is this.

After all, there is ‘me’ in my spoken words and writings, and I want to be the one who chooses words and phrases, not an AI translator or interpreter.

I learn a language as a tool to voice myself in my own way.

It may be a bit crude, yet solely mine, at least.

I happened to see the photo of us taken during our honeymoon ten years ago on the wall.

Our faces were puffy, and both of us were young and youthful.

We were complaining that our 20s were gone, yet now I see that we were young and youthful enough in many ways.

I am thinking that ten years from now, looking at our photos from this year will make us feel the same way.

Ten years later from any period, it will change how we look at ourselves and we will say how young and youthful we were.

I am trying to have this future ability to recognize the sense of our youth, which is only possible to do looking backward.

Me today is young and youthful. Just a daily reminder.

People say their English never improves no matter how hard they try.

They say they put in so much effort but never achieve the desired results.

I’ve said the same thing about learning French.

I never understood why my French didn’t get past the beginner level. Why did I always suck?

After some observation, I easily got the answer.

I talked a lot about learning French, yet I didn’t actually study that much.

So many times I babbled, “Ah, I should learn French….” yet I spent so little time actually doing it.

I spent so much of my energy talking on and on about French that I thought I was learning French.

The same thing happens with my attitude toward sorting out my clothes.

For days and months, I talked about the need to rearrange my drawers.

And yet?

I didn’t even want to look at the drawers, and I didn’t.

The reason your English never improves is clear.

You don’t really work at it.

Words are funny.

Sometimes they come out after long and hard consideration, and sometimes they just pop out without even thinking.

Some words are heard so many times from people around me, stay in my head quietly for a while, and then one day just come out unconsciously.

We need to keep an eye on these words.

“It’s not gonna work in this life.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“How am I going to be able to do that?”

“It’s too much for me to handle.”

I mean, why not?

What stops you in this life?

Money can be earned.

How am I going to do it? Well, I can figure that out somehow.

Everything feels like too much to handle at first. We can learn, experience, and get used to it.

Words are a habit, and habits become reality.

By controlling the words that come out unconsciously, we control our reality today and tomorrow.

On Saturday night, I watched an episode of the Culinary Class Wars again with my husband.

Unlike the K-foodie Meets J-foodie or the Solitary Gourmet which run for about 20 minutes, the Culinary Class Wars takes up more of my time as it runs for more than 1 hour.

And another thing about this show is that…

it interferes with my deep sleep.

Just like last time, I had rather light sleep after watching this show before going to bed. Usually, I don’t wake up during the night and have very deep sleep, but my sleep becomes light as a feather after watching this show.

While our usual habit of reading books for 1 or 2 hours before going to bed can be a factor, the characteristics of this show seem to be another.

Unlike the K-foodie Meets J-foodie or the Solitary Gourmet, the Culinary Class Wars is a survival competition show and its filming style has a lot of anticipation and surprise factors, which stimulate dopamine.

Going to bed right after watching an exciting show seems to prevent me from having a relaxed state of mind and interfere with the deep sleep that I usually have.

One more strange thing is that this kind of dopamine-enhancing show shuts down my Japanese-learning ears.

When I watch shows in Japanese, I usually keep an ear out for the words and phrases very consciously, yet while watching the Culinary Class Wars, I kind of lose that sense.

Although the Japanese conversations I hear are all accumulated in my unconscious brain, they just flow away at a conscious level.

Then, is this show really suitable for my Japanese learning?

Well, I need to watch some more and figure that out.

(And I really should not watch it right before going to bed.)

I’ve taken some time to list all the Japanese TV shows and movies that I watched over 1 year in the holy name of learning a language.

Since I found that the typical sense of humor in Japanese dramas doesn’t quite suit me, I also watched a lot of non-Japanese TV shows with a Japanese dub (thanks to Netflix and Disney).

This list also includes a lot of food and cooking-related TV shows as food is one of my major interests in terms of cultural exploration.

The list is actually longer than I imagined.

Solitary Gourmet – 5 hours
A hard day – 2 hours
Finding Nemo (Dub) – 20 hours
The Practice (Dub) – 40 minutes
Tokyo Swindlers – 12 hours and 40 minutes
Kiyo in Kyoto: From the Maiko House – 6 hours
K-foodie Meets J-foodie – 16 hours
Evening Drink Style – 4 hours and 20 minutes
Big Short (Dub) – 2 hours
Slam Dunk Movie – 2 hours
Atom’s Last Shot – 37 hours and 30 minutes
The Family – 2 hours
Wakako Sake – 1 hour
Weekend Family (Dub) – 50 hours
Prison Break (Dub) – 6 hours and 30 minutes
Hanzawa Naoki – 9 hours and 30 minutes

The total is 176 hours and 10 minutes.

The time specified in the above list is not the total runtime of the show but rather the actual time I spent watching. Some were watched several times and some were stopped without finishing the whole series.

The main contributor to this grandiose list of watching TV in the name of learning Japanese is dishwashing.

70% of the total time was spent doing the dishes while watching the shows.

I feel obliged to dedicate myself to the dishwashing to maintain my commitment to learning Japanese, which leads to serious eating.

I need to keep going.

I need to keep eating, all in the name of learning Japanese.