“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves

My wife notes that now there needs to be a similar word for electronics/gadgets acquired but never really used (probably a lot of them through Kickstarter).

Kinda weird, I have not (yet) felt the compulsion to shop ebooks on Kindle that I won't begin reading immediately. And I do have ridiculous Steam backlog and relatively many unready physical books, so I definitely am familiar with the phenomenon. But with Kindle buying books as you go is so easy and pre-buying books does not really seem to give similar benefit like for example Steam sales or having the book available like with physical books.

With Kindle if I find an interesting book I can just click it to my wishlist (which is very convenient) and I can generally trust that when I want to actually read it it is still available and not significantly more expensive. In contrast if I see interesting game on Steam at -75% the rationale for buying it is that the day I want to play it it will probably cost a lot more if I don't buy it now.

The curators of public libraries, at least, should learn better than to accumulate 800 page treatises on HTML, CSS and Java.

I have 100+ unread books on my Kindle, but in stark contrast the piles of physical books I used to have sitting around, having them on my kindle is awesome.

Any time I need a book, I know I have several great ones to choose from.

So I think the advent of digital books[1] transformed my 積ん読 from a huge and ugly pile of heavy artifacts — that ultimately had to be sold at a yard sale in 2005 ($1 for all 3 gigantic hardback volumes of Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP!!), with the remainder ending up in a landfill — into an invisible, weightless trove of knowledge and entertainment.

I haven't bought a paper book since I bought a paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at an airport, just before the airplane rules changed to allow reading electronically even during takeoff and landing.

But I also spend twice the money (or maybe even ten times the money) that I used to -- but that's because I buy way more books. I tend to google for books I think I might like when I am drunk late at night, and I also buy any book which somebody I know forcefully recommends.

[1]: I mean what Amazon did: making almost all books available in convenient[2] digital form. I read digital books on my Newton and Palm devices back in the old days (1990s, Peanut Press and others, but the selection was extremely limited

[2]: convenient if you don't care about removing the DRM, which I usually don't, since I rarely read a book more than once

EDIT: Here's a visual representation:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/om9xdox53rcl1g9/Screenshot%202015-...

Some of the notably awesome books on that screen: The Son, Spin (and really, almost anything by Robert Charles Wilson, but especially Spin), The Dog Stars, Blindsight and Echopraxia, Station Eleven, Seveneves and REAMDE, Nightwoods.

Bonus: gut-wrenchingly awful books I started reading and aborted (or worse, read to the end on the misguided hope that somehow they would redeem themselves): California, The Buried Giant, Avogadro / A.I. Apocalypse, Wool, Mr. Mercedes, Terms of Enlistment.

Probably half of them I still have not read.

Japanese is a really nice language. The grammar for plain speech is so consistent that I'm always tempted to try to write it down in BNF. The other nice thing about it is that it is economical. A noun by itself is a grammatically correct sentence. Copula and verbs are optional. Any sentence ending in a verb (or copula, as long as you change "da" to "na") can be used to modify a noun. It makes it so simple to say complex things. Finally, things that you would use tone of voice for in English can be expressed with particles at the end of the sentence. This allows you to be really expressive in Japanese.

If anyone is interested in learning Japanese, I have some advice:

- Do not learn polite forms until you master plain forms. Japanese is built on plain forms and polite forms are an extension of that. If you learn polite forms first, you are going to get wildly confused because everything you assume about the grammar will be wrong. People think they must learn polite forms in order to get along. Just do what all my Japanese high school students did: add "desu" to the end of all your sentences ;-). It is totally wrong and you will sound like an uneducated, hillbilly moron, but people will appreciate your effort ;-)

- Read http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar I don't think there is a better grammar guide out there. Memorize all the example sentences (if you use flash cards or Anki, then drill from English to Japanese only).

- Learn hiragana and kanji (hiragana first). Pick up katakana over time (it's not really very important). Hiragana and katakana are phonetic alphabets. Once you know hiragana you can read children's books with "furigana" (the pronunciation of kanji is written beside the kanji in hiragana). Kanji are the chinese characters.

- Do not avoid learning kanji. One thing that I discovered as I was learning Japanese is that I could learn vocabulary along with the kanji faster than I could learn the vocabulary alone. Kanji is a fantastic mnemonic and is constructed in a comprehensible way. "Remembering the kanji" by James Heisig is a great technique for learning kanji. I don't like his choice of keywords, though (some are arguably just wrong). I recommend reading the first section of the book and then deriving your own keywords. As it turns out, the publisher of the book offers the first section as a free PDF download: http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012/12/RK-1-6th-edition...

- Read manga as a way to learn conversational Japanese. Probably this is the best thing I ever did. Yes there are characters with weird expressions (datte ba yo!) or incredibly impolite expressions (ending every sentence with yagaru), but I really doubt you will fail to pick those up ;-) Obviously don't use them in real conversations if you don't want to shock people. Generally speaking the expressions -- and especially the contractions -- are the way normal people speak in Japan. You won't get this in a text book.

- Don't read textbooks (except for Tae Kim's, linked above).

- For introductory vocabulary, the JLPT vocabulary lists up to and including N3 are excellent. Don't bother past there because it is loaded down with vocabulary that you are unlikely to use, at the expense of vocabulary that you will definitely need in every day conversations. After you memorize N3 vocabulary, just get all your vocabulary from normal reading. By all means, if you just enjoy memorizing vocabulary lists, feel free to do N2 and N1 vocabulary lists -- it won't hurt you. I just think that it is an inefficient use of time.

Hope that helps anyone who is getting started ;-)