Today was a good day. First, I went to a cafe to do language exchange with a lovely Japanese girl I have just gotten to know. Believe it or not, Japanese people wanting to learn Norwegian do exist in Tokyo, but they are few and far between. We talked in a strange mix of Japanese, Norwegian and some English when neither of us could explain what we meant in the two first languages. I found it incredibly useful to actually just talk freely to someone Japanese instead of in the classroom, at least I always manage to say more in such a free situation than what I thought I would be able to do. It must have sounded funny to the people around us in the cafe – my messed up Japanese, followed by some English explanations, mixed in with a couple of Norwegian phrases.

I love how everyone have aloe vera growing in little pots outside their houses.

And then I decided to walk back into Shinjuku (新宿), here coming close to Kabukichō (歌舞伎町).

Kabukichō is just a sweet mess of host- and hostess-bars, restaurants and adult entertainment, and of course a ton of love-hotels towards the Shin-Okubo area. It is quite charming in its own busy, strange and peculiar way.

And then I went to Muji – Japan’s answer to IKEA. I was a good girl and did not spend my money in there today.

But I looked at all the pretty sparkly things.

And all the restaurants I have never eaten at…

I passed this store, because I was heading to…

Marui! They have a cute shopping center for the.. eh.. specially interested. They have a whole floor of Lolita goods, one floor of princess goods, one floor of punk and a quite a few other floors filled with mori-fashion and other cute things. I am not particularly into those fashions, but I went to look for some makeup and hair-accessories. This is from the escalator – you are, as always, not allowed to take pictures inside the stores, but I shot this one from my hip because I thought the walls were cute.

And then I went to H&M, and was really lucky in my bargain hunt. Full price for above items: 5100円. What I paid: 600円.

And last, but not least, I went to Sekaido like a good girl and bought notebooks for school. I like to trick my brain into thinking that classes are even more interesting than what they are by buying new notebooks and plastic folders for each term. Oh the joys of new stationery ♥

(This was a song that Jennifer Warnes co-wrote with Leonard Cohen and it appears on her album “Famous Blue Raincoat”. One of the great overlooked albums of the 80’s.)

I have been listening to this all weekend. It makes me want to burst out in tears – or laughter. I don’t know. I don’t get these musical epiphanies often anymore. So when they finally come, few and far between, I feel happy and overwhelmed, even though the songs that cause the epiphany usually contain some kind of melancholy.

I’m magic – I made food! My endeavors with cooking continue. I still do not enjoy it. I was scared of the flaming heat from the stove and tried to stand as far away as possible when mixing the vegetables. I think it turned out okay, and did not taste only of blood, sweat and tears, but also vegetables and soy sauce.

One day I think I will go out and just take pictures of all the mascots I can find in about one hour around Shinjuku and Shin-Okubo. Funny how they have cute mascots of pigs and chickens at a place which well, fries them up and them serves them on a plate to you. It reminds me of the fish market in Norway, where they had a cute little drawing of a whale with the cute text underneath “We have whale!”

After cooking dinner the previous night, it was time to have someone else do the hard work. Waiting at the station to go out for dinner the next day…

I found a palm tree while walking to school! And on the right – waiting for dinner to be served at the izakaya we went to. Ah, Fridays! ♥

1. I looked over some of my favorite illustration web pages, and I keep returning to Linn Olofsdotter. I want to make beautiful things like her one day.
2. Some nice people have just started their blogs lately, so if you like photography, you should absolutely visit tippi+ella and creativedaysblog.
3. Mozart is the most productive productive girl on the entire internet. I can not understand how she finds time to make so many beautiful things.
4. Binka wrote a 10 point list against writers block, and I think it is a great list. The list is in Norwegian.
5. Julia Galdo‘s photography is just jaw dropping, and I especially like the series taken for S Magazine.

(Ok, so I cheated a little bit – I fell asleep, and it is Saturday here before I could publish this post. Whups.)

