It's so weird. So many channels have promoted skillshare but yours is the first ine that actually convinced me to give it a shot lol I trust that you wouldn't recommend something unless you stood behind the product! I'll give it a shot~
Learning Japanese hasn't resulted in such drastic changes for me as you've experienced, but it's been incredibly rewarding like you mentioned. Also, I've never done anything on a continuous, daily basis as long as I have Japanese. While it hasn't been a smooth process it's so nice to see how far things have come. I pretty much study Japanese through immersion (reading/listening everyday for several hours or more at least), in addition to making Anki flashcards from anime mostly (recently hit about 10k). I passed N2 last Dec, and planned to take N1 this Dec, but forgot to sign up lol. My speaking is pretty lacking since I feel like I need more immersion for it to come more naturally, but it feels at a point where it's workable for daily life stuff. However, I recently visited Hokkaido and forced myself to go to a somewhat small bar and had a blast talking to the people there. In my first year or so living in Japan I was pretty lazy about studying, but got my shit together for the past 2.5 years and it really shows what daily efforts add up too. Now I wish I could do the same for my diet lol
It becomes a lifestyle and learning Japanese was one of the hardest, most depressing and most satisfying things I've ever done : ) Just apply some of the same principles and discipline to your diet ;)
Watching from Florence Italy! Here it's dark by about 4:30 in the afternoon. I'm American and this is my second year living here, so i know the feeling of living in the language! My habits and views on life have changed so much, to the point that I feel a bit foreign going home. I live with a host family (a great decision for anyone looking to move to another country and learn the language btw) and being immersed in the language is an amazing experience. I already think and dream in Italian because of this immersion.
You have motivated me to learn Japanese now. I'm so ashamed that I've been married to my Japanese wife for over 10 years and I still don't speak Japanese. My daughter is more fluent than I am. Thank you for making this video and the others!
Hi guys, I’m fairly new to your channel, I found it while doing a search about cycling in general and I wanted you to know that I like your channel, I’m a cyclist myself, been cycling for years but not professionally, you’re thorough in your descriptions. You obey the traffic laws and are respectful, you appear to be a mild mannered guy, well spoken, love how you ride with your wife and really thanks for sharing your life, your experiences with us, looking forward to seeing more of Japan, weather you decide to stay in Japan or move to Vietnam I’m sure you both will be successful, you are smart, young and full of energy, best wishes in your travels...
I started learning Japanese four years ago, and for me was metaphorically like going on a train journey and the train goes past the stop you're meant to get off but you stay on the train until it reaches the end because you enjoy the train ride so much. I don't study it daily anymore but being able to read hiragana/katakana, opening new doors, making friends just makes me want to continue learning that language. Great video!
I think Japanese blood 🩸 is not red but blue The blood stained with the samurai’s sword looks beautiful, the cut neck looks pitiful, isn’t it cool 😎 to walk without looking back?
Hi Guys I’m watching from Adelaide, South Australia. It’s summer here now, sunset is around 8.30pm. I really enjoy your videos, and good on you both for living in Japan and making a go of it. Looking forward to watching your next video. You do a very good job of narrating your videos. 👍
An excellent video, Cruise. I'm very glad that learning Japanese changed your life in such a positive way. I enjoyed Thuong's comments on how it also affected her life as well. I thought her comment on how she liked the fact that Japanese people follow rules and how she liked that. I watched the video on the TV, but paused it so I could send the link to a very close friend of mine who also enjoyed it, and mentioned to me how you two are a wonderful couple. Much mahalo, Cruise. All the very best to you both.
Part 2 A couple of other confounding variables in correlating a perceived change in character with a change in language, or even a change in register (formal/polite to casual). 1 - Whether one is trapped in a toxic work-social environment has a big impact. As you pointed out, you and your wife communicate through Japanese as an international language, and as Japanese is not native to either of you, you are more patient with each other. I once had a relationship with a Chinese woman living in Japan, and we both used Japanese as our common language. In another video, you mentioned that Vietnamese (or at least your wife) are a bit different from Japanese in their appreciation of sarcasm ... so when love and love-spats are in Japanese, that has to have some profound effects on the relationship between your 'self' and the Japanese language. I would disagree a bit that Japanese is less confrontational because it depends on the social context. Now, even in peace-time, the language and institutional structures tend to be more hierarchical. From the bottom up, Japanese are more compliant to rules and authority. But from the top down ... just look at the gairaigo that has to be invented to describe the dynamics ... power-hara, aca-hara, seku-hara ... as well as the rise in 'gyakutai' domestic violence in Japan, largely because of the pandemic policies. Japan is still a bit behind the West in admitting that women can be every bit as vicious as men in domestic violence ... but there is a longer cultural tradition than Sada Abe. But back to love ... I remember a funny story about when my colleage took a gaggle of Japanese co-eds to England for a summer exchange program. The typically 'good' students hung out with the teacher, constantly depending on her to explain things for them. The 'bad' girls went to the pubs, exchanged phone numbers with a few of the local lads, and you can guess what the linguistic result was. When they all came back to Japan, those 'bad' girls had remarkably improved in English skills compared to the 'good' students. An even funnier story ... when I was running the bio labs at TUJ, I always spent the first 2 hour lab with everyone sitting in a big circle around the lab tables , including myself, each standing up to give detailed self introductions and answer any questions from each other, and I typically ended that first 2 hour session with an intro into the philosophy of science as applied to non-science majors ... just common sense problem solving, but slowed down and organized so as to catch the human fallacies I mentioned earlier. But during one summer session, a young Japanese guy stood up to introduce himself to the class in such fluent 'American' English, that when he finished, I had to ask him how long he had been in the states. 'One year.' was his answer. My jaw dropped. I asked him how he got so good. He looked across the room at me, grinned, and asked ... 'Have you ever done drugs'? Everyone in the room turned to see see how I would react. You could have heard a pin drop. I just gave a shuck and jive smile and suggested we chat after class. But they knew. From the smile on my face, they knew that as a young marine biology undergrad, I had been on the 'see weed' diet ... I saw it, smoked it, and liked it. I can still remember that smell of bong-water ... uh ... I mean 'salt water' in the air. ;-) After class he explained that he and a handful of Japanese buddies had gone to Carnegie Mellon to be engineers. But while his other Japanese buddies stayed in their dorm room eating noodles and watching Japanese anime, he partied with Americans. The THC, among other pscyo-actives, lowered what in linguistics is called the affective filter ... that emotional barrier which gives stability to a sense of self, but keeps that sense of self somewhat locked into one's native language. When he partied with Americans, he emotionally bonded with them and just picked up the language without worrying about 'ego' or 'loss of face'. His buddies, on the other hand, ended up dropping out and returning back to Japan. At the copy machine one day, I was telling this story to an older colleague, a former employee at IBM and the only graduate of the Ed.D. program whose thesis was a qualitative, rather than quantitative anlaysis (now deceased, he used to write a column for The Japan Times called 'The Applied Linguist'). He smiled and and said that in his readings, he came upon cases of indigenous tribes in the Amazon where adults continued to learn multiple languages well beyond the more commonly held theory of a narrow window of opportunity for fluency at only a young age ... and there were two reasons. They could only marry someone outside of their linguistic tribe, and the variety and abundance of psychoactives used for religious or coming-of-age rituals. Both for artistic creativity and linguistic fluency, it might be interesting to imagine what Japan would be like if marijuana were legal. On the other hand, 'peacefulness' as compliance to rules and authority would be out the window. 