Impressions - Animefangirl!

Watching clips of Beautiful Cooking (美女廚房) online

I’ve hit the stage in my Cantonese studies where I think I’ve gone as far as textbooks and manufactured dialogues can take me. It’s time to start piling on the real media for real Hong Kong people, and what better place to start than reality TV?

Unfortunately both the streams for Guangdong TV and ATV have gone offline (and the latter one has gone bankrupt), and TVB is only available to people who live in certain countries unless you have a proxy service. I’m working on getting around that, but not too seriously because I have another option: Youtube! Because I don’t have any particular show in mind and don’t mind checking out a little bit of everything here and there, Youtube is the perfect place to start.

My first subject: Beautiful Cooking from TVB! Yes, the TVB official channel has uploaded several clips of this blatantly sexist cooking show that literally means Beautiful Girls’ Kitchen (美女廚房). It’s all about bringing young female celebrities onto the show so they can flail about pretending not to know how to cook and so the mostly-male panel can savage the results. Because it doesn’t matter how successful your film career is or how much charity work you do or how fulfilling your life is – if you can’t cook then you’re worthless as a woman </sarcasm>.

Oh, this AnimeFangirl again, always getting outraged over the slightest things, you say. Well yeah, I guess. It is a pretty entertaining show. And it’s clear the girls are playing up their helplessness and cluelessness and the guys are mugging for the camera just to be funny. They’re all actors and celebrities after all. But the underlying message is still, hmmm… why not celebrities in general? Why only female celebrities cooking to please judges who are always always men? I am woman, see me cook!

And that’s not even getting into the obligatory “Man saves day for woman” bit in every show, where at least one contestant finds herself unable to deal with a piece of raw meat or seafood and one of the (male) judges has to do it for her. For example a judge has to wrestle seafood from a tank while the lady stands back and squeals “I’m so scared!”

In another episode it’s a raw duck, and the contestant’s feminine hands are so delicate she can’t apply enough pressure to cut its head off. He-Man to the rescue. “Eek!” screams the lady as she scampers off to the side while the man does his thing. Thank you He-Man, how did women ever cook without you?

I’m all for complementarianism and do believe that God created men and women for different roles and purposes in the family, but this is just ridiculous. Luckily I’m watching this show for learning purposes and not for the social commentary – though it does say a lot about Hong Kong culture that they have such a program. Also as I said they are exaggerating for obvious effect – though it does say a lot about Hong Kong culture that they feel the need to behave in such a way.

So how much Cantonese have I learned from watching several clips of Beautiful Cooking? None, haha! Okay, I did learn the word for squid (墨魚) but that’s about it. Instead this is mainly an exercise in training myself to watch Cantonese programming without subtitles and try to get the gist of it. I’m quite happy as getting the main gist of all the clips I’ve watched so far, though it helps a lot that Hong Kongers are so lively and animated. You won’t be in any doubt about how they’re feeling, I can guarantee that.

That aside, it’s too soon to tell if watching this stuff will have an effect on my Cantonese. But I remember making leaps and bounds in my Japanese listening skills from watching lots of video clips from Hey! Hey! Hey! and Music Station on Youtube. All those vids are down now and I was already pretty good at Japanese when I started watching them, but they did help a lot. I’m hoping to get the same effect from doing a little All Cantonese All The Time for the rest of the year.

As for the Beautiful Cooking show itself, eh, it’s okay. I like cooking, I like seeing what the contestants make of the unexpected ingredients, everyone involved seems to be having a lot of fun. It’s exactly the kind of show I could watch a lot of without even meaning to. I’ve linked two episodes in this post and TVB has plenty more on Youtube, so be sure to check them out if you’re interested!

How fluent will you be after levels 1-10 of Talk to Me in Korean?

Talk to Me in Korean (a.k.a. TTMIK) is a website that teaches Korean to absolute beginners. It starts with stuff like “this” and “that” and “hello” and “goodbye,” the very basics of the basics. I’m not fluent in Cantonese yet, but I’m comfortable enough that I’m ready to start branching out into other languages. Besides, I’ve been watching a Korean drama lately that’s quite fun. I didn’t used to like the sound of Korean very much, but the more I listen to it, the more it grows on me, so I’ll be idly – very, very idly – learning Korean for the next year.

There was no special reason for me choosing Talk to Me in Korean, except people criticized it online for being too basic and I thought “That’s what I want!” Plus I downloaded a few other random resources and textbooks and they were all way too hardcore for me. My hardcore language for now will continue to be Cantonese. Korean will just be my bit on the side until I’m ready to dig deeper, so “too basic” is just perfect for me.

