What Not to Forget When You Travel

Packing for a trip can be tricky. You have to decide what you need and make sure you don't forget anything. I have a checklist saved on my phone that I go through every time I travel so I can make sure I don't forget the essentials.

However, the essentials may be fewer than you'd think. My list of absolute essentials consists of:

• Passport
• Wallet
• Phone
• Kindle
• Camera/GoPro
• Chromebook

And that's about it.

My full to-pack list is obviously much larger than that, but those are the things that I consider to be irreplaceable. I can't just get myself a new passport when I arrive, but if I've somehow forgot to pack any socks at all, I can run to a shop and buy some. Most of what's on my absolute essentials list are there because they're prohibitively expensive to replace or because I can't replace what's on them easily (like my contacts on my phone).

If I forget shampoo, the hotel will have it. If I forget to change money, I can use my credit card or an ATM when I arrive (even if there is a small fee). If I forget clothes, or my phone charger, there are shops there that would be happy to sell me whatever I forgot. Of course, anything I had to buy while there would come out of my souvenir budget, and so far that's been good enough incentive to not forget anything I couldn't do without.

Your list of absolute essentials for a trip may differ from mine, but I find it helpful (and much less stressful to) to have a shorter list of the things I absolutely have to keep mental track of and then a much longer list of everything else I need to pack that I don't need to worry about so much. It definitely helps me start out a trip on a better note!

Sound Like a Native Speaker

An important part of learning a language is the pronunciation. If you aren't pronouncing the words correctly, speakers of the language won't be able to understand you, which rather defeats the purpose of learning the language.

Some, like Gabriel Wyner of FluentForever to be the very first thing that you ought to learn, even before starting to learn vocabulary. Personally, I like to learn the pronunciation alongside some initial vocabulary, just so I've got something to try to pronounce, rather than just memorising letters and sounds. I've found  that actually using a language is the best way to remember it and improve it in all aspects of language learning, including pronunciation. However, Wyner's point that if you learn to pronounce a language incorrectly, then you have to learn the same thing again and having two pronunciations in your head can be confusing is definitely valid - it's best to just learn everything the right way from the beginning.

The best way to learn proper pronunciation is to listen to native speakers. And since moving to a country where your target language is spoken or enrolling in an immersion course aren't always options (and television and music too difficult to understand yet), I've found that the best resource for learning proper pronunciation of a new language is Forvo.

Forvo is a free-to-use site that provides a collection of recordings of words in a language spoken aloud by native speakers. There are both single words and phrases, so if you want to know how a specific thing is pronounced, Forvo is a fantastic resource. The site even tells you where the speaker is from, so if you're learning French, for example, you can see which ones were from France and which from Canada. It doesn't get more specific than that, so if there's a dialect or accent difference between, say, north and south Japan, recordings in both would be labelled the same way, but the pronunciation is still that of a native speaker of the language, which is more than you might have on your own.

If you want to download the files (which I do, so I can load them into flashcards that I make with Anki - more about that later), you will have to create an account, but again, it's free. I've found Forvo to be a fantastic learning resource, especially for languages that don't have the most phonetic of pronunciations (French) or for languages that have sounds that don't exist in English (Korean). It's also nice to hear how a native speaker might break normal pronunciation rules or on which words a native speaker would enunciate less. Plus, it ties learning pronunciation to learning words, so there's context for the sounds you're learning.

The Importance of Neat Handwriting

When I was learning Japanese at university, my sensei taught us that handwriting was very important in Japan. If you had messy handwriting, she said, people would assume that you would have similar lack of care in other areas of life and that you might not be the sort of person they'd want to date or hire. It's not like in English where if you write illegibly, people may just assume you're a doctor.

Every character has a proper stroke order, however, and following that exactly helps with making your handwriting neater and my sensei insisted that Japanese people could absolutely tell if you'd used the wrong stroke order, even if it otherwise looked correct to you.

Really, neat handwriting does make communication easier. It meant my professor could read my writing and properly mark my exams. It meant being able to read Japanese more easily once I moved there. If the entire point of writing is communication, then prizing neatness makes sense. Except in calligraphy, where I can't read much of the cursive - but that's more an art form anyway. 

