Over a month has gone by since my last post, which means the guilt trip is baaack! Ok, since nobody barfed at me the last time I did this, here are some personal updates that just might have interested you if any of you cared.
I’m back in the States!
Yes I know, you’ve seen it countless of times. These so-called “Japan” blogs always ends with: “Ok, I’m ending this blog since I moved out of Japan and there are no more freaky, crazy things that I can blog about.” But don’t worry! I’m different because my life in Japan consisted of sitting at a desk for 10-12 hours. I didn’t have anything interesting happening in my life to begin with! They should make a t-shirt that says, “I worked in Japan and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and a tattered, bruised remnant of my soul.” I would totally buy that.
But seriously, while I don’t use Japanese as much as I used to, the city I live in (Seattle) is large enough that I managed to find Japanese people to hang out with once in a while. What’s even cooler is I found someone to teach me Chinese in exchange for teaching Japanese! (I’ll talk about finding language partners in my next post so stay tuned!)
My Chinese got good enough to suck
Speaking of Chinese, yes I’m still working on it. I’m proud to say that my Chinese has improved from being virtually nonexistent to just really, really bad. Since I’m not a big fan of structured classes (or more specifically, too cheap to pay for classes) meeting with language partners every week really helps me to stay motivated and keeps me thinking if not in at least about Chinese.
It’s contextual spam so it’s OK
Finally, to make this post at least semi-related to Japanese, I’d like to talk the startup I’ve been working on these past few months: MegaBuzz.com. I haven’t talked about it until now because the site itself has nothing to do with Japanese. However, we just launched a new feature today that allows you to create a page about any topic. You can make and answer questions, post YouTube videos, and all that good ol’ Web 2.0 stuff. I’ve already created the Japanese page so I hope you guys will join in and we can quiz each other in Japanese.
Last but not least
Before I go, I’d just like to mention that we got a dog a little while back. He’s four months old and his name is Chewy. He’s very, very whiney.
*SHOCK*
本当に帰国しましたか？
金さんは永住権にするようだなと思いましたけど。
日本に戻るつもりがありますか？
Your not being in Japan anymore doesn’t dampen the validity of your observations and lessons about japanese so I just hope your happy about the move.
Don’t forget that a lot of your readers also study or have interests in other east asain languages (im totally guessing but im sure its true, 😉 so any comments or observations while learning Chinese or Korean also would be interesting to hear, especially if there is relation or comparison with Japanese.
あゆみさん、
そうですよ。帰国しちゃいましたよ。もちろん、いつか日本に戻りたいと思っているんですが、今のところは戻るきっかけがないのです。
To Kohai,
Thanks, I’m still very involved in Japanese and the experience being away from Japan has given me additional stuff to write about. If I come up with anything for other languages, I’ll be sure to write something. Right now, I haven’t gotten far enough in Chinese to actually know what I’m talking about. 🙂
I just wanted to second what Kohai said. It would be interesting to hear about your experiences learning Chinese or Korean in relation to Japanese.
This site is really really good. I study japanese by myself and it helps me a lot. I hope you write something about language partners soon (I also use this “method” for learning japanese, spanish and french). Ah, and I love dogs. 🙂