So I did it again, I really feel behind. I try to find some time to sit down and blog but as of late, I’ve been really exhausted. Not exactly sure why. I’ve been eating a lot healthier lately: tons more vegetables, less meat, etc. I haven’t had fried foods in so long, I don’t snack on junk, most of the time I make my school lunch. I feel proud of myself. Plus, I’ve been taking lots of vitamins, too.
Another great thing, my Japanese is getting a lot better. And I’m not sure how it turned up because it hasn’t always been there, but now on the keyboard drop-down menu on my Mac, I can choose to type in romaji, hiragana, or katakana. Maybe my computer sensed a need for it since I’ve been using the character palette a lot more. I can tell you one thing, being able to type in Hiragana on my keyboard is waaaaay better than selecting each kana from the character palette…
I haven’t been truly studying that much because I’ve been busy at work and exhausted at home, but my Japanese is improving because I am talking to more Japanese people and being comfortable with it. A few weeks back after spending about 6 straight hours trying to hold conversations in Japanese I had gotten really tired – physically and emotionally – and felt like it was really hard for me to be in a situation like that… but the other weekend I went to a BBQ and there was only one other person there that was a native English speaker. I also had a good amount of Japanese friends around so that may have done it, too… but I truly felt victorious… especially with my Kansai-ben.
To me, the Kansai dialect has much more life and vibrance than the standard Kanto dialect. Standard Japanese sounds boring, to me anyway. I like the verb and grammatical truncation that occurs all throughout the dialect. I guess describing it would be like… hearing a Caribbean dialect of English spoken against a generic standard North American English dialect. Different to the point that sometimes you have trouble comprehending the conversation going on in front of you and you’re a native speaker of English.
Anyway, gotta go. I smell.
