A Milestone?

I haven't been blogging for very long or very often, but today I feel I have reached a significant milestone as a blogger. Today's previous post attracted the first spam comment. I've turned on word verification for comments. Hopefully this will deter Professor Howdy and his friends.

「日本はどう？」

Where one might ask "did you have a good time?" in English, in Japanese, the question I usually hear is a more open-ended "how was it?" My 3-year-old equivalent vocabulary seems to cover most cases well enough; I tend to stick with using "good" or "fun", sometimes throwing them both together for "goodfun", and this seems to be sufficient. But yesterday, when a coworker asked, "How was Japan?", it was not my vocabulary that made answering difficult. How can I sum up five months of exploring, traveling, studying, sightseeing, working, learning, and living in Japan? "Goodfun" just doesn't seem to do it justice. Tomorrow I will return home and although I am very much looking forward to the comfort of familiar places and people, I will miss this place and these people.

I don't think I would have it any other way.

Goodbye Japan. Thanks for all the goodfun times.

台風

For me, the typhoon has meant little more than crowded trains and some rain, but it is having more severe effects on others. Read more about the typhoon in the news.

More is Less

The more Japanese I learn, the less I feel like I know. For example, when I first arrived I was having trouble understanding anything spoken at a normal rate. Now, after 4 months in Japan, I am often able to group what I hear into distinct words and phrases, turning one featureless blob of sound into smaller, more manageable (although no more understandable) chunks. I can often pull out a few (typically small) chunks I can understand (usually things like 'today' or 'I think'), but with most sentences, that still leaves me with about a dozen words I don't understand. That's 12 times as many things that I don't understand!