2 - You may have noticed yourself becoming less confrontational because of the typically slow maturation of the human social primate. With my undergrad in biology, I tend to see homo sapiens as sharing more in common with other social primates than with ideologies or languages ... particularly our shared jockeying for social currency in small communities of mutually recognizable individuals (within Dunbar's number) and the time it takes to grow to full maturity as a member of a community. I define maturity as achieving enough autonomous empathy-driven morality to do the right thing in empowering the marginalized and holding authority accountable. Many humans never reach that level of maturity by 'civilized' systemic design. In general, the larger the population, the more hierarchical we become, and the more we become 'semmon baka' (specialized idiots) depending on our niche to fulfill our survival needs. Thrown back to stone age savannah, our book-keeping skills might keep us alive for a couple of hours max. But even worse, modern consumer-driven societies depend on a suspension of the growth process, perpetual infantilization in thinking happiness will come with a newer car, a bigger house, etc. And that comes at the price of compliance to institutional authority ... which leads us back to those dark triads again ... the narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and psychopaths among us. They were probably evolutionarily advantageous in early hunter-gatherer societies as fearless in protecting the tribe from threats and looking for new resources. But in large communities, they tend to feed off of other humans rather than natural resources ... and that brings us back to the likes of the corporate political powers that be. World wide. Maybe. Just maybe. We are not social primates at all. We are nature's first, only, and last experiment with herding primates ... and according to Ernst Mayr, soon to reach our expected shelf life. The first three paragraphs will give most readers the gist. chomsky.info/20100930/ To summarize point 2, I suspect, and hope, that most of us mellow with age and maturity. If you find yourself following that pattern, take some consolation in that you might be as different from dark triad personality types as Renho is from Suga. Enjoyed the self-therapeutic chance to write. If you are up for a good read that applies especially to Japan, check out Michael Sandel's latest book 'The Tyranny of Merit; What Has Become of the Common Good?' He was interviewed for an article by The Yomiuri Shimbun last week. The book is being translated and will be available in Japanese in March 2021. His wife is Japanese, and he has come to Japan many times for guest lectures. Highly recommended for understanding broad social trends happening world wide now, but especially in Japan. Keep chilling bro, and cheers! - steve
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences! Some of those stories were pretty entertaining. My social circles here are mostly Japanese and with work and home also being in Japanese, the only time I spoke English for the last year was when I was filming these videos talking to myself 😅 I've never studied or analyzed these issues on a serious level, but I am fascinated by the influence language has on personality / culture, and am excited to keep learning more as I begin my journey learning Vietnamese.
@@TwoWheelCruise My pleasure Two Wheel. You are in a great position to analyze a lot of literature, psychology, and philosophy about the relationship between those things ... a never ending series of discoveries. That Michael Sandel book would be a great arrow in your quiver, and cheap on Quora ... and with the Japanese edition coming out in March, it would be something you and your wife could both read and discuss. I just wish pursuing that alone would have been enough to pay my rent, but my guess is that the ruling elite would rather we not pursue an understanding of human nature because that would undermine their power over us. Although I am both appreciative and critical of Japan, just my humble opinion, but the American Dream was always an Horatio-Agler myth to herd the working class. You are married and have a social identity, so my guess is that you are living the dream now. It may not have quite the stability or consumer goods normally associated with American prosperity theology, but I envy you. As that old row boat song says, 'life is but a dream'. Happy pedaling!
I recently moved to Nagoya and someone recommends this channel to me! Love it! Also, I just get back to the cycling life, I used to study in the Netherlands and never ride a bicycle after that until I get my bike here. I'm struggling in finding a nice bicycle path here since there are TONS of traffic lights hahaha. But you guys inspired me and going to change my life too!
@@TwoWheelCruise The one you always use in commuting to work is which river? Is it Yada? The one closest to mine is Tempaku and Ueda but from what I experienced a bit (in two weeks) the view along the river wasn't that nice hahaha
Have been watching your videos for a few months now and appreciate the great insights into Japan. Also enjoyed the observations of you and your wife about learning the language. With regard to daylight etc, here in Scotland sunrise is currently about 8.30am and sunset at 3.30pm; the shortest day will be in a few weeks from now (December 21st) and then we can start to look forward again towards longer days in the new year (but no doubt some cold winter days to come!).
Just watched yesterday.. Love & enjoy watching all your videos every night now.. Learn japanese in the same times since i can't go travel back to japan. Miss japan thou. Takecare & stay safe guys.. いけましょう! Love from Malaysia 🇲🇾. じゃあまたね。
very insightful. indeed learning another language opens up a whole new world. thanks cruise and thoung for taking me with you on your rides. i always enjoy it.
You will be a better person when you immersed and understand your culture in your place where you live and work. I had similar opportunity to live and study in US and UK for 4 years each. I am now better as a person cause I understand the psyche of American and British more closely.
Last sunset was Yesterday and next sunrise January 9. 2021... luckily in north! :) Here at southern Finland sunrise is at 9 and sunset 15.. though it’s all day so grey that summer nights can be more brighter that our winter days. Depressing times. That Your learning skills comercial speak came spot on! IKEA was there when You started.. notoriously hazard skills are needed to survive through IKEA, building up stuff what You buy from there and after that keeping Your marriage together.. finalizing all learned skills when wife wants to go again... Yep, been there once (learned my lesson!) and most of that time I was waiting at the parking lot with the kids... x/ You still have leaves on the trees; so distant memory.. now there’s something odd white stuff which people usually find out from their freezers... :/
Here in Sardinia in this period it gets dark around 5.15pm. I'm waiting for the summer because I can't stand the cold and above all because I can go out at dawn in short sleeves for a nice ride on my bike. Curiosity: the Morikoro cycling park is the park where Thuong learned to use the spd pedals, right? I remember the Diadora black/pink shoes, very fashion !!! :)
I was working in a bicycle company in Kyoto as a Taiwanese kaishain and met my Irish GF. Think I can totally understand how you feel, but glad we can talk both in Japanese and English to each other haha.
Intresting story 👍 It is really much easier to speak foreign language when you start thinking on it. My native language is russian and second one is latvian and I become fluent on it only then the "internal wacabluary"was swiched off, but it really comes after lot of practeese. Now Im strugling with english :) Sunsets in Riga at ~15.50
Hi Cruze! Here in Kuopio, Finland is going almoust darkest Time of Year: sunrise 08:00 and sunset 15:00.. But in Summer: Sun never go down. Greetings Kai from Finland
Awesome upload, wish I'd learned a language like Japanese when I was younger, too late in years for me now but watching through the experiences of others can still expand ones understanding of a culture, so thank you both for that. Nice to see E.T. is still keeping guard too 🙂 2:45. Keep well 👍🏻
Hiya Cruise, Beautiful videos, I've been mesmerized. I visited a distant relative of mine in Nagoya who, like you, moved from US to Japan in university. He runs an English school/tutoring service, which I'm told is distinct because it is in a western style house, very unusual for the region. Perhaps you know of it? Many of the bike paths you tape (like this one) remind me of bike paths from the Pokemon game boy games. It turns out they are real! I so wish I could go back. I visited Japan on a continuing ed program with my university to create modern industrial designs with traditional craftsmen in Yame, but I made sure to extend my trip to visit Kyoto and Tokyo, as well. Good luck with your plans!
