Leigh Cooper

Meet Verbal and Taku, the greatest duo since bread and butter. Who are they? Japanese musicians. They work in a variety of styles with a number of other artists from BoA to Yoshika but mostly they just make rad beats and rap over them. So yeah, M-Flo are hip hop artists from Japan and they’re going to teach you how to speak Japanese. Maybe with a little gangster swagger, but hey, what did you expect from international playboys? Sure listening to Japanese music must be helpful, but why M-Flo in particular? Well, my dear friend and fellow Japanese language enthusiast, M-Flo is the perfect duo to help you hone your linguistic mastery. I’ve not just one, not two, but eight impressive reasons why you should put aside your differences and learn to embrace M-Flo for the sake of your fluency.

For starters, all Japanese music, not just M-Flo are ideal choices to improve your listening comprehension because they’re written by native Japanese speakers for native Japanese speakers. While listening to Japanese audio tapes or informative podcasts will help explain some things, real Japanese speakers don’t use the same vocabulary found in Genki Chapter 8, they use much more and they say things much faster. Listening to native-made materials targeted to a native audience will get you to functional fluency much faster than Tanaka-san and Junko-san from your JLPT textbook conversation ever will. So start listening to the organic Japanese being created out there now.

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Another reason why M-Flo are lightyears more interesting to listen to than Tanaka-san and Junko-san, aside from vocabulary and Japanese slang a-plenty: it’s musical. It’s catchy. It’s got beats and hooks and choruses (that, thank goodness, repeat) with sound effects and basslines and even bridges that make you want to sing along in karaoke or at least dance. It’s not rocket science, it’s pop music. You don’t have to judge it against Wordsworth and Mozart, you just have to nod your head because the important bit is that it’s catchy, and catchy = memorable. Remember all those folk songs you learned as a wee one? Well, Verbal is your new Raffi.

So they’re catchy songs, yes (did I mention Loop in My Heart yet?) but even better, they’re short. M-Flo tracks may be filled with dense blocks of surprisingly clever rap, but they’re short and sweet. By the time your not-yet-fluent brain gets tired of hacking away at complex sentence fragments with your mental machete of diligence, the song will be over. Just as you’re about to pass out from the 8-G speed at which you have to read hiragana, the musical interlude will be here. It’s not easy material — a plus really, since it means you can spend hours working on it and still glean more every time — so the shorter chunk you can take it in, the better. I don’t know about you, but I find three minutes and thirty seconds of full on concentration to be a lot, enough to make me feel accomplished when I finish a song but easy enough to repeat the process.

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I never seem to mind repeating the process either because it’s actually interesting. Like most, M-Flo songs are loosely narrative anyway, so I’m always pleasantly surprised when I realise that peppy track is actually about cheating or that sad-sounding ballad is about the first kiss. Plus the tune about a summer fling gives you all sorts of specific vocabulary for such an occasion, and how else would you ever know the word for “golddigger” if M-Flo wasn’t there to teach you the ropes? It’s like reading a book but simpler and with a better backbeat.

The narrative story of an M-Flo song becomes especially apparent in the music video, which you can easily look up on youtube. You may have never heard of them before this very moment, but M-Flo are Japanese hip hop royalty and completely prevalent all over the interwebs, thus they, their videos, and their music is readily accessible to anyone anywhere the web can be accessed. You don’t have to go to great lengths to hear Love Bug, you just have to google search the song title.

You want M-Flo to be popular. You want people to use their songs as ringtones and you want their videos to be copyright protected and all that jazz because it means you can find their lyrics really easily online. That’s the best part of learning Japanese through M-Flo: the actual words being spoken are already written out for your to follow along with so you can learn the kanji as you go (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) properly. You don’t have to rewind and pay the clip nineteen thousand times to hear if he’s saying きもち or きもじ because it’s right there for you. You can learn the word and its proper pronunciation easily and quickly. TV shows rarely publish transcripts and movie subtitles are almost always off, but an M-Flo song has its own accurate transcript ready for your consumption. Just search the song title and 歌詞(かし)

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Now it may be pretty daunting to skim through those lyrics, especially if you can’t read it quickly or don’t recognise all the kanji. This is why M-Flo and Wise are much better to study to than, say, Rip Slyme or Silk Road (other awesome Japanese hip hop artists). Verbal and Taku (and Wise for that matter) are both fluent English speakers, so their songs are punctuated by English catch phrases that you can actually understand. You can use these as placekeepers to see if you’re on the right line or to adjust your reading speed to match their speaking speed.

