最近、私はその歌ばかり聞いています。本当にきれいな歌だと思います。

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?

When my mom and me went to Harajuku the other day, we took some Purikura, just for fun, it is a cute little memory to keep in your wallet.

If you don’t feel like you are looking particularly good on any given day, take some Purikura! It is a photo booth that will automagically make your skin perfect, automatically apply makeup, it will make your eyes larger, the colors in your eyes clearer and your lashes longer. Inside the booth, it is shown on a screen how to pose for the different shots you have selected. Once the shots are done (this goes super-fast), you can doodle on them on a screen at the back of the photo booth, apply text and pictures and whatever you like, before the machine prints out your pictures, pretty much like a regular photo booth. Purikura actually comes from the word Purinto Kurabu (プリント倶楽部), which comes from the English words Print Club. (It seems like people have started to make web pages to do this online, after a quick Google search I found this and this, so now you can try it at home as well. Ha.) /end infomercial.

2010 was the first year I got into singing karaoke (like a good gaijin is suppose to do), and this was the first Japanese song I sang. I think this was my number one theme song for 2010.