Always enjoy your videos. I travel quite a bit to Toyohashi, just a 30 min Shinkansen ride to Nagoya. Always traveling around the country by train with the JR Pass. Didn't know of all the bike paths in Aichi Prefecture. Avid biker in hilly upstate NY. Was supposed to be in Japan this week but no travel :( One of these trips I'd like to hook up with you and take a ride!
My wife had a friend in England who provided board and lodging to adult language students. This woman asked a Japanese student, at the end of his stay, who he thought were most polite, English or Japanese people. He thought about this, then said, the English were most polite. My wife thought that this confirmed her belief that the English were very polite. But I thought that the young man had been really put on the spot: should he be truthful, or should he be polite?
I am learning the japanese language these past few months and i found it difficult because i am new to the language, but i still can't stop learning japanese it's very nice to learn other languages and it's also fun learning the language. And also while learning the language, it also wanna make me go study to the country. Thanks for making this inspiring video. 🇵🇭Fan from the Philippines🇵🇭
I'm 17 years old from Thailand I can speak 3 languages and I'm really interesting in Japanese language i just start learning it like 3 month i usually learn another language by watching Netflix and RUclips You know I learning English by watching your video right now haha
Hey Cruise, it's always nice to hear your experiences especially with learning Japanese even though I've heard many times in the past. Someday I'll have to take a formal Japanese language course. For now, I'll just have to make do with my wife constantly telling me やめて or ちょっと待って or 痛い 😂
One reason I started is I had a crackpot idea of learning Japanese after watching some people translate for fighting game players in interviews (Street Fighter etc) and never would have imagined I'd end up living here because of those breadcrumbs. I went in quite blind to the limits/problems of English teaching jobs but managed to start working in IT which was my career path back home! Now I have a fiancee and two dogs, I think I'm a lifer here. >:) And I just picked up a almost new Cannondale Carbon 5 Synapse for 90,000 yen as my first road bike. Much more fun doing routes on the road bike compared to my Giant Escape/Panasonic Hurryer. Oh yeah, one other reason is I really wanted to play Street Fighter in the arcades which is kinda silly, but now I do that every week with a bunch of people. Everything fell into place too nicely so I'm waiting for a disaster to happen haha.
Currently sunrise is 8:30 and sunset 16:30 in the Netherlands. November and December are usually overcast so even when the sun is up everything is gray.
Welp i been watching some of your old videos and i see how you changed over time 😌 now i wonder if i could do it too. 😆 Still i would be burning my eyebrows learning japanese just to read manga and anime
Sunset here in Phoenix, AZ USA about 5:30 as of December 25th, 2020, after December 21st we are on the upside of the winter solstice, daylight will be getting incrementally longer until the summer solstice. Is your wife learning English?
I started dabbling a little in Japanese a few years ago and got nowhere. But in the past year I've tried to focus on a proper study schedule - the more I read about Japanese language learning the more I realise how much time I wasted previously - it really is such a difficult (but rewarding) language, but I think it requires a very different approach than most languages, mostly due to those annoying three alphabets. It will be years before I get anywhere near conversational Japanese, but thanks for this video, its given me another reason to keep up my studies, one day I'll make it... I'm sure it'll be worthwhile in the end.
Hi Two Wheel, Due to RUclips’s limit on length, this comment will be divided into 2 parts. Part 1 Watching as of 10:18 pm, Dec. 2. Sunset must have been between 4:30 and 5:00 pm in Tokyo, but it was raining. Like you, after nearly 38 years here, even my street Japanese is more natural than my English. Just about all my friends are Japanese and I never hung with an expat community, so that has had an impact. Less 'confrontational' ... yeah, maybe. But I would probably fall a bit closer to the side that Japanese people share more in common with other ethnicities, regardless of language. For example, I love the soft sound of Portuguese as sung in bossa nova and struggle under a heavy load of cognitive dissonance when thinking of the current reign of Bolsonaro, harsh military regimes of the past, or the current dangers in the favelas or for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. There are changes, but I would probably use a bit different language to describe those changes. For example, 'personality' is normally a bit more closely tied to behavior traits having a strong genetic influence and are generally stable over time. In that respect, I don't think my personality has changed as a result of Japanese culture or language, but how I express those behavior patterns have changed. Regardless of the linguistic differences between my native English and Japanese, I've found that I have naturally gravitated towards the same personality types that were my friends back in the states (mostly closer to the altruistic end of the moral spectrum rather than the opportunistic end. The latest research indicates that as little as 30% of an adult's character (personality traits plus experience) can be attributed to good parenting. And though as a former educator, I cringe at the thought, but I suspect education plays an even smaller role. I suspect it is the same with Japanese people. The likes of Suga and Abe (and their authoritarian, faux-meritocratic counterparts in the corporate work place) are every bit as insufferably arrogant as Chinese and Korean propaganda paint them. Assholes seem to be born, not made, and are all too common in all countries. I often watch NHK for the Diet proceedings. A couple of weeks ago, Renho challenged Suga by demanding to know what he is doing about the plight of women during this pandemic. Remember Abe's 2013 promise to make Japan a country where 'women can shine'? Suga's flippant reply was that there are now more women filling (minimum wage) part-time jobs than before. Renho hit the roof, and nearly tore another anal orifice in Suga, and rightfully so. Renho and Suga ... two very different kinds of social primates, separated by the same language. Rather than 'confrontational', perhaps 'passive-agressive' - or worse, 'mukanshin' ... is how those Japanese with dark-triad personality traits (narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, or psychopaths) tend to express themselves. Unit 731, Aum Shinrikyo (I still remember their cheerleaders in elephant masks during Asahara Shoko's failed bid for election), the Kato-Akihabara incident, and the more recent Sagamihara mass murder ... all were a consequence of the dark side of human nature, regardless of language. Sorry for the following 'sage on stage' pose. After all these years, I can't seem to shake the college prof gig ... even when chatting with another college prof. :-) We both seem to agree with a fairly strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) and some shared aspects of post-modernism ... that language is a provisional social construct, and language both describes and determines the world we see. Part of my agreement with you comes from just living in Japan for so long. But another part comes from my background in philosophy of science (T.S. Kuhn - how paradigm shifts are correlated with redefining assumptions by redefining terms), and philosophy proper (that ol' Taoist (Lo Shi) - zen thingy. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were also pretty good at pointing out the limits of logic and language (check out 'Wittgenstein's Ladder' on wiki), and Gödel did the same for mathematics. At the last Tokyo University All Japan Speech contest I judged, I wore a little klein bottle on a string around my neck to remind students and teachers alike that a 'real' speech should address a real world problem ... otherwise it is just a narcissistic pose or mental masturbation. Mathematical models, current RUclips/Google algorithms, and language in general ... are all ultimately provisional social constructs, necessarily closer to metaphor than 'objective' definitions of' reality ... but being bilingual, you are already more aware of that than most who are mono-lingual. Even when I was running TUJ's biology labs, I made sure the students understood that Cartesian 'subjective-objective' duality was not a fundamental structure of reality, simply an ideal heuristics to try and weed out all-too-human fallacies from our observations and problem solving.