That’s the whole beauty of using M-Flo to learn Japanese, you can self correct without having a teacher over your shoulder or a native speaker feed you hints. Taku sets the pace and Verbal feeds you the hints already. You can hear a word and because it’s a catchy, short story punctuated by English you can figure out the meaning from context pretty easily. If you’re already in Japan, you don’t have to feel silly listening to practice conversations or survival lessons from JapanesePod101 (a great resource, by the way), to everyone else you’re just rocking out to some M-Flo. People may even compliment you on your music taste, and if you aren’t familiar with the Japanese music scene, M-Flo tends to feature some of the biggest artists so you’ll know who to name drop when asked for your favourites. Seriously, don’t be afraid to let Mssrs Verbal and Taku from M-Flo school you in the fine art of street words, dangerously catchy loops, and native-level (if informal) Japanese.

With so much information floating around, readily available, it can become overwhelming fairly easily and, in the case of many naysayers, so easy to simply denounce. However, the accessibility of how-to information and new communicative mediums like social networks and forum communities can also give rise to some incredibly inspiring material. People are doing amazing work, and that work is making its way around the interwebs to incite change and invite other great derivative works. Because of these two facts, it makes it rather difficult to those of us well attuned to both society and technology, for we are constantly struggling with the balance between unnecessary information and life changing information.

Recently I set about purging my RSS feeds and social networks, and while I fully expected to unsubscribe from half of them, I ended up only choosing to filter out a few. My criteria has become quite clear, and yet the problem I faced was reading a large bookshop filled with authors who have great things to say. I just didn’t have the time to read all of it I wanted to, and yet I still wanted to be able to skip a few days of feed checking and not be overwhelmed by the backlog. After all, I find the writing of certain others a huge source of inspiration and advice, and the idea of missing out on the things these people have to say is a truly stressful prospect.

Yet, despite such an overwhelming amount of high-quality content, alas I had to trim down my 100+ blogroll. Generally I read up on many different subjects as varied as graphic design and typography to cooking and nutrition to lifestyle design and personal finance to asian culture and nomadic travellers. It wasn’t even the length of blog posts that forced me to unsubscribe. When Bread and Honey ends up ranting for several paragraphs about nothing related to food at all I still find myself reading every word, while sometimes Brooklyn Nomad’s 500 word posts are just too long for me to bother with. It’s a wide world out there: if Steve Pavlina has mastered the longform, Seth Godin is a ninja of the short, which just goes to show there’s no real formula. If you’re good enough, I’ll read it.

In spite of well-written posts and a decent topics, there are three major criteria that are nagging enough to make me unsubscribe to otherwise totally worthy blogs, and I thought perhaps not every blogger out there has spent a lot of time matching their format to their audience. This isn’t wholesale advice, it’s my personal opinion and a small insight into what I think can get in the way of your stellar content, despite your best intentions. You may not care that you’re one reader down, but then again you may take my complaints into account as I outline the top three reasons why I unsubscribed to your blog.

1. Truncated RSS Feeds
Now, I know there’s been a huge debate raging in the blog world about full vs. truncated RSS feeds, but in my opinion it’s a no brainer. The risk you run of getting your feed scraped is infinitely less important the risk you run of not connecting with your community. Not only is a shortened RSS entry more likely to get skipped over by me in comparison to the full-length posts flanking it, but I am incredibly unlikely to click your link. There’s no good excerpt length either. A few sentences is not enough to get me interested and tends to have the opposite effect, while a few passages is just enough to make me frustrated I have to open up my browser, wait for the page to load, and then reread the bits I’ve already read. I rarely bother. So if you have a truncated RSS feed, I urge you to try a full post feed and see if you convert better. See if your community grows stronger. It drives me nuts because I do want to read your entree posts, but I’ll settle for the appetiser version instead of consuming all your content. Stop with the truncation and let me use my feed reader as it was intended.