How’s my progress so far? Well I’ve learned all the basic Hangeul alphabet using a Memrise app for that (I used the Android version, not the website I linked, but it’s the same thing). It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Some people say you can go do it in 15 minutes, but for me it took about 2 weeks of repeated drilling for it to stick in my head. Now I can recognize most words after some study, and I think my recognition speed is getting faster by the day. Memrise is pretty handing for drilling stuff until you finally master it, more on it some other day.

After finishing the Hangeul, I’m now on Level 1 of the Talk to me in Korean lessons. I told you I was just doing the basics, didn’t I? Most recently I learned “It’s not me” and “That is not a cat.” I’m so fluent now… not! 😀 Baby steps. One thing I’m not doing is listening to the podcasts. I realized quickly they spend 95% of each lesson speaking in English. Besides, I don’t really like podcasts. I read much faster than I listen.

So what I do is, I read the PDFs under each lesson, then I drill them into my head using the corresponding Memrise lesson. Simple enough. It only takes about 15 minutes a day to go through a lesson so it’s not getting in the way of my other learning efforts. And since there about 265 lessons in the TTMIK curriculum, I should be done in roughly 8 months if I’m faithful and don’t skip too many days. I googled a lot to see how fluent I should be at that point, and the answer is “not very” but I want to see for myself.

I’m not affiliated with either Memrise or Talk to me in Korean, btw. Just recording what I’m doing and how it’s going. I’ll check back after… hmm… 3 months? If I don’t forget, that is. I’m also using Memrise to kick my Cantonese up a notch but I haven’t seen too much progress on that front yet. More on that story as it develops.

Thoughts on Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka?

I’ve only read the free sample pages of Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka? provided by Fantasia Books and don’t intend to read any more, but that was enough to form a general opinion. The intention of the free sample is to help the reader decide if they want to read any further, after all, and 70 or so pages of a book is a pretty substantial freebie. This post will contain a few spoilers, so read chapter one and two if you haven’t already.

On to the meat. We all know other world/isekai light novels are all the rage these days. Every other LN features a hero ending up in another world somehow where he somehow becomes overpowered and a chick magnet and all the other otaku fantasy wish fulfillment tropes that the genre is so well-known for. Other world stories are so common these days that’s it’s hard for new books to make a dent – unless they either subvert or deconstruct the genre (getting increasingly common these days) or add some kind of spin or gimmick.

Enter Tsuujou Kougeki – Do You Like Moms Whose Normal Attacks Hit the Whole Enemy Party Twice? The twist here is that the main hero Masato does not go into the game world alone but is accompanied by his doting mom Mamako and it is Mamako, not Masato, who becomes the overpowered hero. It’s pretty funny how he gets so worked up and excited about being the Chosen One… then his mom just walks up and snags the two most powerful weapons in the game. Not only that, but the in-game guidebook suggests there might be other such overpowered mother-son pairs in the MMMMMORPG game. It would be interesting to meet them and see how things go.

So the unexpected swerve is an intriguing one, enough to get even a light novel avoider like me to read it. The problem is, it’s not quite what I expected. I should have smelled a rat when I saw the cutesy, fanservicey picture of Mamako on the cover. What I was expecting was a normal mom, late 30ish early 40ish soccer mom with the dignity and gravitas to match. Putting a regular, realistic everyday person into these kinds of situations is always much funnier and more interesting to me anyway.

Mamako is just annoying. Ditzy, clingy, manipulative, always ready to use tears to control her son if nothing will work. Doesn’t know jack about what’s going on, won’t share what little she does know, won’t listen to common sense advice but charges ahead without a thought in the world. Is this really a woman in her late 30s? How did she survive long enough to breed? The worst part is her fake crying to weasel her way into or out of situations. That’s just plain dirty. The excessive focus on her young appearance and on Masato’s brief moments of attraction to her are just pig-disgusting icing on a pig-disgusting cake.

Masato is no paragon of virtue either. He’s whiny and too cranky and rude towards his mother. I’m sure we can all remember times when we were a little sharper with our moms than we had meant to be, but to snap and snarl at her all chapter long is just… ick. And all that whining and crying just because his mom has better weapons instead of creating a build and learning skills to make the best of what he has. I blame Mamako for bringing him up wrong, that’s what. Plus he’s 15 years old, what can I say?

I didn’t read enough to get to know the loli merchant and the tsundere sage better, but I doubt they’ll be any better than the already-low level established. The tsundere in particular killed my desire to read any more. You know she’s just going to argue with Masato and beat him up all the time but she’s still going to “win” his affection over any better girls in the series anyway. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

TL;DR – The premise was interesting, but the ditzy personality of the mom and the whiny, cranky personality of her son ruined the whole thing for me. If they make an anime I might try an episode or two, but the interest I had in Tsuujou Kougeki is gone and probably isn’t ever coming back.

Watched a few episodes of The TETSUWAN Dash!!