Can we have a video about which gear is good and what bike types are there. There will be videos about this probably out there but I would love to learn it from you guys😊 sunsets in mumbai india at about 6pm nowadays(winter)
I work couples time with japanese company long time ago and it's really a dream crusher for me especially as an outsourced. BUT from watching your videos I like the way you ride and rant at the same time telling all your experiences ups and down being living in japan and work also as part of the society. Because of that I learn to stop blaming and start forgiving and accept that japan is not meant for me. Also thanks to you I learn how cortisol destroy my mind and my body as the cortisol raise I started want to rant on my riding LoL
Japan is not for everyone. A lot of people learn that the hard way and I have faced some hard times myself here and am struggling with the decision of if we want to stay here permanently. Despite that, I'm glad to have came and experienced everything. Even if we move, we can always find Japanese people all around the world to use our language skills :)
Cruise .you know they have translator device Lii work 80% perfect .but they don’t have Vietnam translator ? If you can master VC language you are the Man .shimanami kaido was awesome 😎
Hi Cruise ... I've been living in Germany now for over 50 years. I was posted here while I was in the Army in 1969. I took it on myself to learn Germany. There was no schooling so I had to learn from socializing and speaking to the people. As you can guess after 50 yr, I now have no problem speaking,reading and writing German. As you said you now think Japanese and have sometimes a problem finding the English words, with me its the same. Whats worse is speaking English but forming the sentence grammatically in German, it doesn't work. It is also a sex oriented language, which means you have to phrase it differntly for men and women
beautiful story and nice influencer marketing, but with this way do not matter, one choice can change ones whole life.... btw are you still moving to Vietnam, if I may intrude.
Further a much earlier post you made about jobs in Japan have a income cap, I think the comparisons you were making to USA were against the old USA, one that was dying 10 years a go and it's dead now. The idea of getting tenure is gone, the idea of being full time teacher at university is also pretty much dead. All the money is flowing up to administration, and corruption between administrators and service companies, construction companies, research corporations, etc.
@@TwoWheelCruise I agree, those who have the right job are getting paid well, but those jobs are rarely handed out on apparent merit. ie: Don't overthrow your current situation in Japan until you've something in hand stateside. Even then... I was hired out of Hong Kong to go state side, but found the position far more complicated than it appeared on the surface, (barely) legal corruption is pretty much a given at any decent pay scale in Academia. That's pretty standard in Japan too, but as a foreigner you'll be sheltered from it. Anyway, good luck with what ever you do, but I'll certainly miss your videos on cycling in Japan. Brings back memories, though mine are from 40 years ago.
That’s what I had heard. I just wanted to hear your experience. Hoping to take my N3 next year since it was canceled in the US this year. Thanks for the videos. They make me long to get back to Japan and do some more biking.
I am curious how Japan changed from the culture of fighting in between themselves during the feudal era and being an aggressor in WW2 to this modern pacifist state in such a short time. Maybe it's a topic worth exploring cause if you want nuance then you have to ask the natives as opposed to relying on historic material and you are well equipped to tell us this story. Hope you consider it. Cheers!
The first 1000 people to use the link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership: skl.sh/twowheelcruise11201
Great quality video...cheers✌
Tell her I say Hi 😅
Big fan here !!
It's so weird. So many channels have promoted skillshare but yours is the first ine that actually convinced me to give it a shot lol I trust that you wouldn't recommend something unless you stood behind the product! I'll give it a shot~
Your wife is such a thoughtful and caring person, she seems like the type of people who would get along with anyone! Hope you’re treating her well!
She's the best!
You guys have changed my life. Lets go!
Let's go! :)
Learning Japanese hasn't resulted in such drastic changes for me as you've experienced, but it's been incredibly rewarding like you mentioned. Also, I've never done anything on a continuous, daily basis as long as I have Japanese. While it hasn't been a smooth process it's so nice to see how far things have come.
I pretty much study Japanese through immersion (reading/listening everyday for several hours or more at least), in addition to making Anki flashcards from anime mostly (recently hit about 10k). I passed N2 last Dec, and planned to take N1 this Dec, but forgot to sign up lol. My speaking is pretty lacking since I feel like I need more immersion for it to come more naturally, but it feels at a point where it's workable for daily life stuff. However, I recently visited Hokkaido and forced myself to go to a somewhat small bar and had a blast talking to the people there.
In my first year or so living in Japan I was pretty lazy about studying, but got my shit together for the past 2.5 years and it really shows what daily efforts add up too. Now I wish I could do the same for my diet lol
It becomes a lifestyle and learning Japanese was one of the hardest, most depressing and most satisfying things I've ever done : )
Just apply some of the same principles and discipline to your diet ;)
Every language gives us a knew soul. Great video!
Watching from Florence Italy! Here it's dark by about 4:30 in the afternoon. I'm American and this is my second year living here, so i know the feeling of living in the language! My habits and views on life have changed so much, to the point that I feel a bit foreign going home. I live with a host family (a great decision for anyone looking to move to another country and learn the language btw) and being immersed in the language is an amazing experience. I already think and dream in Italian because of this immersion.
Thanks for sharing!
You have motivated me to learn Japanese now. I'm so ashamed that I've been married to my Japanese wife for over 10 years and I still don't speak Japanese. My daughter is more fluent than I am. Thank you for making this video and the others!
Better late than never!
Hi guys, I’m fairly new to your channel, I found it while doing a search about cycling in general and I wanted you to know that I like your channel, I’m a cyclist myself, been cycling for years but not professionally, you’re thorough in your descriptions. You obey the traffic laws and are respectful, you appear to be a mild mannered guy, well spoken, love how you ride with your wife and really thanks for sharing your life, your experiences with us, looking forward to seeing more of Japan, weather you decide to stay in Japan or move to Vietnam I’m sure you both will be successful, you are smart, young and full of energy, best wishes in your travels...
Thanks!
A new pair of shoes are always something to be thankful for. Take care of your feet and they will take care of you!
Sunset is 8.29pm in Melbourne Australia in the beginning of summer.
Nice! 😅
I started learning Japanese four years ago, and for me was metaphorically like going on a train journey and the train goes past the stop you're meant to get off but you stay on the train until it reaches the end because you enjoy the train ride so much. I don't study it daily anymore but being able to read hiragana/katakana, opening new doors, making friends just makes me want to continue learning that language. Great video!
Great metaphor!
I think Japanese blood 🩸 is not red but blue
The blood stained with the samurai’s sword looks beautiful, the cut neck looks pitiful, isn’t it cool 😎 to walk without looking back?
Very thoughtful answers from Thuong here. Another great video 👍🏻
Thanks!
One of the most beautiful love/bike story's...
Thanks!