I posted some of the pictures of last year’s hanami in my summary post for april 2010 but I did not post all of them, so here they are. I can not wait for hanami this year. Two months, and spring is coming ♥

It’s Friday. It is one year and nine days since I moved to Japan. It is about six weeks since this season’s state of constant cold started. It is three days since this term of Japanese started up. It is one month since my birthday already. I am still cold. I feel like my hands are in a constant state of cold like little icicles, my torso is warm but I am still shivering from the cold. It is a calm evening, and I can not seem to start the long list of things I want to do, simply because both my mind and my hands feels numb and slow from the cold. I want spring. Just a little longer, just another month or two now…

I used to love this movie just a couple of years ago, and I just rediscovered it. This is the first part. The buildings in the background and the details and love that went into this film is just beautiful.

(“Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark.” Taken from Wikipedia.)

A new term has started, and I want to do well. Pictures are funny, I feel my face looks so different on camera compared to RL, or even compared to how my face used to look in pictures just a few years ago.

The (not so) long walk to school.

I always take a back street through a little park on my way to classes so I can look at the flowers and not be run over by the cars.

I always wonder why not more people get electrocuted by all the wires hanging everywhere.

I stopped by a parking lot before school to look at the pigeons.

And then there was school. Today it was three hours of reading, and one hour of listening. Apparently I have started intermediate Japanese now, and how that happened I have no idea, because there is absolutely nothing about my Japanese which can describe it as intermediate.

The view of Shinjuku from the school’s balcony.

And then I walked home again… and now I should probably start reading through the material for tomorrow.

I am not sure how famous Ken Tanaka is if you are not studying Japanese or have any interest in Japan, but basically, his story goes as follows: He was born in the US but was adopted away to Japanese parents when he was very little, and now he is trying to find his American birth parents. He says he taught himself English as an adult. Of course, this is merely a big spoof to get internet-famous, but his videos are entertaining and funny. I am not sure how funny this video is if you have no interest in Japan or Japanese what so ever, but I was laughing out loud through both of these videos.

How to speak fluent Japanese without saying a word – Part 1

How to speak fluent Japanese without saying a word – Part 2

(Sorry for the lack of actual photographs in the last 24 hours, I just have to get through the classes today, and new pictures will follow tonight.)

学校が始まります。。。School is starting in 1.5 hours, I have forgotten half of what I am suppose to know by know, the kanji is mixing themselves together in my head and all I see are little squiggles on the paper, vocabulary I used to know seems foreign to me, like I see the words for the first time, and the grammar points seems more Greek than Japanese to me at the moment. Despite a half-assed effort over at renshuu.org and lang-8.com during the latest days, I can only conclude that I have to step it up quite a bit from today.

How do people learn? How do people push their brains to a greater capacity? I am trying to go back, trying to think how I learned English in the first place, how I learned HTML and CSS, how I learned to take pictures – but all of those things seems so internalized I can not remember my initial struggles with it.

I do remember asking my English teacher in 3rd grade – “In the name ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ – what does the word ‘the’ mean?” My teacher answered me that the word “the” did not have any meaning on its own. Today I know that answer was wrong, that was my teacher not knowing how to answer that question to kid, who probably would not understand what she was trying to tell me anyway. Today there is Wikipedia, today I know that I can look up the word the on Wikipedia and get an explanation, but I am not sure sure my nine year old self would have understood it even with the help of Wikipedia. I don’t know. What is curious to me, is that the way I felt about the word the as a nine year old – this is the way I feel about Japanese today. I read about Japanese. I try to research various aspects about the language, I try to grasp the concept of it. I read and I research about how people learn, about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, about vocabulary acquisition, shadowing, about ways to memorize kanji efficiently…  but despite reading about Japanese – I am not sure I can fully grasp the concepts and internalize them. Maybe I should spend more time practicing the actual language, and less time trying to grasp the concepts and trying to find the best way to learn.

Do you think you can learn if you don’t grasp the concept of what you are doing first?