When I first visited Japan, I bought an electronic dictionary. This saved me from looking up kanji (the complex characters borrowed from Chinese) by counting strokes and identifying radicals (the root component of a kanji character) to index into the enormous tome that I had been using. The dictionary was much lighter, and had a stylus that could be used to draw kanji. Using this sort of input method, the order that you draw the strokes still matters, but it’s much faster than flipping pages. I used this dictionary for getting around Japan, studying, reading manga, and playing video games. Years later, after the Nintendo DS came out, I upgraded using a cartridge called Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten. It uses the same stylus input method, but the results are marked up in color and it has a nicer interface, including a history of recently looked-up words, which is extremely useful. One of the other tools that I was using at the time (and still use today) is a plugin for Firefox called Rikai-chan. When enabled, this plugin allows you to hover the mouse over a word and see the definition in a pop-up.

Rikai-chan also has dictionaries for German, French, and Russian, and similar tools may exist for other languages too, so make sure to look for this kind of plugin for the language that you study if you like to read online material in the original language.

My favorite dictionary now is Japanese for the iPhone. You can look up words by typing roman characters with the default Qwerty keyboard, or by enabling the Japanese and Simplified Chinese Handwriting keyboards in the iPhone settings you can enter a word using the Japanese input method (which presents you with possible kanji as you type phonetically), or by drawing kanji. It includes expressions, proverbs, conjunctions, and interjections, and has an impressive catalog of example sentences. As if this isn’t enough, it also has a vocabulary list feature. I like to create a list of new words for each novel, manga, or video game that I’m into, and then study them using the flashcard feature wherever I am when I have a spare minute. The flashcard feature uses an algorithm based on a series of steps.

When you identify a word correctly, it advances to the next step, and eventually into a “Known” category. Usually there are about twenty or so items between the “Unknown” and “Known” categories that you’re working on, but occasionally you see some items that are in the “Known” category as well. I’d highly recommend an app for your language of interest that has this sort of system for reviewing vocabulary.

In fact, I recently discovered Smart.fm, an online tool/community that’s based on a similar system. There’s a video on the home page that describes how their system automatically determines which material you need to be presented with at a given time to have the best chance of remembering it. I actually recall reading an article a while back about a man who was living his life according to this sort of algorithm. One of the other interesting things about Smart.fm is that in addition to the Goals (sets of material to study) curated by Smart.fm, the user community can create their own. So you can find Goals for varying grades of vocabulary for Japanese, Spanish, and other languages, as well as Goals consisting of the capitals of the world or the names of stars and galaxies. For Japanese, the system does a good job quizzing you on the phonetic reading of a word, the meaning of the word, and the kanji. Some of the goals include sentences, which serve as examples and are also presented to quiz your knowledge. From what I’ve read, images can also be incorporated into the material for a Goal, so the system has the capability to support many areas of study. Unfortunately, their main quiz interface is a Flash app and they dropped the iPhone app that they had developed, but I suspect that they’re working on a new HTML5 solution that will work both on their site and on multiple mobile platforms.

On their own, the tools I’ve mentioned really only help review and expand vocabulary. Without a solid foundation in grammar, even Rikai-chan can only help so much. I have a few books and dictionaries for grammar reference, but I haven’t come across any nice apps or plugins to help in this area of language study. My best suggestion here is to take classes to build your foundation, keep your books, and seek out interesting material at your level to practice with. I’m currently trying to figure out if there’s a good way to get manga in Japanese on the iPad. If you can build some friendships with native speakers, that’s another good way to explore new grammar, and maybe even learn a regional dialect.

And of course the ultimate boost for your language skills, once you have a good start, is to immerse yourself by living abroad. You’ll learn more about the culture, customs and lifestyle, which will reinforce your understanding of language and vice-versa. You might even gain some new perspective and learn more about yourself. And you’ll always have an urge to go back someday.

Interview with Oguri

What’s your mission, or hope, as an artist?
Dance. Basically I feel inspired to dance. I began dancing with Body Weather and Tatsumi Hijikata’s  work, but it was not to learn a kind of tradition or to be a ‘dancer’. I was attracted by the spirit and community. Body Weather does not teach one how to move but is an investigation of the body through working with and learning from others and explores the connection of body to space. A lot of people connect Butoh with the atomic bomb and Hiroshima, and I want to make it clear that that is a misunderstanding. Of course that is a very strong human experience and everything is related, but Butoh is not a direct expression for that. Rather the dance is a possibility for human understanding. Butoh is revolutionary, but it just means ‘dance’. Dance doesn’t have a goal. I work between my body and myself.

