By popular demand, and I mean that of S. Subjugation, I have decided to keep up the fish picture. That and I'm too lazy to find another picture to post.
Please note that I have changed my cell phone e-mail address, as I was being so savagely bombarded by junk mail that I was beginning to feel like Dresden in 1945, only instead of firebombs it was unwanted e-mail, and instead of untold numbers of casualties I would get mildly irritated every now and then. Clearly the comparisons are endless.
So yesterday I sort of accidentally joined one of the Aikido groups on campus (aikido is a really soft martial art, sort of like karate only it doesn't turn you into an unstoppable killing machine with an annoying tendency to place unnatural stress on a thoroughly domesticated Japanese word). I had only intended to go to one practice in order to fulfill a promise I had made to one of the members at a recruiting seminar before checking out some other clubs, but at the end of practice someone asked me if I wanted to join, and by the way part of entering is donating your spleen, and would I be okay with that, and I figured hey, I've got nothing better to do, and it's not like I use my spleen anyway. One rather pleasant dinner and a mildly uncomfortable major-organ-removal surgery later, and I was in the club. It seems pretty cool and laid-back; they practice three or four times a week, but practice isn't all that intense and they seem to place about as much importance on going out on the town after practice as on the actual martial art itself.
I started Korean today, and it seems pretty nifty. The writing system is awfully neat, and pretty starkly different than any other I've ever seen or heard of. Basically up to three letters at a time fit together like a puzzle piece to form on block character that is both highly compact and easy to read. The rules to the language look pretty simple and the basic syntax is identical to Japanese, so it shouldn't be too terribly difficult ot pick up some basic stuff this semester. I still have absolutely no reason to be taking Korean and have no particular interest in it other than the fact that it has a neat writing system, but I really have nothing better to do.
I have already noticed a striking difference between my ability to communicate in Japanese at the beginning of this semester and last one. At the start of last semester, I tended to wander around campus with the other two Americans so that, if and when we got stopped for a conversation, the three of us together could work out enough comprehensible sentences to fudge a reasonable approximation of rudimentary conversation. Now I simply feel more confident about my Japanese, whether it is merited or not, and can actually instigate and hold a relatively normal conversation. This ability to stand on my own and act and speak much as I would in America has gone an incredible way to eliminating the feeling of being the gaijin spectacle that people march out to say a few broken sentences in Japanese before moving on to an interesting conversation with their real friends. I can tell that the Japanese I knew last semester are happy about it as well, now that they can talk to me much as they would one of their other friends. Obviously my Japanese still has a very long way to go, and even these everyday conversations are riddled with errors that friends just overlook, but nonetheless starting to feel like a human again is a wonderful thing.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
