An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Several of my fondest childhood memories stem from working in libraries. There, it was often my duty to take a crisp newspaper and clamp it to a wooden holder for broadsheets. My preferred paper was The Globe and Mail from quite early on; one of the alumni from my high school is a prominent columnist  there. The advent of the internet in the early to mid-90s happened to coincide with a period that I didn't subscribe to broadsheets and lived without TV (otherwise known as my time at university). To procrastinate from studies, I often read through some of the newsgroups, and played around with a personal set of HTML pages. Interestingly I was still working in the libraries during this period, but had moved to cataloguing new arrivals of periodicals, and didn't touch newspapers except for the occasional copy of the university papers ( The Tech  and  Tech Talk - I was saddened to learn the latter went out of print in 2009) or  Bay Windows , made freely available to t...

Since childhood, I've found that if I devote a certain amount of concentrated effort thinking in one language, there is a transitory period where trying to speak another language is frustratingly difficult. The worst experience I had of this was a few years ago. After a few weeks of only working, reading and dreaming in English, I bumped into a Japanese faculty member at DCU. I sincerely hope she doesn't remember the incident, as it was painfully humiliating for me: practically no Japanese issued from me at the time, but stubborn pride kept me from switching to English. The fact it was a chance encounter definitely exacerbated the situation, but I was no stranger to this phenomenon. When I entered the Canadian school system, I'd had practically no prior exposure to English. This meant that for a few years initially, I'd answer questions posed to me at school in Japanese, and at home it would take about an hour before I'd revert to Japanese with my parents. Saturd...

Something which by now may have become apparent to my colleagues and friends alike, is that in personal writing I gravitate toward long and complicated sentences. The formality of my writing has also been remarked upon by more than one friend. On the other hand, I also try to optimize diction: that is, I have an old habit of attempting to use whatever word I believe is most appropriate, regardless of how rarely one might hear it. In my Japanese language post from May, I had mentioned that I experience a constant struggle to maintain linguistic competence. In fact, it seems self evident that disuse leads to atrophy in many situations, be they physical (musculature), neural (pathways to access memories) or otherwise. With tweeting, the stringent limit on message length means I struggle with the inevitable prevalence of abbreviations and  (in that case, &) initialisms - and rarely, acronyms - far more in English than I do in Japanese. However, in the latter tongue I clearly ...

数年前に、NLP関係の研究チームに加わって間もなく言われた言葉でした。たしかに日本語が通じるという事を履歴書に示してきたおかげで、幾度も仕事のチャンスが与えられてきた。その「ほとんど」が微妙だけど、まあたしかに完璧な語学力とはほど遠いのは痛いほどわかってもいる。 私はカナダで生まれ育ったので、日本での滞在歴はなんと数週間のみ（ちなみに二週間以上いた期間は３歳になる直前だった）。土曜の午前中に行われる日本語学校へ十年ほど通い、せいぜい中学生レベルくらいの国語を身につけたのだが、主に多量のフィクション（漫画も含む）を読み続ける事、日本にいる親戚との文通、そして父母とは日本語のみで対話していた事があったおかげで今にいたる。 とにかく、「使わなければ無くす」ため、（英語だと"use it or lose it"ですね）定期的に日本語でツィッターやブログを書いて行こうと心がけしてますが、どうぞよろしくお願いします。コメントもいつでも日本語でお気軽に書き込んでください。