2. Updating Too Often
I hate this with a bitter passion. If you update more than twice a day, I will not read your blog. I’d rather you write amazing, in-depth posts once a week than tiny morsels every hour you think about it. That’s what twitter is for, not your blog. I suppose this reveals my preferences for actual people rather than aggregate sites because I value a single person’s opinion, even one I disagree with, infinitely more than several. Do I read the Gadgeteer? No. Do I read everything Julie from the Gadgeteer reviews? Yes. Because she only writes when it’s worth writing about and she’s has one of the only sensible female voices in the industry. I Love Typography only updates one a month but each post is incredibly information-rich, perfectly formatted, and thoughtful. Die-hard Man U fan though I may be, I don’t read a single news feed because it would be barmy to hear the same quote about Nani seventeen times a day. It’s easy for me to stay subscribed to you if you don’t update as often as I’d like, but it’s much harder for me to continue to put up with your excess posting if I only like part of what you offer. Don’t update 11.7 times a week. It means you aren’t spending enough time on your writing.

3. Unoriginal Content
I’m not just talking about stealing someone else’s material and not attributing it, though that is a scary-big deterrent for me. I’m talking about what happens when a blog stops writing anything original and instead just guest posts, hosts blog carnivals (link roundups), interviews people, and reposts. This is why I do not understand how most people use tumblr. If I know you personally, I totally care what you read and what you listen to and what you like. That’s what del.icio.us, goodreads, google buzz, retweeting, and youtube subscriptions are for. Not for your blog. If you’re going to share a video, please explain why you shared it. If you’re going to interview someone, you better say something no one else has said about them. If you’re going to host a carnival, it better be framed by generous commentary and you better have five times more original content before you even think of hitting the publish button. This is a blog for goodness sake. Make it personal already. Travel blogs make this mistake a lot. I can find good flight deals and reservations in wherever you’re travelling on my own, but I can’t see it as you do or meet the people you did. I can look up volcano whatever, but I can’t have a spiritual awakening during a night hike. You have to make me care beyond the norm. The best travel writers write about what they did and why it was worth reading instead of where they are and how they got there. Liz Learns Japanese utilises ideas from all over the place, but although the story is the same everyday (”I’m practicing Japanese!”) she manages to make it personal, tells you a victory or a struggle from her daily life or a neat trick she’s tried, noting common phenomena through a unique voice. And guess what, I freaking love it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to make it yourself.

RIYL: Deadmau5, Danger, Andy Caldwell, Axwell, Phoenix

House music, true house music, seems to be one of those love it or hate it kind of genres adored by some clubgoers and ignored by the general populous. Yet you don’t always have to be at a serious electro show or Electric Daisy Carnival to get into the mood. There are a few artists out there spinning old-school house with finesse generally unrivaled in America at least.

While Europe boasts great legends like Tiesto and Sasha, there are a few contenders lurking stateside, and San Francisco’s own Kaskade is one of them. Just as brilliant live as he is on an album, his latest release The Grand is one of the smoothest house albums I’ve heard in a long time. It has a great progression of rhythms, changes every few measures to keep you from ever thinking it’s trance, and has its share of interesting instrumental samples.

Unfortunately The Grand isn’t the sort of album a 30 second sample will do justice. Kaskade’s mastery is not found in his hooks but rather in the build up he can create and sustain for minutes at a time in a totally un-frustrating way. It’s an album that requires a few tracks to get totally immersed in, despite opening with an unbelievably catchy lead. His style is still vocal-heavy and orchestral, but Kaskade seems to have picked up a few tricks from his work with Deadmau5 and drops in quite a bit of choppy bleeps that are still new territory for him. The Grand is chock full of collaborations and featured vocalists, but don’t worry, he keeps it well within the boundaries of the kind of panache and artistry you’d expect from the well-respected Kaskade sound. It doesn’t matter whether you’re heavily immersed in the scene or if this is your introduction to house, The Grand deserves your consideration.

