Every year when the year starts, Japanese hang up these decorations on their doors, and I just think they are adorable. Here is a small collection from my neighborhood.

The wall in my toilet. I have learned a thing or two here.

sushi + ankimo

shishamo + fried chicken

potato-pie hokkaido style + christmas lights in Tokyo

typical izakaya-food on a typical evening.

And we have to love the English education on Japanese TV.

Lots of pictures from fall 2012. I played around with a new apple product and took pictures of my face.

I drank coffee from classical cups and walked around Bergen in the freezing cold weather right before the snow fell.

Dromedar, Misjonen and Blom. The holy tri-force 😉

Food at Jacob’s and chrismas lights up in the trees.

Homemade dinner with salmon, and the 4th floor in the Tokyo apartment.

Kanji that I had to remember + cheese and wine and crackers.

More dinner, I ate a lot of salmon last fall.

Shrimp and crab and wine with M.

Wine + M’s new lamp + my new hair + birthday gift.

明けましておめでとう！最近、今学期の準備とバイトのせいで、時間があまり足りなかったけど、満足している。よいお年を〜
Happy new year! I have been super-busy preparing for the next couple of months and working, but I am happy. Hope you all will have a great 2013!

Time for another small update! (Apologizes for all the mobile pictures recently, they just kind of piled up, all of a sudden. I got a new iPod, so I got a little bit trigger happy, I guess!) In the picture above, I went to visit my budgie. He has a new lovely home with nice parents, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, so a visit was well overdue. He is still hanging in there, even though he is probably 850 years old in budgie-years.

new shoes / old eggs

oooold pages from a notebook

sushi the cat posing / wine and cookies

mmm! sushi!

old little things discovered in a box.

…and a lovely cappuccino at Dromedar to brighten a cold and slushy day.

I took some quick snapshots with my phone from some of the pages in my Moleskine. I swear, this sketch book and me are not made for each other. I have been trying to fill out this book for 2 years, and I still have 35 pages left. I have no idea, but when I buy a Moleskine, I can tell instantly when I start drawing in it if it is going to be easy or hard to fill the book up. The easy ones takes approximately 3 months to fill out. The hard ones – like this one – is currently at 2+ years and counting. In any case – real pictures will come when the book is completed. At this rate, it will be within a year. Jeez.

I made an illustration portfolio. Yay! You can see it here. The text is in Japanese, but what is important is the rest of the content, right?

First of, I just wanted to show this awesome video: “Skype Me Maybe” – sung in 30+ languages by 17 polyglots! Super inspirational!

Now, onto another set of language-related links. Most of them are about – surprise, surprise – Japanese, but there is also some Norwegian, French and general language links mentioned.

1. Smashing Magazine has a great article about Japanese, A Beautifully Complex Writing System.
2. Free FSI language course in French can be found here!
3. The Polyglot Project Podcast – Episode #1 – Moses McCormick can be heard here on David Mansarays site.
4. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but here is the wiki-page about Kyouiku-kanji. If you feel like the 2000 joyo-kanji is too much to grasp at first, mastering the 1006 kyouiku-kanji can really bring you a long way when it comes to reading and understanding Japanese.
5. Japanese idiom dictionary! This is great for figuring out colloquial use of japanese, which can be hard if you don’t have a real japanese person at hand to ask.
6. Japanese proverb dictionary! (You have no idea how impressed Japanese people get when you throw in a proverb or two in your conversation!)
7. A resource site for JLPT N1, N2 and N3. Mostly in Japanese. Not the easiest thing to navigate, but some good resources hidden in there.
8. Kokuji 国字 or Wasei Kanji 和製漢字 are Kanji that were created in Japan. Most of them only have KUN readings, but there are some Kokuji that have ON readings because they were assumed to have them according to phonetic association with similar characters. Here is an extensive list of kokuji.
9. Nice little blog about language learning: www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com.
10. Verbling is like chatroulette, only in the languages you are studying. Super neat idea, although I am a bit camera shy myself.
11. If you are interested in Norwegian language, you can listen to free podcasts called “Språkteigen” here. It is a program produced by NRK, in Norwegian, about quirky (and not so quirky) aspects of the Norwegian language. For intermediate, advanced and native speakers.

And here is a bonus video: 日本人が知らない日本語. Funny drama in Japanese, about Japanese. The Swedish girl’s Japanese accent cracks me up every time.