Skip to main content

Normality Does Not Make for Good Storytelling

On one hand, normality=yay, me becoming a successful part of Japanese culture has been achieved! On the other...it leaves me with nothing to tell you guys about.

So I figured, now that I'm more or less a part of this all, what have I achieved? So I went back two months to my Bucket List.
Here's what was on it:
1. Learn how to make miso soup
2. Go to a Maid-cafe
3. Return to Chiiori (What's that? Click HERE. No, seriously. CHECK IT OUT IT'S REALLY COOL.)
4. Go to a movie in Japanese
5. See Kabuki theater
6. SUSHI and RAMEN

Here's what I added to it:
1. Go to Tokyo Disney
2.Go see From Up on Poppy Hill, the new Ghibli movie

And here's what I checked off:
1. Sushi and ramen (I've had each about five times. Yummy, every single time)
2. Go see From Up on Poppy Hill, which covers both that and "see a movie in Japanese"

...long way to go, folks.

Language. Ah, language. How I miss effortlessly speaking!
But on the plus side, I've gone from knowing next to nothing to being able to hold coherant coversations. I can now,
1. Conjugate some verbs, past/present/future though sometimes I get them mixed up (like the verbs to write and to buy: kaku and kau. In the present tense, to write is kakimasu, while to buy is kaimasu)
2. Conjugate adjectives, past/present/future (WHY DO ADJECTIVES NEED TO BE CONJUGATED?)
3. More vocab and generally more kanji, though I can't read for my life
4. Expressing I want to do something/have something
5. Particles (to, from, subject etc.) in the most basic sense. I'm not lying when I say that this is the most confusing thing for me (besides kanji).

Could be worse!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enoshima: The Heavenly Maiden and the Dragon

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....

Fukuoka: A Saga of Shrines

As many long-term residents of Japan do, I have a goal to visit all 47 prefectures of Japan. Just last week, together with my parents, who flew over from Chicago for a long weekend, I checked off No. 25: Fukuoka Prefecture. I'd never been to Fukuoka, which is on Japan's southerly island of Kyushu, before, but everyone I know who had visited had told me it was a great trip. It's capital, also called Fukuoka, has the distinction of being both Japan's youngest city and also the city with the fastest growing population, making it one of the only metropolitan areas outside of Tokyo with an increasing number of residents. A very dynamic place to visit; a vibrant city with an old, old history. WARNING: LOOOONG POST AHEAD. Friday morning my parents and I hop over on a flight from Haneda Airport to Fukuoka Airport, which is a fantastic 10 minutes away form the city center. Ten. Minutes. What I would do to have one of Tokyo's airports be that close! The weather was sunn...

文化祭!(Bunkasai--Cultural Festival Days 1 and 2) and Man I'm Tired!

So this weekend was Musashino Joshi's annual Cultural Festival, an event that all high schools (I would assume) have, where the school is open to the public and classes and clubs put on events, or set up quiz games or food booths. Essentially it's like a carnival. Traditional culture...not so much (though there are aspects of it). Mostly it's just good fun. My class was doing a chocolate banana food booth, so on Friday (the school-wide prep day, even though techincally it was another Japanese holiday) we got cardboard and began making our booth, which was Hawaiian themed. And you'd think it wouldn't take very long, but it took the entire day and then about half an hour on Saturday. (Also, what' you're seeing is Summer Uniform Form 1.5, where there's the sweater over the shirt.) But in the end the booth turned out pretty sweet, if I may say so myself: The top says Chocobana, and the sides of the poles are made to look like palm trees with a monkay on it...