Recommended Tracks:

“Angel On My Shoulder,” “Another Place,” “Saturday Night,” and “In My Arms”

I talked about my troubles with Japanese class a while back, when I was debating whether to continue with formal instruction because it was drop-dead boring. I never made it to my fourth class, instead I combed iTunes for Japanese language music and updated my Netflix queue to only include Japanese movies. I am so glad I stopped going.

Now that’s not to say that we don’t all need a little help now and again, or to suggest that classroom learning can’t be fun, but for me, rote textbook memorisation wasn’t enough. I’m still a beginner in Japanese, but in the few months since I beefed up my own studies, I’ve learned absolutely loads about how to make leaps and bounds in a language most of my mates still find baffling. The biggest question is the how. How do you start from scratch, how do you make significant progress when you’re facing linguistic Mount Everest? What do you need to do to get a foothold stable enough to build some momentum? I thought I might share some of my language learning best practices so that you too might find a way to conquer that intimidating foreign tongue.

1. Stop with the pretense
If you’re waiting until you learn X to do Y, or if you think you can’t do THIS because of THAT, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot. It’s stupidly easy to put off things or to create qualifiers or to feed your energy to the wrong thing. I struggled with this quite a bit when I started my vlog but I can’t tell you how glad I am I made it over the pretenses I had put up to keep me from doing what I wanted to do. Having trouble quieting the lizard brain? Do what I did with vlog 1, make it bad on purpose. Not hard, but bad. Do it badly. Make it suck. Then the worst has happened and you can get on with the learning. You can put the pretense aside and start doing. Don’t wait until you know all the kanji to try and read manga. Don’t tell me you can’t speak Japanese because adult brains harden after a certain age. Don’t believe it’ll take years to become fluent. Don’t think there’s no good music. There is no reason in the world you cannot learn Japanese. No. Reason. Whatsoever. So stop with the pretense. Remember, it’s never a good time so you might as well get cracking.

2. There is no excuse for illiteracy
First of all, millions of people can read Japanese well enough, and millions more know triple the number of characters you have to know (Chinese has significantly more hanzi than Japanese has kanji). Second of all, the writing system is the best way to communicate in the language. Especially kanji, because drawing the kanji of a concept you don’t know how to say let alone pronounce it will get you much farther than any kind of gesturing, pantomiming, or poorly pronounced vocabulary ever will. Learn all three alphabets as you’re learning to speak. If you’re a Japanese school child, you’re surrounded by the writing every day of your life. You can ask your parents questions. You have to read it every waking hour of your school day. You would be laughed at for not knowing it. You are not a Japanese school child, so you need to learn hiragana and katakana immediately if not sooner. As for kanji, same thing goes. Japanese school children learn less than 200 characters a year until they graduate. Not you. You’re going to learn much faster because, unlike Japanese school children, you are not confronted by hundreds of characters every day. You can live your life happily without ever setting eyes on a single character. So you are going to have to shove kanji down your throat. Make it easier however you need to: by making up mnemonic stories, using pictographs, reading that textbook that uses examples from manga, using the Heisig method, eating an m&m for every kanji you get right, it doesn’t matter, just do what you have to do. I’ve learned more kanji in three months than my intermediate-level Japanese college buddies did in 3 years and as a result I can read what feels like 13 times the street signs, maps, and menus they can.

