suntoad

On the plane back to Japan last week I was able to watch a movie in Japanese without benefit of any subtitles, and today I began reading a book in Japanese.

The Movie was Departing Osaka at 0:00, the book is ダーリングは外国人.

I’m pretty pleased with that.

The results came in yesterday and, congratulations me, I passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 3.

What’s bothering me is that I just barely passed. 65% cumulative when I had been hoping and expecting to get closer to 75% or 80%. Essentially, after a full year of studying and working at the language, my test scores were up by 6%.

I don’t know quite how to feel about this other than to say that studying on my own just isn’t working. So now I’m thinking about hiring a Japanese teacher and getting deep into the books again, but I am frustrated.

Still, we soldier on, right?

During the past month I have successfully refurbished an older (2003) eMachines box. I removed Windows and installed “Gusty” Ubuntu Linux and assorted software to re-make the machine into a Linux powered media pc.

I am using Miro for television and video podcasts, Audacity for audio recording, Skype for phone calls, and Ubuntu’s native software for CD and Mp3 playback.

This is an easy, fun, project, and I have been enjoying the results so much that my next computer, someday, will be a linux box from the ground up (as in, I’ll build it myself). For anyone who is as sick and tired of Windows as I was, I highly recommend switching to Linux.