Hello from Seattle, nice VLOG, thanks.
Hi Guys
I’m watching from Adelaide, South Australia. It’s summer here now, sunset is around 8.30pm.
I really enjoy your videos, and good on you both for living in Japan and making a go of it.
Looking forward to watching your next video. You do a very good job of narrating your videos. 👍
Thanks!
An excellent video, Cruise. I'm very glad that learning Japanese changed your life in such a positive way. I enjoyed Thuong's comments on how it also affected her life as well. I thought her comment on how she liked the fact that Japanese people follow rules and how she liked that. I watched the video on the TV, but paused it so I could send the link to a very close friend of mine who also enjoyed it, and mentioned to me how you two are a wonderful couple. Much mahalo, Cruise. All the very best to you both.
Thanks Kelala!
your cycling vids are quite calming, keep up the good work🚴🚴
Thanks, will do!
Your videos are so stable
Awesome video and such a lovely area to ride. Thanks for sharing! 😊🙏
Part 2
A couple of other confounding variables in correlating a perceived change in character with a change in language, or even a change in register (formal/polite to casual).
1 - Whether one is trapped in a toxic work-social environment has a big impact. As you pointed out, you and your wife communicate through Japanese as an international language, and as Japanese is not native to either of you, you are more patient with each other. I once had a relationship with a Chinese woman living in Japan, and we both used Japanese as our common language.
In another video, you mentioned that Vietnamese (or at least your wife) are a bit different from Japanese in their appreciation of sarcasm ... so when love and love-spats are in Japanese, that has to have some profound effects on the relationship between your 'self' and the Japanese language.
I would disagree a bit that Japanese is less confrontational because it depends on the social context. Now, even in peace-time, the language and institutional structures tend to be more hierarchical. From the bottom up, Japanese are more compliant to rules and authority. But from the top down ... just look at the gairaigo that has to be invented to describe the dynamics ... power-hara, aca-hara, seku-hara ... as well as the rise in 'gyakutai' domestic violence in Japan, largely because of the pandemic policies. Japan is still a bit behind the West in admitting that women can be every bit as vicious as men in domestic violence ... but there is a longer cultural tradition than Sada Abe. But back to love ...
I remember a funny story about when my colleage took a gaggle of Japanese co-eds to England for a summer exchange program. The typically 'good' students hung out with the teacher, constantly depending on her to explain things for them. The 'bad' girls went to the pubs, exchanged phone numbers with a few of the local lads, and you can guess what the linguistic result was. When they all came back to Japan, those 'bad' girls had remarkably improved in English skills compared to the 'good' students.
An even funnier story ... when I was running the bio labs at TUJ, I always spent the first 2 hour lab with everyone sitting in a big circle around the lab tables , including myself, each standing up to give detailed self introductions and answer any questions from each other, and I typically ended that first 2 hour session with an intro into the philosophy of science as applied to non-science majors ... just common sense problem solving, but slowed down and organized so as to catch the human fallacies I mentioned earlier.
But during one summer session, a young Japanese guy stood up to introduce himself to the class in such fluent 'American' English, that when he finished, I had to ask him how long he had been in the states. 'One year.' was his answer. My jaw dropped. I asked him how he got so good. He looked across the room at me, grinned, and asked ... 'Have you ever done drugs'?
Everyone in the room turned to see see how I would react. You could have heard a pin drop. I just gave a shuck and jive smile and suggested we chat after class. But they knew. From the smile on my face, they knew that as a young marine biology undergrad, I had been on the 'see weed' diet ... I saw it, smoked it, and liked it. I can still remember that smell of bong-water ... uh ... I mean 'salt water' in the air. ;-)
After class he explained that he and a handful of Japanese buddies had gone to Carnegie Mellon to be engineers. But while his other Japanese buddies stayed in their dorm room eating noodles and watching Japanese anime, he partied with Americans. The THC, among other pscyo-actives, lowered what in linguistics is called the affective filter ... that emotional barrier which gives stability to a sense of self, but keeps that sense of self somewhat locked into one's native language. When he partied with Americans, he emotionally bonded with them and just picked up the language without worrying about 'ego' or 'loss of face'. His buddies, on the other hand, ended up dropping out and returning back to Japan.
At the copy machine one day, I was telling this story to an older colleague, a former employee at IBM and the only graduate of the Ed.D. program whose thesis was a qualitative, rather than quantitative anlaysis (now deceased, he used to write a column for The Japan Times called 'The Applied Linguist'). He smiled and and said that in his readings, he came upon cases of indigenous tribes in the Amazon where adults continued to learn multiple languages well beyond the more commonly held theory of a narrow window of opportunity for fluency at only a young age ... and there were two reasons. They could only marry someone outside of their linguistic tribe, and the variety and abundance of psychoactives used for religious or coming-of-age rituals. Both for artistic creativity and linguistic fluency, it might be interesting to imagine what Japan would be like if marijuana were legal. On the other hand, 'peacefulness' as compliance to rules and authority would be out the window.
2 - You may have noticed yourself becoming less confrontational because of the typically slow maturation of the human social primate. With my undergrad in biology, I tend to see homo sapiens as sharing more in common with other social primates than with ideologies or languages ... particularly our shared jockeying for social currency in small communities of mutually recognizable individuals (within Dunbar's number) and the time it takes to grow to full maturity as a member of a community. I define maturity as achieving enough autonomous empathy-driven morality to do the right thing in empowering the marginalized and holding authority accountable.
Many humans never reach that level of maturity by 'civilized' systemic design. In general, the larger the population, the more hierarchical we become, and the more we become 'semmon baka' (specialized idiots) depending on our niche to fulfill our survival needs. Thrown back to stone age savannah, our book-keeping skills might keep us alive for a couple of hours max.
But even worse, modern consumer-driven societies depend on a suspension of the growth process, perpetual infantilization in thinking happiness will come with a newer car, a bigger house, etc. And that comes at the price of compliance to institutional authority ... which leads us back to those dark triads again ... the narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, and psychopaths among us. They were probably evolutionarily advantageous in early hunter-gatherer societies as fearless in protecting the tribe from threats and looking for new resources. But in large communities, they tend to feed off of other humans rather than natural resources ... and that brings us back to the likes of the corporate political powers that be. World wide.
Maybe. Just maybe. We are not social primates at all. We are nature's first, only, and last experiment with herding primates ... and according to Ernst Mayr, soon to reach our expected shelf life. The first three paragraphs will give most readers the gist. chomsky.info/20100930/
To summarize point 2, I suspect, and hope, that most of us mellow with age and maturity. If you find yourself following that pattern, take some consolation in that you might be as different from dark triad personality types as Renho is from Suga.
Enjoyed the self-therapeutic chance to write.
If you are up for a good read that applies especially to Japan, check out Michael Sandel's latest book 'The Tyranny of Merit; What Has Become of the Common Good?' He was interviewed for an article by The Yomiuri Shimbun last week. The book is being translated and will be available in Japanese in March 2021. His wife is Japanese, and he has come to Japan many times for guest lectures. Highly recommended for understanding broad social trends happening world wide now, but especially in Japan.
