more reps of smaller chunks

That’s the advice I dole out to language / communication students and trainees regularly.

If you want to work on listening comprehension in whatever language, you need to take a small bit, say 3-5 minutes or less, and repeat it several times. But most people don’t take this approach. They have an hour’s commute by train, so they listen to a one-hour CD in the target language. Or they watch a complete, two-hour movie, rather than targeting a few minutes of that movie for intensive drilling.

It is human nature, I suppose. After, movies are supposed to be fun. You put one in the machine, sit back and enjoy uninterrupted. None of this once-with-script, once-without-script stuff. No vocab review and preview.

Vocab works the same way – to really master new vocabulary, the best approach is to work through several repetitions of a small list of target words or phrases. But most people (myself included…) invest the same amount of time in going once through a longer list. Less effective / efficient, but again, human nature.

Same in martial arts. I am one of the people who tends to do reps of entire forms, even though I know it is better from a learning perspective to isolate a part of the form and do more reps.

I attend several classes with my main teacher most weeks. In a typical class, we might go through a form once or twice uninterrupted, then spend most of the class isolating small chunks for intensive scrutiny and repetition. That’s especially true with the more common competition forms like tai ji jian 32. But it might also reflect the generally lower experience level of most people in the 32-motion tai ji sword classes.

We also have a class that focuses on the tai ji sword sets of the Sha family. Sometimes we follow the pattern above. Other times, like last week, we get a surprise. We started with several reps through the 36-motion tai ji sword form. Then we ran through the two-person paired sword form – an unprecedented 11 times.

I was wondering about the very unusual class format. In part, it must be related to the generally higher level of experience (even so, many of The Venerable Tai Ji Ladies were not quite on top of the form, shall we say). But I think it may have been the instructor’s way of cementing the form, drilling it in deeply one final time before moving on to something else.

And indeed, it looks like we will be starting the long-awaited second two-person / paired tai ji sword form of the Sha family. More reports on this later as it develops.

This is so-called Golden Week in Japan, when a number of national holidays fall together closely in sequence. The lucky people are able to arrange their schedules for about ten consecutive days off work. Others among us will be working most of today, teaching Business Communication Skills (notice the capital letters? It’s a fancy way of saying Business English. Which is a fancy way of saying “teaching English”).

I’ll be working one-to-one with a guy (oops, a Salaryman) from Company K. I am sure I will give him my regular lecture on “More Reps of Smaller Chunks”. I’ll also be running through some of the Sha family tai ji sword forms this morning before work. I wonder which style I’ll follow…

A horse is a horse, of course...

…unless it is jumping over a river.

There is a move in the 32-motion tai ji jian (sword) form called 跳步平刺, or tiao bu ping ci. A rough word-for-word translation might be “jumping stance horizontal thrust”.

That describes the motion pretty well – after surging forward, you lift off one foot and take a small jump, land in a preparatory position, and thrust forward. With a horizontal blade.

Another, older name for the motion is 野马跳涧, or ye ma tiao jian: experienced tai ji people will recall our old friend, 野马分鬃, (ye ma fen zong), part the wild horse’s mane. Indeed, the motion in the jian form features a wild horse, this one jumping over / across a river in a valley.

Suddenly we get a much more powerful image of the horse leaping, making distance – and landing gracefully, blending into the next motion smoothly.

A similar motion appears in many tai ji sword forms. In the Sha family style 24-motion sword form, it is called 虎包头 (hu bao tou = tiger shakes its head??). Another similar motion appears in the Sha family’s 36-motion sword form, actually composed of two bits, 退步勒马 (tuibu lema, step back and tame the horse / control the bit in its mouth) and 灵猫扑鼠 (ling mao pu shu = swift cat grabbing a mouse, a reference to nimble footwork?).

Returning to more commonly seen sword forms, we have the 42-motion competition form – the same move also called tiao bu ping ci.

So what’s in a name? I am definitely not a fan of the kung fu flicks where fighters call out flowery names of overblown techniques before attacking. But hearing about the older, more descriptive name of the motion in question last night – and hearing my teacher lightly chastise a Japanese student for not contemplating the meaning to be found in the written characters – made me think of Liu Jing Ru Laoshi.

He put together some of the forms we practice in his line today. For both these and other, older forms, he attached names, usually descriptive in a suggestive way rather than mere descriptions of physical techniques. That is, “open the window and gaze at the moon” rather than “grab the guy’s arm and pull it across to the right with both hands, then unwind that energy to smack his ____”. They are both saying the same thing, just with different words.

Many of these old forms had no names for the motions in the old days. “Do this. No, like that. Faster. Then do that.”

I’ll take the newer, more suggestive names. Too poetic for some people, maybe, (what the hell? I punch him before he punches me. Who needs all these tigers and moon-gazing?). But we can find hints and suggestions in names like these, and I’ll take every hint I can get. “Jump stance horizontal thrust” doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination.

spears

Met a friend for an afternoon workout and it was just what I needed – too much solo review lately. We focused on two weapons – spear and tai ji sword. The sword was basically drill and review and that was fine and good. The spear was drill and review and partner work.

No protection so we were going slow to half-speed but it was good – thrusting cutting poking occasionally blocking or grabbing the other guy’s spear and moving into close range. I am looking for much more of this kind of practice in the future. Of course the basics are always the foundation and the center of each practice. But at some point, I need to test it out - against an unwilling partner. And much as I love everything I am doing in the Chinese martial arts, the particular arts and practices I have chosen don’t have much of that.

I finished with only the tiniest scrape on one finger. As a long-term project, I want to find protective armor, pad the spear tips a bit, and turn it up another notch. It always comes down to the same problem – trying to find the best balance between combative realism and personal safety. I guess my pendulum has swung pretty far over into the safety range and I am feeling it is time to add a little risk and discomfort.

Another point of interest – I realized immediately what should already have been obvious. What with side-facing stances and long weapons, there is a very similar feeling to this Chinese spear work and the Japanese art of naginata (glaive), and I drew quickly upon those naginata techniques long familiar to me. On the other hand, one key difference between J and C arts is that the former tend to favor single, decisive blows, while the latter tend toward series of attacks. Hence the repeated short thrusts so typical of Chinese spear work, in contrast to the typical Japanese style.

Back home, I worked through a spear form, then switched to the sword and was slightly distracted or disoriented by the shortness and lightness of the weapon – suddenly it didn’t feel that I was using it properly at all and my form – though technically OK – felt quite disconnected.

So despite the excitement and pleasure of productive practice, I also had a streak of disappointment at my inability to shift quickly between two types of weapon. Time to quit blogging about it and get outside and get on it!