3. No, マジ(for real), learn the kanji.**
It’s intimidating I know, but far from impossible. Here’s how you do it: 1) ignore the way the Japanese government/most schools present it. You have to separate out your writing learning from your reading learning. Learn more kanji than you learn Japanese. In other words, learn the meanings of kanji you don’t even know the Japanese word for yet (e.g., learn 専門 means specialty even though you don’t yet know it’s pronounced せんもん and is translated as major/area of study). Learn the characters and stroke order along with their English meanings first (stroke order is important otherwise you can’t look them up). Then learn their readings and radicals and all that jazz. As you learn more about the spoken language, you’ll have a better chance at discerning when they’re used and how to pronounce them (which changes based on context) than you would by straight up drilling. 2) When you learn a Japanese word, learn it all at once. When you encounter a new word or phrase, learn how to say it, what it means, and how it’s written with kanji otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad trying to unlearn stuff later. Plus you’ll be literate a hell of a lot faster.

4. Pimp the vocab, drop the grammar
This was a most valuable lesson taught to me by Benny Lewis. When you are at square one and you know nothing, the most important thing you need to do is pimp your vocab. Beef it up. Cram it into your head. Learn everything in your basic phrasebook. Do not start with the first pages of a textbook. Textbooks like to teach you the most basic grammar and the most formal vocab. In Japanese they seem to start with “to be” structures, introductions and asking people what school they go to and how old they are. Besides being dry and dull, I find it harder to start with grammar. Too much is unfamiliar. And you still can’t talk about anything because you don’t know the words “I” “know” or “nothing.” So forget about grammar. You’ll learn it intuitively and remember it much better after you realise that “の” seems to denote possession than if someone had told you outright. The point of a language is not to write copy-perfect paragraphs. The point is to communicate, and what you need is to develop a base of vocabulary from which to communicate. Back when I was in Kyoto and knew zero Japanese, I could still ask someone where they were from by pointing and saying “anata” and then looking inquisitive. I didn’t have to know that -ka signifies a question, or that anata is understood, and when it isn’t must be followed by +wa, no screw all that. Now that I know enough vocabulary to order in a restaurant, I know I should have said “doko kara kimashta ka” or “watashi wa vegitarian des.” But you can bet I knew how to say “niku” (meat) and shake my head before I knew the rest of it. So don’t stress about grammar until you have a shedload more vocabulary in your arsenal first.

5. Avoid translations
Eschew anything with romaji. It will just make it harder for you. Don’t watch anime or movies with the subtitles on. Subtitles do a great job of making you focus on the story but a terrible job of making you concentrate on the language. Story is incidental. It’s the honey that makes greek yoghurt taste better. Watching subtitles is not eating yoghurt at all, thus not improving your Japanese. And like taking straight shots of honey, just focusing on the story is addictive but ultimately leaves you hungry and is not the best way to go about snacking. If you’re really fighting to read よつばと but can’t seem to get it right, the moment you turn to the English translation is the moment you have no reason to keep struggling. It’s basic logic. We’re hardwired to take the path of least resistance. So don’t offer yourself that option. Instead keep at the hard stuff and you’ll progress faster overall, despite how painfully slow your progress through a single page may be.

6. Be a tortoise, not a hare
Okay, this one I stole from Khatzumoto, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if it isn’t true. Sure your rate of improvement is directly proportional to how much time you but in, but it isn’t like filling a coin jar. Whether you put in two quarters every day or 60 quarters at the end of the month does matter. It’s like eating. Your body probably wants around 2,000 calories per day, and we tend to spread them around the the waking hours. If you eat 10,000 calories for breakfast on Monday, you may skip some meals but you will be hungry long before Friday rolls around. You haven’t thwarted the eating system by filling your coin jar for the month, you’ve gained weight and probably messed up your metabolism. Just like your body is good at processing calories, even excess ones, it’s really good at forgetting stuff that isn’t constantly reinforced. If you want to eat properly, you have to eat three meals a day every day, and if you want to learn Japanese you have to practice regularly and routinely. Read more about why tortoises are much better than hares over at Khatzumoto’s site.