Keep chilling bro, and cheers! - steve
有点罗嗦但说得针对
@@结实反流 LOL. Hi 结实反流.
Yeah. If you think this is wordy, you should see my comments on why foreigners leave Japan.
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences! Some of those stories were pretty entertaining.
My social circles here are mostly Japanese and with work and home also being in Japanese, the only time I spoke English for the last year was when I was filming these videos talking to myself 😅
I've never studied or analyzed these issues on a serious level, but I am fascinated by the influence language has on personality / culture, and am excited to keep learning more as I begin my journey learning Vietnamese.
@@TwoWheelCruise
My pleasure Two Wheel.
You are in a great position to analyze a lot of literature, psychology, and philosophy about the relationship between those things ... a never ending series of discoveries. That Michael Sandel book would be a great arrow in your quiver, and cheap on Quora ... and with the Japanese edition coming out in March, it would be something you and your wife could both read and discuss.
I just wish pursuing that alone would have been enough to pay my rent, but my guess is that the ruling elite would rather we not pursue an understanding of human nature because that would undermine their power over us. Although I am both appreciative and critical of Japan, just my humble opinion, but the American Dream was always an Horatio-Agler myth to herd the working class. You are married and have a social identity, so my guess is that you are living the dream now. It may not have quite the stability or consumer goods normally associated with American prosperity theology, but I envy you. As that old row boat song says, 'life is but a dream'.
Happy pedaling!
Incredible video. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Andy!
@@TwoWheelCruise you’re welcome!
I recently moved to Nagoya and someone recommends this channel to me! Love it! Also, I just get back to the cycling life, I used to study in the Netherlands and never ride a bicycle after that until I get my bike here. I'm struggling in finding a nice bicycle path here since there are TONS of traffic lights hahaha. But you guys inspired me and going to change my life too!
The river paths are the only escape in the city 😅
@@TwoWheelCruise The one you always use in commuting to work is which river? Is it Yada? The one closest to mine is Tempaku and Ueda but from what I experienced a bit (in two weeks) the view along the river wasn't that nice hahaha
It was Yada and Shounai rivers
Hi from Hiroshima! :) very nice cycling route
Thanks! :)
Have been watching your videos for a few months now and appreciate the great insights into Japan. Also enjoyed the observations of you and your wife about learning the language. With regard to daylight etc, here in Scotland sunrise is currently about 8.30am and sunset at 3.30pm; the shortest day will be in a few weeks from now (December 21st) and then we can start to look forward again towards longer days in the new year (but no doubt some cold winter days to come!).
Thanks! Looking forward to the longer days
It is one of the happiest things for me when the days start growing longer!
Just watched yesterday.. Love & enjoy watching all your videos every night now.. Learn japanese in the same times since i can't go travel back to japan. Miss japan thou. Takecare & stay safe guys.. いけましょう! Love from Malaysia 🇲🇾. じゃあまたね。
Thanks!
どういたしまして。
I'm interested in learning English, so this video is good for me.✌️
very insightful. indeed learning another language opens up a whole new world. thanks cruise and thoung for taking me with you on your rides. i always enjoy it.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Washington, DC. Sun sets at 4:40! Love you guys!!
Cheers!
love hearing from thuong chan !
You will be a better person when you immersed and understand your culture in your place where you live and work. I had similar opportunity to live and study in US and UK for 4 years each. I am now better as a person cause I understand the psyche of American and British more closely.
Last sunset was Yesterday and next sunrise January 9. 2021... luckily in north! :) Here at southern Finland sunrise is at 9 and sunset 15.. though it’s all day so grey that summer nights can be more brighter that our winter days. Depressing times.
That Your learning skills comercial speak came spot on! IKEA was there when You started.. notoriously hazard skills are needed to survive through IKEA, building up stuff what You buy from there and after that keeping Your marriage together.. finalizing all learned skills when wife wants to go again... Yep, been there once (learned my lesson!) and most of that time I was waiting at the parking lot with the kids... x/
You still have leaves on the trees; so distant memory.. now there’s something odd white stuff which people usually find out from their freezers... :/
Wow, that sunset is crazy early! Fall/winter is delayed here in Japan compared to Europe/US
Hello from Brazil. I lived one year in Ogaki shi - Gifu ken (2008) but i didnt study japanese. I miss this place. Japan is my grandparents homeland.
Thank you for d nice video... Arigato goseamasu.. Watching from your neighbor country Philippines 🇵🇭 🇵🇭 🇵🇭
Thanks!
More video to watch and inspire other Tru cycling 🙏🙏🙏👍👍👍
Here in Sardinia in this period it gets dark around 5.15pm. I'm waiting for the summer because I can't stand the cold and above all because I can go out at dawn in short sleeves for a nice ride on my bike.
Curiosity: the Morikoro cycling park is the park where Thuong learned to use the spd pedals, right? I remember the Diadora black/pink shoes, very fashion !!! :)
I actually like cycling in the colder weather :) But it's still over 10C here
And yes, it's the same park. Those were fun times :)
My wife is from Beijing and learning Chinese has be very challenging. Let’s go!!! Great video
Thanks! I really want to commit to learning that too one day :)
Brilliant video folks my cousin taught english in kyoto and has such a similar view on the japanese and their language
Thanks!
I was working in a bicycle company in Kyoto as a Taiwanese kaishain and met my Irish GF. Think I can totally understand how you feel, but glad we can talk both in Japanese and English to each other haha.
Awesome!
gee i feel like riding and talking with you, all ears on you, all eyes on the road ahead
Intresting story 👍 It is really much easier to speak foreign language when you start thinking on it. My native language is russian and second one is latvian and I become fluent on it only then the "internal wacabluary"was swiched off, but it really comes after lot of practeese. Now Im strugling with english :) Sunsets in Riga at ~15.50
Hi Cruze!
Here in Kuopio, Finland is going almoust darkest Time of Year: sunrise 08:00 and sunset 15:00..
But in Summer: Sun never go down.
Greetings Kai from Finland
Wow, I can't complain anymore haha
Awesome upload, wish I'd learned a language like Japanese when I was younger, too late in years for me now but watching through the experiences of others can still expand ones understanding of a culture, so thank you both for that. Nice to see E.T. is still keeping guard too 🙂 2:45. Keep well 👍🏻
Never too late to learn ;)
Always fun to ride by ET.
Watching from Bloomfield Mi, sunsets now between 5 and 5:30. Less time to ride!
Hiya Cruise,
Beautiful videos, I've been mesmerized. I visited a distant relative of mine in Nagoya who, like you, moved from US to Japan in university. He runs an English school/tutoring service, which I'm told is distinct because it is in a western style house, very unusual for the region. Perhaps you know of it?
Many of the bike paths you tape (like this one) remind me of bike paths from the Pokemon game boy games. It turns out they are real! I so wish I could go back. I visited Japan on a continuing ed program with my university to create modern industrial designs with traditional craftsmen in Yame, but I made sure to extend my trip to visit Kyoto and Tokyo, as well.
Good luck with your plans!
Thanks! There's lots of schools around, so I'm not too familiar with them. But the cycling here is pretty great 🙂
That was interesting.