Calligraphy is beautiful, and in the future may actually be the only time people actually write out kanji anymore. Thanks to modern technology, many Japanese people don't have as much need to write kanji, instead reading, texting, and typing it.

 Forgetting the kanji isn't something that happens only to foreigners. If you think about it, when was the last time you actually wrote anything in English? It's just not something people spend as much time doing because they can just e-mail or text it instead.

This does make learning Japanese a lot easier for foreigners. Learning to recognise and read kanji takes a lot less time than learning them well enough to write them from memory, so you can become functionally literate in Japanese much more quickly. When you type in Japanese, so long as you know the reading of the word, your phone or computer will provide you with a list of kanji to choose from - you only have to be able to recognise them.

Many Japanese learners can cut out writing kanji from their studies altogether and can get on in Japan just fine most of the time. Thanks to the prevalence of texting, even if you're living in Japan, it can be considered more advanced study rather than an immediate need. Although if you are living in Japan, you may find that there is some need for being able to write in Japanese, such as addressing envelopes at the post office.

Panda Quest

My boyfriend and I are on a quest. The goal is simple - to see pandas. Until we can take a trip to China to see the Panda Kindergarten at the Chengdu Panda Base, we'll have to settle for seeing as many at zoos as we can.

The Ueno Zoo in Tokyo had pandas when I was there, but my time living in Japan predated my interest in pandas, so I never made the time to see them. Because I missed out on the Tokyo pandas, we've been trying to make up for it by seeing all of the ones we can. Since we currently live in North America, that's where we've started.

Last year, my boyfriend and I went to Washington, D.C. and, naturally, at the top of our itinerary was the National Zoo, to see the pandas. The National Zoo actually has got a fantastic panda cam and I'd been watching it when Bei Bei, the then-cub was born. By the time I visited, the tiny baby panda that I'd seen learn to walk and climb trees was as big as his mother.

The entire zoo was lovely - it was entirely free, the only charge was if you wanted to purchase a map, which we did - the zoo is not so confusing that you can't get round without one, but it was nice to have and the proceeds went to support the zoo.

This wasn't my first time seeing pandas in person - I saw them first in San Diego, but I'm never going to complain about seeing more. They're adorable and I'm so glad that they're finally off the endangered species list. They're still vulnerable, but that downgrade from endangered is thanks to all of the hard work and time put in by people who truly care about them. Hopefully we'll see a return of pandas to the wild someday as well.

I promise there are pandas in the photo with me - they're in the shade, trying to escape as much of the early autumn heat as they can.

Learning to Read (in Japanese)

Japanese is my fifth language, so I'm no stranger to learning a language. Japanese is, however, the first language I'd learnt that had a different writing system from English. In French, Spanish, and German, it was just a matter of adding accents, cedillas, and umlauts when needed, and there were perhaps a few different letters, like ch, ll, and ñ in Spanish, but nothing wildly different from English.

Japanese does occasionally use Roman letters (called romaji), which all Japanese people do learn, although it's mostly used for typing on a computer (you type in romaji and the computer changes this to kana/kanji). But mostly, it's used for the benefit of those who don't speak Japanese - you'll see it on signs in train stations and on streets, and in Japanese-English dictionaries and Japanese textbooks. Most Japanese people don't really use it except for stylistic reasons.

If you're wanting to learn Japanese, it would thus benefit you to learn the kana and kanji instead, unless you're planning to only speak Japanese and never read or write it. But really, it's worth it. Most decent Japanese text books will stop providing romaji after the first chapter or two so you don't grow dependent on it.

In my own Japanese course, I notised when trying to learn hiragana that my eyes were drawn to the romaji, because they were more familiar to me, until the textbook stopped providing them and I was forced to learn the kana or fail my class. If the romaji had continued to be provided, most likely it would have actually hindered my learning of Japanese. As it is now, I can read Japanese faster and more fluently in kana and kanji than I can in romaji.