The TETSUWAN Dash!! (ザ!鉄腕!DASH!!) is a Japanese TV variety program that airs on Nihon TV and stars the members of Japanese boyband Tokio getting up to various hijinks. I say “boyband” but the member of Tokio are all past 40 by now and one episode even had two of them figuring out ways to burn fat and stay trim even in their late 30s.

How did I discover this program? Mostly by chance. I was browsing around some Japanese media fansites and saw a comment somewhere mentioning how much Japanese fans hate Taichi Kokubun, one of the members of Tokio. I browsed about a bit more and found a thread translated from 2channel about how much they hated him. TBH 2channel is just a bunch of trolls who shouldn’t be taken seriously and AFAIK Kokubun is actually one of the most popular members of the group. But long story short, someone in that thread mentioned The Tetsuwan Dash, I started googling around and quickly found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiDIDD2Q8Go&list=PL5ku2GovwsktmEC31WTBPcY2yH-Pbboi4

Lots and lots and lots of old The Tetsuwan Dash episodes! Yay! The video quality isn’t the best so some stuff can be a little hard to see sometimes, but it’s more than good enough for keeping up my Japanese while watching stuff that isn’t completely inane (i.e. doesn’t involve AKB48 or the likes).

As a bonus it’s actually a very educational show. Parts of it are a little boring and just have two members driving around Japan in a solar car ooh-ing and aah-ing over the local sights, but the Dash Village (Dash Mura) sections teach me a lot about small-scale farming. The first episode I watched taught me about cross-pollination as the team attempted to crossbreed two varieties of rice. It was a tremendous amount of effort, especially since one breed was growing faster than the other so they had to rig a hothouse over the slower one and transplant the faster one to somehow regulate the speeds, then they had to manually pollinate some of the rice and in the end a lot of the crop was still lost to disease, and on and on. Lots of very interesting, very educational drama.

In another episode I learned about how corn is pollinated – I always wanted what those long silky fibers on the end were for. Turns out each fiber is connected to a potential grain on the cob. The fiber absorbs the pollen, passes it down to the cob and then a grain grows on that spot on the cob. Fascinating stuff, I had no idea. Furthermore, the point of growing all that corn on the farm was to create silage. I know the term “silage” and I’ve seen silos on farms and stuff but I had no idea what was actually inside. They cut up the corn, put it in rubber bags, buried it and let it ferment, and then dug it up later and fed it to the goats. I learned so much from that episode alone.

Unfortunately it turns out that Dash Village was located in Fukushima Prefecture. It became heavily irradiated after the TEPCO incident in March 2011 and has been evacuated. Even worse, the knowledgeable old farmer who does all the teaching passed away in 2014 at the ripe old age of 84. That means no more Dash Village episodes anymore, awww :-< But I haven’t gotten that far yet. The episodes I’m watching date back to 2008 or so, so I still have a while left to get there.

The other variety parts of The Tetsuwan Dash can be hit or miss. The driving around in the solar car bits are usually quite meh. The reactions of the guys in the car are so fake, it’s pretty obvious that everything’s been set up in advance and they aren’t just randomly happening upon random fishermen who randomly take them out for fishing. How young do you think we are. But other segments can be fun, especially when the guys get involved in doing something physical like the exercise segments I mentioned at the top.

Overall it’s a very enjoyable program with likable hosts (even Kokubun!) and a high educational factor for both Japan/Japanese and general knowledge. And Kokubun isn’t as bad as the trolls make him out to be, even though he does seem to do less work and eat more than the others, haha. Give it a try if you’re looking for a (relatively) intelligent Japanese TV show to practice your Japanese listening skills, especially at the advanced level. If you’re a fan of Tokio, all the better!

Also dropped: Soul Eater, Rokka no Yuusha, Ping Pong

Continuing from the last post, some more things I dropped recently:

Soul Eater: Not my cup of tea. I think I’ve outgrown shounen action shows or something, because the violent action in the first few minutes didn’t thrill me in the least, and then the attempts at… humor? with Maka’s dad or whoever just made me roll my eyes. I turned it off before the halfway mark. I’m not going to bother reading the manga or any summaries either. Tsugi!

Rokka no Yuusha: Meh. Not interested. I made through the whole of episode 1, which is more than I can say for the other two shows in this post, but that’s about it. The fast pace of the first episode was good – demon revives instantly, party starts to come together, all good, but the dense rash main character and the coy (but really strong, honest!) princess didn’t interest me enough to make me want to continue. One episode is enough.

Ping Pong: The main character’s voice and attitude turned me off completely. I know he’s supposed to sound bored and lifeless, and I’m sure hundred of voice actors were auditioned and several takes were made in order to get him to sound like a dead fish, but he just rubs me the wrong way 100%. I’ve heard good things about Ping Pong so I might read the manga where I don’t have to deal with any annoying voices and the super slow pacing. The anime, though, is not for me.