Watching from Osaka, sunset is about 5 min later than Nagoya :)
🤣
Always enjoy your videos. I travel quite a bit to Toyohashi, just a 30 min Shinkansen ride to Nagoya. Always traveling around the country by train with the JR Pass. Didn't know of all the bike paths in Aichi Prefecture. Avid biker in hilly upstate NY. Was supposed to be in Japan this week but no travel :( One of these trips I'd like to hook up with you and take a ride!
Thanks! That's very close, but I've only passed through
Each time i watch your vids makes me want to cycle in Japan again!
Hopefully it opens up again soon :)
My wife had a friend in England who provided board and lodging to adult language students. This woman asked a Japanese student, at the end of his stay, who he thought were most polite, English or Japanese people. He thought about this, then said, the English were most polite. My wife thought that this confirmed her belief that the English were very polite. But I thought that the young man had been really put on the spot: should he be truthful, or should he be polite?
That's a tough one 😅
i used to live in Nagoya... Natsukashiiiii))))))
Nice story
I am learning the japanese language these past few months and i found it difficult because i am new to the language, but i still can't stop learning japanese it's very nice to learn other languages and it's also fun learning the language. And also while learning the language, it also wanna make me go study to the country. Thanks for making this inspiring video.
🇵🇭Fan from the Philippines🇵🇭
Thanks! Keep it up!
I'm 17 years old from Thailand
I can speak 3 languages and I'm really interesting in Japanese language i just start learning it like 3 month i usually learn another language by watching Netflix and RUclips
You know I learning English by watching your video right now haha
Awesome!
Hey Cruise, it's always nice to hear your experiences especially with learning Japanese even though I've heard many times in the past. Someday I'll have to take a formal Japanese language course. For now, I'll just have to make do with my wife constantly telling me やめて or ちょっと待って or 痛い 😂
It's amazing how far you can go with so few words here😅
One reason I started is I had a crackpot idea of learning Japanese after watching some people translate for fighting game players in interviews (Street Fighter etc) and never would have imagined I'd end up living here because of those breadcrumbs. I went in quite blind to the limits/problems of English teaching jobs but managed to start working in IT which was my career path back home! Now I have a fiancee and two dogs, I think I'm a lifer here. >:) And I just picked up a almost new Cannondale Carbon 5 Synapse for 90,000 yen as my first road bike. Much more fun doing routes on the road bike compared to my Giant Escape/Panasonic Hurryer.
Oh yeah, one other reason is I really wanted to play Street Fighter in the arcades which is kinda silly, but now I do that every week with a bunch of people. Everything fell into place too nicely so I'm waiting for a disaster to happen haha.
You need to make a " Let's Go " tee shirt with an Anime Thuang San on it !!!
Working on it!
WOW such a beautiful, cool environment ... loved this among all or your videos
Just watched yesterday.. Love & enjoy watching all your videos.. In the same time i can learn japanese too.. Love from Malaysia 🇲🇾. じゃあまたね。
Thanks!
Kaizen, constant improvement..
17:00 im already looking forward to mixing up german, english and japanese someday (im learning japanese right now (ichinensei))XD
Currently sunrise is 8:30 and sunset 16:30 in the Netherlands. November and December are usually overcast so even when the sun is up everything is gray.
Pretty early there too.. The nice thing about Japan winters are the sky is often very clear
8:31pm in Launceston Tasmania, which is the southern island state of Australia.
I would like a video from you both in which Thuong does the voiceover in English. Can hear she is progressing well.
One day she will be able to speak in English in the videos :)
Welp i been watching some of your old videos and i see how you changed over time 😌 now i wonder if i could do it too.
😆 Still i would be burning my eyebrows learning japanese just to read manga and anime
Well here in Denmark , right now sunrise is 08:25 ands sunset at 15:50 , the shortest day here is December 21st.
Almost there!
Sunset here in Phoenix, AZ USA about 5:30 as of December 25th, 2020, after December 21st we are on the upside of the winter solstice, daylight will be getting incrementally longer until the summer solstice. Is your wife learning English?
Thanks and yes.
I started dabbling a little in Japanese a few years ago and got nowhere. But in the past year I've tried to focus on a proper study schedule - the more I read about Japanese language learning the more I realise how much time I wasted previously - it really is such a difficult (but rewarding) language, but I think it requires a very different approach than most languages, mostly due to those annoying three alphabets. It will be years before I get anywhere near conversational Japanese, but thanks for this video, its given me another reason to keep up my studies, one day I'll make it... I'm sure it'll be worthwhile in the end.
Consistency is key. Any brakes to a study routine will kill all your progress. I gotta get back in a good study routine for Vietnamese..
when he said he learnt japanese on his last year of edu. wohoo its mee 😂😂💯💯
Nice video bro keep it up.
Cheers!
You got a new light. Anything happen to the old one?
I have lots of lights 😅
Hi Two Wheel,
Due to RUclips’s limit on length, this comment will be divided into 2 parts.
Part 1
Watching as of 10:18 pm, Dec. 2. Sunset must have been between 4:30 and 5:00 pm in Tokyo, but it was raining.
Like you, after nearly 38 years here, even my street Japanese is more natural than my English. Just about all my friends are Japanese and I never hung with an expat community, so that has had an impact.
Less 'confrontational' ... yeah, maybe.
But I would probably fall a bit closer to the side that Japanese people share more in common with other ethnicities, regardless of language.
For example, I love the soft sound of Portuguese as sung in bossa nova and struggle under a heavy load of cognitive dissonance when thinking of the current reign of Bolsonaro, harsh military regimes of the past, or the current dangers in the favelas or for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
There are changes, but I would probably use a bit different language to describe those changes. For example, 'personality' is normally a bit more closely tied to behavior traits having a strong genetic influence and are generally stable over time. In that respect, I don't think my personality has changed as a result of Japanese culture or language, but how I express those behavior patterns have changed.
Regardless of the linguistic differences between my native English and Japanese, I've found that I have naturally gravitated towards the same personality types that were my friends back in the states (mostly closer to the altruistic end of the moral spectrum rather than the opportunistic end.
The latest research indicates that as little as 30% of an adult's character (personality traits plus experience) can be attributed to good parenting. And though as a former educator, I cringe at the thought, but I suspect education plays an even smaller role.
I suspect it is the same with Japanese people. The likes of Suga and Abe (and their authoritarian, faux-meritocratic counterparts in the corporate work place) are every bit as insufferably arrogant as Chinese and Korean propaganda paint them. Assholes seem to be born, not made, and are all too common in all countries.
I often watch NHK for the Diet proceedings. A couple of weeks ago, Renho challenged Suga by demanding to know what he is doing about the plight of women during this pandemic. Remember Abe's 2013 promise to make Japan a country where 'women can shine'? Suga's flippant reply was that there are now more women filling (minimum wage) part-time jobs than before. Renho hit the roof, and nearly tore another anal orifice in Suga, and rightfully so. Renho and Suga ... two very different kinds of social primates, separated by the same language.