Learning Japanese writing can look intimidating. To start, you've got the kana (hiragana and katakana) - two syllabaries (one character per syllable, rather than one per sound like in an alphabet), which means that not only have you got more characters, but also you have to figure out which to use when. The hiragana are used for grammatical functions in a sentence and for any native Japanese words that haven't got kanji, while the katakana are used for loan words and for emphasis. They're actually rather easy to learn - there are loads of apps and YouTube videos out there that will teach you both of those and they should only take a week or so of studying before you're reasonably comfortable with them.

The kanji are where Japanese gets difficult. These are the Chinese logographic characters and there are thousands of them. As of 2010, there are 2,136 regular usage kanji - these are the ones that students are expected to know before leaving school and that are allowed to appear in publications like books and newspapers without furigana (the hiragana reading) printed next to (or above) it. There are many more than that, but you won't see them quite as often and you'll have the reading provided to help you out. But still, 2,136 is a lot of characters to learn just to read a newspaper.

I'm not trying to be discouraging - honestly, I've found learning kanji to be rather fun, even while it's been challenging. There even more videos and websites and apps for learning kanji than there are for kana, as well as many suggested learning methods. I'll get into those later on - I'm still figuring out which method works best for me as well.

A Trip to the Past

My boyfriend's company holds a summer picnic every year at a different location round the city. A few years ago it was at the art museum. This year, it was at Connor Prairie, a historical village set in the 1800s that uses preserved buildings from an actual family that used to live there.

Personally, I preferred Colonial Williamsburg, as I felt that Connor Prairie was more meant for children. There were loads of educational activities - there wasn't just a loom, there was also a smaller version for kids to try out, for example. So, while that may make it a bit less interesting for adults, it's absolutely fantastic if you have children.

There's a whole section on the American Civil War where you can see how the soldiers lived and details about some of the battles. There was also information on local Native Americans and their relations with the settlers, namely the Connor family. I did like that Connor Prairie focused so much on the one specific family - it was a different perspective from other similar places that focused on more general history.

The part I actually liked the best was the barn, where they had animals that you could pet. I'd never touched a sheep or a goat before and now I've pet both. They had a week-old lamb out with its mum as well. I was surprised by how soft the wool on the sheep was, given that pure wool products tend to be rather itchy.

Overall, it was a fun day, but I don't know that I'd feel the need to go again, at least not without a child with me. Perhaps when my nephew is a bit older I can bring him here.

Save the Galaxy

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I tracked down a Star Wars Battle Pod. The reviews of the game were good and since I'm a fan of anything Star Wars, we thought we'd give it a go. It's an arcade game, so unless you've got a lot of money to spare, you might want to find it at an arcade. In the UK, this is mostly at Tenpin and Hollywood Bowl, and in the US and Canada, it's at Dave & Buster's.

It's actually an enclosed pod, which is nice, since you can immerse yourself in it more. My boyfriend and I swapped off playing each level - he's better than I am at arcade-style games, so he had a higher score than me on most, but I beat the Takodana level when he didn't, so I was rather proud of that accomplishment. The battles are all famous ones from the films - Battle of Yavin, Battle of Hoth, Battle of Endor, Battle of Takodana, so while you do participate in destroying both Death Stars, there's still a lot of variety.

There's a bonus level at the end called Vader's Revenge that isn't really part of the storyline, because it takes place after the destruction of the first Death Star - you play as Vader and you're trying to prevent the Rebels from taking a piece from the Death Star's remains and you destroy the Millennium Falcon in the process. I couldn't beat that level, but my boyfriend got a top score on it. Perhaps I just subconsciously couldn't bring myself to destroy the Falcon?

The game is on a rail system, so there isn't any freedom to explore the level, but that's rather to be expected of an arcade game. And since you're participating in very specific events that take place in a small area of space (or atmosphere, depending), it makes sense for it to be set up that way as well. I thought the game was a lot of fun - it's exciting and fast-paced and you get to participate in some of the most important events in the Star Wars franchise. At least, of the ones that appear in the films.