jordwest

My quest to become fluent in Japanese began today. I’m taking Japanese classes for 6 hours per week, plus 2 extra hours of conversation practice. After one hour in class, and one hour of conversation class (with native Japanese speakers) I have already learned a lot more from the conversation class.

I remember while studying a little Japanese in high school I underestimated how difficult it would be to learn a language. I am hoping that these extra conversation classes will help. When learning a language, I think it helps to put it in context by actually conversing with a Japanese person – it takes away the whole academic aspect to the language. Japanese to the English speaker can sometimes feel like doing maths – it takes a while to understand, but then it just suddenly makes sense. Then you realise there are a zillion other rules (like English – the I before E rule is the most stupid spelling rule I’ve ever heard)

So vocab I learnt today in class:
どうぞ　よろしく　- Doozo Yoroshiku – Pleased to meet you

Thats all. From the conversation class I learnt:
いちご – Ichigo – Strawberry – Also the name of the main character in Bleach
みなさん – Mina san – Everybody

Awesome fun – and you get to meet so many people!

I’ve stopped using an alarm clock. Waking up to an alarm clock makes me feel like crap so I try to wake up using my body clock. I always feel less stressed – its like my body is prepared to wake up at a time that I tell it the night before.

Its great to see people having fun playing a game that you’ve created – not so fun when they get angry at the bugs :/

Its not that hard if you have the right tools.
I used to use Dreamweaver, now I’m experimenting with CakePHP and Notepad++, both of which are free. CakePHP is for creating web applications, but it can be used to very easily design a website with dynamic content. And – if you don’t think you can design the graphical layout, check out www.oswd.org