Rather than 'confrontational', perhaps 'passive-agressive' - or worse, 'mukanshin' ... is how those Japanese with dark-triad personality traits (narcissists, machiavellian opportunists, or psychopaths) tend to express themselves. Unit 731, Aum Shinrikyo (I still remember their cheerleaders in elephant masks during Asahara Shoko's failed bid for election), the Kato-Akihabara incident, and the more recent Sagamihara mass murder ... all were a consequence of the dark side of human nature, regardless of language.
Sorry for the following 'sage on stage' pose. After all these years, I can't seem to shake the college prof gig ... even when chatting with another college prof. :-)
We both seem to agree with a fairly strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) and some shared aspects of post-modernism ... that language is a provisional social construct, and language both describes and determines the world we see.
Part of my agreement with you comes from just living in Japan for so long. But another part comes from my background in philosophy of science (T.S. Kuhn - how paradigm shifts are correlated with redefining assumptions by redefining terms), and philosophy proper (that ol' Taoist (Lo Shi) - zen thingy. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were also pretty good at pointing out the limits of logic and language (check out 'Wittgenstein's Ladder' on wiki), and Gödel did the same for mathematics. At the last Tokyo University All Japan Speech contest I judged, I wore a little klein bottle on a string around my neck to remind students and teachers alike that a 'real' speech should address a real world problem ... otherwise it is just a narcissistic pose or mental masturbation.
Mathematical models, current RUclips/Google algorithms, and language in general ... are all ultimately provisional social constructs, necessarily closer to metaphor than 'objective' definitions of' reality ... but being bilingual, you are already more aware of that than most who are mono-lingual. Even when I was running TUJ's biology labs, I made sure the students understood that Cartesian 'subjective-objective' duality was not a fundamental structure of reality, simply an ideal heuristics to try and weed out all-too-human fallacies from our observations and problem solving.
is that a new gold jersey Cruise?
😎
Watching from Jakarta, sunset at 6:00 pm here.
Watching from Japan, sunset at 4:28 pm here.
Can we have a video about which gear is good and what bike types are there. There will be videos about this probably out there but I would love to learn it from you guys😊
sunsets in mumbai india at about 6pm nowadays(winter)
ruclips.net/video/NTzkTwy1hgk/видео.html
@@TwoWheelCruise Thanks! watched it just now
I work couples time with japanese company long time ago and it's really a dream crusher for me especially as an outsourced.
BUT from watching your videos I like the way you ride and rant at the same time telling all your experiences ups and down being living in japan and work also as part of the society. Because of that I learn to stop blaming and start forgiving and accept that japan is not meant for me.
Also thanks to you I learn how cortisol destroy my mind and my body as the cortisol raise I started want to rant on my riding LoL
Japan is not for everyone. A lot of people learn that the hard way and I have faced some hard times myself here and am struggling with the decision of if we want to stay here permanently. Despite that, I'm glad to have came and experienced everything. Even if we move, we can always find Japanese people all around the world to use our language skills :)
Cruise .you know they have translator device Lii work 80% perfect .but they don’t have Vietnam translator ? If you can master VC language you are the Man .shimanami kaido was awesome 😎
Are those Nike ZoomX Vaporfly Next%? Those are some nice runners hahaha!
nike gravity zoom
I wished i can give you more than one like.
Hi Cruise ... I've been living in Germany now for over 50 years. I was posted here while I was in the Army in 1969. I took it on myself to learn Germany. There was no schooling so I had to learn from socializing and speaking to the people. As you can guess after 50 yr, I now have no problem speaking,reading and writing German. As you said you now think Japanese and have sometimes a problem finding the English words, with me its the same. Whats worse is speaking English but forming the sentence grammatically in German, it doesn't work. It is also a sex oriented language, which means you have to phrase it differntly for men and women
I guess being bilingual in different languages each presents its own unique difficulties :)
I like it
Nice thumbnail
Thanks! 😎
beautiful story and nice influencer marketing, but with this way do not matter, one choice can change ones whole life.... btw are you still moving to Vietnam, if I may intrude.
It's still a possibility, but I'm still not able to enter.
From Philippines
Hello to my favourite couple in Japan
Hello! :)
ugh I hope im here long enough to where I feel like i will have to learn it, maybe i look at it different because im in the service :/
How do you record your audio? do you have a lapelle mic cliped too the helmet dangling on your phone?
Separate audio recorder, link in bio
@@TwoWheelCruise arigatoo
16:15 I don't need to read subtitles on anime anymore.
Forgot to mention that one. Also watch at 1.5 speed now 😅
Can relate to end up thinking in Japanese 🤣(too much anime 🤷♂️😂)
Yea when I took Japaneses In collage(1994ish), I studied a broad..... totally disrupted my studies....
Further a much earlier post you made about jobs in Japan have a income cap, I think the comparisons you were making to USA were against the old USA, one that was dying 10 years a go and it's dead now. The idea of getting tenure is gone, the idea of being full time teacher at university is also pretty much dead. All the money is flowing up to administration, and corruption between administrators and service companies, construction companies, research corporations, etc.
Definitely the wealth gap is getting really bad in the US, but starting salaries are double what they are in Japan
@@TwoWheelCruise I agree, those who have the right job are getting paid well, but those jobs are rarely handed out on apparent merit. ie: Don't overthrow your current situation in Japan until you've something in hand stateside. Even then... I was hired out of Hong Kong to go state side, but found the position far more complicated than it appeared on the surface, (barely) legal corruption is pretty much a given at any decent pay scale in Academia. That's pretty standard in Japan too, but as a foreigner you'll be sheltered from it. Anyway, good luck with what ever you do, but I'll certainly miss your videos on cycling in Japan. Brings back memories, though mine are from 40 years ago.
Did you take the JLPT? What JLPT level did you need to get your jobs?
I took it once when I first moved here to pass the N2. I didn't need it for my job, but the entire interview and job was in Japanese.
Some places you may need it to get in the door though
That’s what I had heard. I just wanted to hear your experience. Hoping to take my N3 next year since it was canceled in the US this year. Thanks for the videos. They make me long to get back to Japan and do some more biking.
Interesting. You said you became more forgiving. International couple are probably more forgiving to each other, I feel.
Definitely
I want to learn Japanese language so that when I watch anime I don't need to rely to english subtitles😅😅😅
Is this JLPT Sensei by any chance?!
😉
@@TwoWheelCruise your JLPT site is superior 👍🏻 thanks for all your work
Thanks! 😁
I am curious how Japan changed from the culture of fighting in between themselves during the feudal era and being an aggressor in WW2 to this modern pacifist state in such a short time.
Maybe it's a topic worth exploring cause if you want nuance then you have to ask the natives as opposed to relying on historic material and you are well equipped to tell us this story. Hope you consider it. Cheers!
Most younger Japanese people I've talked to don't know much about this and it's really skipped over in the education system :/
@@TwoWheelCruise Interesting, basically they chose to forget the past it seems?
了不起
Learning all the different alphabets stop me flat...
Dude, you look cut! Are you competing again?
I'm actually really out of shape now 😅 But hoping to make some new years goals
@@TwoWheelCruise Wow. I totally have a New Year resolution now!
Learning Japanese by watching anime
😁😂
Learning Japanese made you look gay in the thumbnail??
Watching from Dartmouth Nova Scotia...sun setting around 4:30-5. ✌