Changes
So anyone that isn’t doing this via RSS has probably noticed a few differences. Those of you who do read via RSS – if you got a bunch of messages telling you my site is unavailable – sorry about that.
It turns out that the disk my VPS was hosted on crashed irrecoverably. Of course, it took my provider 5 days to get back to me with an explanation as to why my site was down. They eventually did give me an explanation, but not before I got sick of my requests for information going unanswered and transferred my site to a new host. I think there is money to be made in seeking out stocks of companies that have awesome customer service and buying that. I have yet to test whether the opposite is true, but if a company has shitty customer service, I just don’t have the patience to deal with it anymore. Moral of this story is – VPSland has shitty customer service, so they get no more of my money. Linode comes highly recommended by people I trust, so I have big expectations of them. Time will tell.
The site is not the only change in my life of late. I went back to Australia last month for final selections for the Australian national kendo team. Unfortunately I was not successful, so I won’t be going to Milan next year to compete. A pity really, I would have loved to have gone. It’s ironic that I came to Japan to do more kendo training, but if anything have ended up doing less over the last 3 years than if I’d stayed in Melbourne. I made a conscious decision to try and strike a better balance between my home life, my work and my passion for kendo. I did that, but it meant that I was not as sharp as I needed to be at selections. I didn’t fight badly, just not well enough. As it stands, I’ve made the Australian team twice. I would have loved to have gone a third time, but it is not to be. Other things in my life are calling. I will not be part of the squad for subsequent campaigns. I thought I’d be more upset about it than I am, but when it’s time, it’s time.
I’m looking forward to spending more time with friends and family. I’m looking forward to spending more time on my Japanese (which is still awful, for the amount of time I’ve spent in the country). I’m looking forward to being more active in the testing community. I’ll still be swinging sticks at people, but I no longer have to drive myself into the ground in order to get ready for competition. It actually feels pretty good.
Borrowing Japanese as a teaching aid
Adam Goucher’s post on New things to steal from the Japanese is the impetus for this one. At CAST I gave a lightning talk on borrowing Japanese language as a teaching aid.
Using foreign loanwords is probably harmless enough if you’re using them to jazz up a story, but if you’re going to use them as teaching concepts especially in the sense of you being the teacher and having enough understanding to relay these concepts to others then more care is warranted.
There were a couple of points that I wanted to make in my talk (though I’m not sure how well I did in the five minutes that I had). Firstly, there seems to be some sort of mystic profundity attached to the Japanese language. Pick a common concept and use the Japanese word for it and all of a sudden it’s full of ancient wisdom.
When I first started learning Japanese, everything seemed terribly profound to me too – probably a combination of kanji seeming unintelligible and me watching far too many samurai movies. Being a little older and a little bit more experienced, I can safely say that, like western teenagers, Japanese teenagers can talk for a half hour solid and say ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Japanese language is not necessarily any more profound than your native language. English has some wonderful, seldom-used words that you could choose to bring back into common parlance.
The other thing is that Japanese language is not necessarily as straight forward as it seems. There are many words that do not have a one-to-one translation and many words that have more than one meaning based on the context you use them in. That cool word you borrowed to spice up your new teaching material may have other meanings, than the one you intended, or deeper meanings that you don’t quite understand.
Shu-Ha-Ri is a particular favourite of mine when it comes to borrowed terminology. On the surface, it describes the progression of learning from the novice stage (shu), where you follow an instructor’s directions over and over again without necessarily understanding why (wax on, wax off, Daniel-san); then an intermediate stage (ha) where you begin to explore what your new-found skills mean and how to apply them in practical situations; to an advanced stage (ri) where your learning becomes self-directed and you no longer require a teacher in order to evolve your skills.
Sounds simple enough in concept, right?
Okay, so let’s take a closer look at the three kanji used.
守 – Shu – means to obey, but also to protect or defend.
破 – Ha – means to rip, tear, break or destroy
離 – Ri – means to detach, separate or release
Armed with this knowledge it becomes a little tougher to reconcile each of them into the neat little definition above. To add to this, allow me to make a gross generalisation about Japanese culture compared with Western culture.
I have observed that westerners tend to have a mindset of ‘make me understand, then I will do’
In Japan there is frequently a pattern of ‘do and eventually you will understand’
The ‘do’ part may take several years before understanding arrives. Case in point, I have done kendo for around 18 years. I felt that I had a solid understanding of the basics maybe 6 years ago. Some of my peers would probably tell you I’m still not there yet.
I’m not saying that one way of thinking is right and one is wrong, or that one is better than the other, but that you should understand that these difference is there. They are part of the culture and it has a direct bearing on language and the understanding of concepts such as Shu Ha Ri
Ri may not come to you without many years of effort. It is unlikely that a several week or even several month course will take you from Shu, through Ha to Ri. Not in the most simplistic sense of the term. Got someone telling you that you can be a black-belt from scratch in six weeks? Run far, far away from that person.
As far as teachers go, I would suggest that if you are tempted to borrow from the Japanese, or another language that you don’t speak for that matter, that you spend some time studying the culture and the people and at the very least be aware that your understanding of the term may well be incomplete before you have your students start calling you sensei.
Lessons Learned in Translation 3
in Everything, Japanese, Software Testing
as Bach, exploratory testing, Japanese, lessons learned in software testing, Pettichord, testing in japanese, translation
I wanted to tackle something a little heftier than the last post to see if content that was less straightforward to explain was also challenging to translate. I went with lesson 28 – Exploring requires a lot of thinking. The translation had a few things that were interesting, including the title. I’ll put up the [...]
Lessons Learned in Translation 2
in Everything, Japanese, Software Testing
as Bach, Kaner, learning japanese, lessons learned in software testing, Pettichord, Software Testing, translation
Here’s my latest foray into re-translation. Actually, this seems to be a pretty good translation of the original text. I suspect what I need to do is find some of the more difficult passages and see what I can find around those. I’ve been looking at the shorter entries to this point because hey – [...]
Heuristics of Software Testability (in Japanese)
in Everything, Japanese, Software Testing
as heuristics of software testing, Software Testing, testing in japanese
Part of the work I’m doing just now is helping developers to increase their testing skills to handle the bandwidth that my team can’t. I asked Yuka Horino, one of my colleagues to translate James Bach’s Heuristics of Software Testability into Japanese as one of the things to distribute to our dev group. (Thanks Horino-san!) [...]
Lessons Learned in translation
in Japanese, Software Testing
as Bach, Japanese, Kaner, lessons learned in software testing, modeling, Pettichord, translation, Weinberg
So a while back I said I’d be posting translations from the Japanese version of Lessons learned in software testing. Basically, I pulled the trigger way too early on that. There have been a bunch of things all demanding my time, so this was a side-project that I just wasn’t able to get to before [...]