How did Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! come to be?
Because of my interest in William Faulkner.

How does Caddy! relate to the Japanese performing arts tradition?
I found Faulkner through Japanese literature. Oe and Nakagami  were inspired by him, and if they are like my fathers, I wanted to meet my grandfather. When Faulkner visited Japan in the mid-1950s after World War II, he said I am like you. I come from the south–the losers country. There is physicality in Oe and Nakagami’s work, and for me that is dance.  I find the same thing in Faulkner’s work.

What influence has Butoh had on you as a performing artist?
Butoh is respect of Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance. In Japan, there was folkdance, ballet, and modern dance. There was a society where performers presented seven-minute pieces for a classy, sophisticated audience. Hijikata comes along half naked and shines the light in the audience’s eyes. He brought the idea of homosexuality and sex and eroticism on stage. He killed a chicken on stage, and the little girls fainted and he was kicked out. After he was expelled, people sought him out because he seemed so cool, and at the time, many people had the same antiestablishment sense. He did a lot of collaborations and events, but it was very avant-garde, very strong cutting edge work.

This year’s Spirit & Place theme is “Inspiring Places.” Does Caddy! take its sense of place from Faulkner’s writing?
William Faulkner lived his entire life in one small county town. From there he created hundreds of characters and lives full of memories and imagination. He invented a fictional place, Yoknapawtawpha, that the reader feels and travels through. In the dance we carry the spirit of the stories.

Can you describe what it’s like to perform this piece?
I have the opportunity to be in Faulkner’s imagination, to dance his stories in space and explore many different characters and the strength and depth of humanity.

What do you ask of the audience who attends this performance?
If you have a chance, please read Faulkner.

Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! The William Faulkner Dance Project is Saturday, November 7 at 7 pm in The Toby. Tickets are $10 for the public and $7 for IMA members. Purchase tickets online

BONUS: Show any Toby ticket stub and receive half off the ticket price for Caddy!

Back at the derby: spray-painted, crumpled automotive beasts tumble against one another.  The air is filled with terrific absurdity.  These vehicular masochists have planned these clashes.  They have intended it, and yet not intended it – very much like an artist’s relationship to the work of art s/he creates.

I learned three things at the demo derby:

• Embrace the ugly
• Push through anything crippling
• Take things that are hard by nature and try to soften them

Some of these concepts underlie the abstract form of movement called Butoh, made with slow-mo gestures, prolonged facial expressions and the baring of the unconscious.  The dancer Oguri returns to the IMA November 7 with another Butoh-inspired performance, this one an interpretation of the literary experiments of American author William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!).  Fear no art: what appears incomprehensible and senseless at first actually might actually reflect the order of the universe.

More on the November 7 event as it nears.  Until then, keep smashing, clashing, and seeking truth.

Good news, right? Until the day when scientific advancements make living forever possible, everyday blogger-types like myself can pursue other life-extending options gleaned from those who do it best.

The Danish people seem to have figured something out. Ranked (once again) as the “happiest people in the world” in a recent international survey, one would expect the Danes to also have a longer life expectancy. Some suspect it’s low expectations that keep them content, while others say it’s the city’s way of life, with nearly one-third of Danes biking to work and another one-third taking public transit. Others suggest it’s the laid-back, carefree lifestyle they lead with free healthcare and top-notch education systems. I am not sure how Americans can avoid worry, but Hoosiers can certainly benefit from a better public transit system. The sooner it is on track, the sooner we’ll be whistling our way to work.

Next up, Japan boasts the healthiest population in the world, with a woman’s life expectancy averaging 86 years. A diet rich in fish, rice and seaweed helps keep heart disease and cancer under control, while government-sponsored fitness programs help the Japanese stay trim. My advice — spin class and sushi for dinner tonight. I hear the Wii Fit is also to die for.

Leading the world in smarts, the Finnish students come out on top. They attribute a good education system to student-teacher relationships, pupils’ enthusiasm to learn and an environment conducive to learning mathematics, with strict rules minus the high anxiety. Determining the smartest population is impossible because there is no standardized global exam. Staying mentally fit has been a proven factor in reducing the onset of disease. So it’s back to reading Middlemarch and playing Settlers of Catan next Friday for me.

To state the obvious, I think we can agree that happiness, health and intelligence all contribute to longevity. So my plug for an instant fix — RSVP for tomorrow’s exhibition preview and party for To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum at the IMA. Bring a friend, have a drink and learn a little about the ancient Egyptians’ quest to live forever.

• Get your tickets here