7. Start with filler words
If we’re talking about basics in any language, I might add that one area you won’t be able to navigate by feel is the filler words. The particles, subject markers, indefinite articles and other such nonsense that appears a ton but seems to have no meaning. So if you only read up on one thing, read up on the particles and what they mean. Learn the conjunction words. Learn words like “anything” or “something” or “nothing.” More importantly learn your Ws (what, where, why, who, how, etc.) and your Ts (there, that, this, those, these, the others, etc.). Luckily you won’t have to learn possessives in Japanese but if your target language requires them, learn them too. Learn the prepositions. Learn how to stall in your language. How do you say “er…so…well…that’s right…” and the like? Having these filler words will not only make your Japanese sound more native and smoother, but will help you pick out new vocabulary amidst the words you don’t know. You can tell when わ is は and other semi confusing bits of grammar you are going to ignore until you’ve learned more vocab.

8. Practice numbers early
This is especially true with Japanese, where the word for three when talking about people is different than the word for three when talking about pieces of paper. Numbers are incredibly important. Can you image not being able to tell time? Not being able to write down a phone number? The problem with numbers is that you have to know them backwards and forwards, in other words so thoroughly that it appears intuitive to be able to use them. Just knowing how to count to 100 isn’t enough. Get really insanely good at dealing with numbers sooner rather than later. You’ll need the help, and if you get good at spouting off and picking up numbers you’ll be one whole huge step more functional. It will take much practice, so get started now with your numbers, and you can thank me by sending a 三百(さんびゃく) euro check to me later.

**I hear “but kanji is sooooo hard!” all the time and it drives me crazy. It’s one of my pet peeves when people claim writing systems are too difficult. I don’t care how difficult (or more accurately, different) they are, being illiterate but fluent is a travesty. Especially you expats, if you’re living somewhere for goodness sake take a few months to learn the language of the country you’re in. If you don’t know to read it, you don’t know the language.

5% Unassuming Bookworm

Because I read voraciously and I buy mostly nonfiction

Because I hold library cards to multiple counties

Because I am a member of a Young Adult Fiction book club

Because I still make book covers out of grocery bags for my most precious volumes

Because I prefer glasses to contacts

Because I would rather browse a bookshop than sightsee when I travel

5% Leet Superuser

Because I think shell commands are faster than GUI ones

Because I understand how RSA works, change all my passwords every three months, and monitor my RAM usage on my desktop

Because I find DIY projects relaxing and actually read MAKE:

Because I programmed my computer to talk to me when I log on

Because I am the master of keystrokes and custom shortcuts

Because I refuse to sell my tube telly so I can still play my original NES lightgun games

15% Loudmouth Texan

Because I am usually the loudest person in the room

Because I slip into a Southern accent when I’m angry

Because I own and wear a cowboy hat

Because I live in denim

Because I am elitist about BBQ, Soul Food, and Mexican fare despite being vegetarian

Because I could drive through West Texas on autopilot, including the detour to Buckee’s

30% Tiny Hipster

Because I wear skinny jeans and love plaid button downs

Because I don’t carry a purse

Because I own a wardrobe entirely from Vale-U-Village, my sister’s closet, or 8th grade

Because I have been to more Of Montreal concerts than you

Because I rock the short haircut (and it’s asymmetrical, too)

Because I journal in a Moleskine

45% Quirky Japanese

Because I have an unrelenting work ethic

Because I drink a scrillion cups of green tea daily

Because I take public transit everywhere and pay for it with my mobile

Because I actually enjoy reading in Kanji

Because I adore the onsen like a second living room

Because I am unnaturally obsessed with technology and totally unafraid of robots

Because I practice Soto Zen Buddhism

Because I may have Irish descendants, but my liver is not from them

Because I take quality design seriously

Because I like to Karaoke to Full of Harmony’s “Exclusive” so much it’s my ringtone

