... just gets in the way, and all these good words about daily vocab tests just come to nothing.

On Friday evening on the way to pay a flying visit to some old classmates, one of whom is returning to Japan with his family, my car conked out on the M4. I had to walk to the nearest emergency phone to pinpoint exactly where I was, and as I walked past the crash barrier my trouser leg caught on a sharp edge and ripped right open. Picture me, sat on the grass verge beside the motorway, trousers flapping open, looking very much the loser. Not a good evening.

Although I didn't think this at the time, if I'd had that experience in Japan, it would have been a brilliant learning opportunity. I could have practiced some great swear words. Learnt how to get a long with the blokes who drive emergency recovery vehicles. Negotiated with the insurance company over where they would take the car to. Found a garage the next day.

As it was, I had to do all this in stupid old English. I didn't learn a darn thing. Except perhaps that tearing your trousers open in public is not a good idea.

A Chinese friend of mine said recently (I'm paraphrasing here): "What's so hard about learning Japanese? I could read a Japanese newspaper" - meaning that, with so many kanji to give us clues, well, it's a doddle to us Chinese speakers.

Well, up to a point.

I found a site today where you can test yourself on the kanji that are used most frequently in newspapers. Brilliant resource:- Japanese Newspaper Word Frequency List. The questions are multiple-choice, where you see the kanji and choose the meaning from 4 alternatives. For curious, I took the first test. The trouble is, I read the kanji aloud in my head, with Chinese pronunciation. So I know that 首相 means Prime Minister, but I pronounce it 'shouxiang' and have no idea what the Japanese pronunciation should be.

So yes, it's an unfair advantage compared to my class-mates, but still presents a problem. Doubly so, because I don't want to unlearn Chinese while learning Japanese. (Yeah, I know, you'd swap this problem for yours).

Still, I suppose it all adds to the joy and the challenge.

On the underground today, I saw a poster with the word 'bikeathon', and wondered what an ancient Greek would make of it. He'd probably struggle with our concept of marathon, and would need a bit of time with a bicycle before you'd even think of saying "Hey Xenophon, we've got this new Greek word you'll really love!"

I'm beginning to think that Katakana loan words work a bit like that, taking on a life of their own in Japanese and no longer really being English/German etc. Though I hesitate to say it (we're so darn PC here) but セハ is a good example. What English speaker would recognise that without help?

That title reminds me of a gaffe I made in my first days as a student in Beijing in 1981, when I walked into the campus bank and confidently announced I wanted to open a window - the word for 'window' (窗户 - chuanghu) being confusingly close to 'account' (帐户 zhanghu), at least to my young foreign brain. "Oh yes?" said the teller with a tired half-grin. Some time later, I went to the clinic with a fever: "I want to see some clothes", I said - 'clothes' (衣服 yifu) sounding like the love-child of two words for 'doctor' - 医生 (yisheng) and 大夫 (daifu).

I suppose the knack when learning a language is to ignore the risk of making this type of mistake, and just (in the words of Radio 4) 'go for it'.

Stuck here in London, sans Japanese family or environment, that's quite difficult to achieve. My 'all angles' strategy is perhaps partly a con. I think that by going to a concert of Japanese music, something will permeate into my brain, something of the lilt of Japanese even if not words. Or perhaps it's more of an encouragement and reward. I would almost certainly not have gone to the concert last night in LSO St Luke's (keep up, folks, it's been on my events page for like days already) if I'd not been looking for something Japanese to do - and I'd have missed a great event.

The koto player Etsuko Takezawa played a wonderful and varied set. I've never seen the koto played live before, and was entranced. The opening piece, Midare by Kengyo Yatsuhashi (1614-1685) was everything I could possibly hope for.

There was an interesting comparison with the Chinese 'guqin' (古琴), which I'd seen in the previous night's performance. The guqin has no bridge; notes are changed by pressing the string against the sound-board. Although the two instruments must have a common ancestry, the subtleties and flexibility of the koto seem greater.

Anyhow, that's where windows came from: that learning a language opens you to all kinds of experience, a different understanding of how things are. Even if we make fools of ourselves along the way.

I've just had a browse through the 'study aids' pages of www.jbox.com, which is a great way to stimulate ideas. I've bought a few things from there over the months:-

-- A couple of issues of Nihongo Journal (日本語ジャーナル), the sadly discontinued magazine for learners of Japanese. The content ranges from beginner to advanced level, with articles, tips, exercises and a CD. Back-copies are available from jbox.com and from the publisher's own site:- www.alc.co.jp.

-- A book called Catchy Japanese Phrases. If I wanted to know how to say: "I have a hangover", here's where I'd look. The book is divided into subject areas, such as Eating and Drinking, Greeting & Weather. Each phrase is printed in English (plus Chinese and Korean) on one side of the page, and Japanese (kana/kanji and romaji) on the back of the page. Thew pages are lined off into 3 sections. If you remove the pages from the book and cut them into 3, you have flash-cards. There's even a printed circle where you can punch a hole to keep the cards on a book ring. Sheer genius.

-- 'Pass the Test' headband (Zettai Goukaku Hachimaki) - Indispensable.

To friends whose ears I've bent over the past few months, enthusing about the joy of going back to the classroom to learn Japanese, I often seem to use the phrase: "attacking it from lots of angles". What I mean by that, is that the best approach to learning is one that is varied, using different sources, different contexts, a range of both the routine and the surprising.

I suppose what I'm trying to achieve with this site is to create for myself another angle, another way of structuring or codifying my studies, and an incentive to keep working at it. Who is to say whether there'll be anything of benefit to anyone else.