Let's Enjoy Looking At "ONLINE RAIBU JOURNARU"

Score! A friend and I spent a couple of hours rummaging through the local used book store today. This place has grown tenfold during the three years I was in Japan; what started off as a two-room storefront operation has expanded into two levels and myriad little rooms branching off in unexpected locations, in the traditon of the finest used book stores in the world. (I'm looking right at you, Caveat Emptor!)

Anyway, while poking around I came across a book entitled Second Year Latin, and whose name was that on the spine if not Mr. Charles Jenney's himself! Predictably, I was ecstatic, as it was priced at a mere $9.99 and still in pristine never-been-touched ex-schoolbook condition.

I have a great deal of love for Jenney's latin textbooks and their wonderfully unapologetic focus on grammar, and the fact that they're organized more intelligently than the other systems. (I'm looking at you Wheelock's; you're one of the main reasons I dropped my Classics major the other being that pesky Greek requirement.) My heart will always belong to the Cambridge Latin Series, but Jenney's is much more suited to individual review and as a grammar resource for all those bits I never quite picked up in class.

"Enjoy it," the Owner Lady told me as I left the store. "I guess..." (I doubt this was a book she'd ever expected to see leaving her store.)

But alas, my enthusiasm has faded slightly in the intervening hours, as I am not certain if what I purchased was in fact, Jenney's Second Year Latin or Scudder's Second Year Latin, and a Library of Congress search has not yeilded definitive results. But hey, it still contains Caesar's De Bello Gallico, which is what I've been itching to read of late (and the reason I'm brushing up on Latin in the first place).

That will be all.

Hmm. I went out for a walk last night and appear to have returned with a Beginner's Chinese textbook and Beginner's Chinese Poetry text, courtesy of the NHK's Radio and Television Lecture Serious. How did this happen?

If you don't yet know about NHK, and live in Japan, stop reading now. You will only endanger your sanity by progressing further. For those of you who aren't in Japan, and thus somewhat immune to the massive temptation NHK presents, please allow me to tell you about my nightmare.

NHK runs a truly astonishing number of educational radio and television programs in a variety of disciplines. Unlike their American 'Become a Neurosurgeon/Fully Fluent in Afrikaans/French Horn Virtuoso in Under 30 Seconds!' counterparts, the NHK textbooks are real textbooks, that seriously examine their target subjects, and in the case of the language texts, teach grammar and fundamentals (as opposed to the glorified phrasebooks that are the Teach Yourself series).

You now understand why the death knell tolled for me when I discovered that the NHK programs weren't just limited to eikaiwa.

It started simply enough, with the NHK Korean radio and television texts. Then I discovered that all of NHK's programs were beginning anew this April, and what's more, that they'd revamped pretty much every course. Since then, I seem to have somehow acquired their French, Spanish, Italian, and reading the works of Shinran (founder of a large and influential Buddhist sect at one of my favorite temples in Kyoto) texts. I have got to be stopped.

On top of the programs I've just mentioned, they also have courses in German, Balinese, Arabic (Arabic!) Japanese classics, Latin classics, Western culture, composing haiku and tanka, baseball appreciation, several Japanese philosophers I'm not familiar with, recent novels, Western cuisine, Japanese cuisine, and a host of English language texts at all levels. It's dangerous.

And what's more, it's pretty sobering to see how little attention American culture pays to education in comparison. These texts that I've mentioned? $3.00 a pop. And they're professionally done, and they're geared toward laymen, who study these subjects for fun. Of course, the effectiveness of any textbook is limited by the motivation of the person using it, but just the fact that every time I've gone in to drool over these books I've been standing with about three to fourteen other people ranging in age from middle school students to grandparents, says something pretty basic about the Japanese attitude toward learning and what constitutes leisure. Most Americans? spend their $3.00 on tabloids or People magazine.

So yeah. I'm going to be a polyglot by the time I leave this country. What the heck. Polyglots are sexy.

That will be all.