Other Bits and Bobs
I learned how to be a filmmaker from Anthony Leakey when I was 15 and haven’t stopped since. I’m an archivist at heart who loves to make lists and document everything. I may be small but I can eat a pound of pasta in one sitting. My lifelong ambitions are to become a polyglot and find the perfect cup of tea (I can already tell you it’s probably an oolong). I believe being a renaissance individual is the best way to approach life and tend to have my fingers in many different disciplinary pies simultaneously. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I know too much about information security not to be substantially paranoid. I am definitely a foodie whose kitchen equipment is worth more than her jewelry. I hope I never stop learning new things. I’m afflicted by terminal wanderlust and like to pack for weeklong trips in a single rucksack. I get up at 8:00 on Saturdays to watch Manchester United play, and I always cheer for Ji-Sung Park. I learned to beatbox when I lived in the ghetto. I am a polyphasic sleeper, a lucid dreamer, and a supersmeller, which means I sleep four hours a day, totally thought that piece of toast chasing me was real, and can smell the popcorn you ate yesterday.

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Please look at this adorable stack of cute Valentine’s Day stuff my flatmates and friends got me!!

I cleaned up this Christmas, taking home a ridiculously fancy rice maker, you know the kind that has all the bells and whistles: two timers, a computer chip that touts “fuzzy logic”, and, no joke, the ability to bake a cake. It even sings to you when your rice is ready, and I wish I was kidding. Short of mowing the lawn this thing can do everything and anything, including turn the girl that was addicted to pasta into the girl that eats rice with every meal.

I was always fairly hesitant to own a rice maker since I didn’t eat an overwhelming amount of rice, and even when I do it’s usually the boxed flavoured variety. Yet, I eat a lot of vegetables and often scramble to find something else to fill up my plate, something neutral, like a bread or a pasta or a potatoe. Then it dawned on me that perhaps I wasn’t eating much rice because making rice was such a hassle. My pans never heated evenly, so my rice never cooked perfectly, plus it took a hefty 55 minutes to get white rice sufficiently done, an hour and half for brown rice. Maybe, just maybe, if I didn’t have to maintain constant vigilance over a bubbling batch of rice, then perhaps I might eat more of it.

Dead on. I absolutely love rice in a way I never thought was possible, all because of a fancy machine. I have the timer set so my rice is ready when I walk through the door (and still kept toasty if I’m even hours late), and it takes me about ten minutes to saute up some veggies or heat up some leftovers (Korean-style soup is my current favourite). Some nights I’ll throw in some lentils, vegetable stock, and onions, set the menu to “mixed rice” and go to the gym. When I’m stretched and showered, I’ve a hot meal at the ready, no prep involved. It really is a modern wonder.

Let’s talk about congee (okayu or juk) for a second. The porridge setting. Experimenting with this setting has led me to a world of breakfast foods I didn’t even know I was missing. A bowl of rice porridge is like a blank canvas just waiting for whatever you want to add — miso and green onion for a savoury start to your day, dried cranberries and apricots with cashews and a drizzle of honey for a sweeter tooth, a few bits of cheese and fresh tomatoe make for good lunch, while coconut milk and pistachios or mango is a belly-warming dessert. Not into the rice part? You can also make steel-cut oatmeal with maple, oats in cream of asparagus soup with cracked black pepper, or even non-instant grits for my comrades in the south. It’s been an easy, cost-effective, super filling and very versatile option for me this winter. I’d highly recommend giving this setting a try.

I liken the rice maker to a fancy coffee maker. You can always drip coffee the old-fashioned way, and sure a $20 contraption will do the trick for your morning brew, but if you’re making coffee every day, why not invest in a nicer model, one that say, grinds the beans for you, or has a timer so your coffee is ready ten minutes after your alarm goes off? Why not have something that can brew espresso too if you’re in the mood for a double dose of caffeine? It’s the same with rice. Sure you can make it on a stovetop just fine, but you can also just press a button instead and have it be not only ready, but perfectly cooked every time. Curry taking a bit longer than expected to reduce? Your rice maker probably has a “keep warm” function that makes sure the rice is still nice and hot without overcooking it into a hard mass of starch. It’s brilliant, really. If you’ve been in debate over whether the micom/micro computer makers were worth the money, take it from me, they’re worth every penny.

On my plate: okayu (rice porridge) with miso and green onion