Remember those Chinese people at that Chinese take-out restaurant I told you about? Yeah, well I’ve been eating there a lot lately. I’ve finally reached the stage of my addiction to where I eat there once a week. The only thing is…I feel kind of like a stalker.
Like, I know for a fact that they don’t speak English. They can’t even say simply numbers correctly (no offense, Chinese people, you’re still awesome :D). It’s just that, the other day, I started having suspicions. Like, what if they think I’m a creeper. Or what if they think I’m stalking them or something. I mean…am I?
Of course I’m not. I just like their food. But I swear, when I walked in the other day, I heard the guy tell the woman, “It’s that guy again.” Do any of you know any Chinese that sounds remotely like that (I don’t know if it’s Mandarin or some other version)? I’m pretty sure it’s not English. But you never know…
Whatev. Time to put my paranoia to rest.
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Wicked. Wicked. Wicked. I saw Wicked. It was on tour in English, and I saw it. Wicked. It was in wicked. I mean, I already had half the songs memorized before I went, but it was Wicked. Wicked. Wicked. Wicked. The most Wickedly Wickedest musical named Wicked you’ll ever Wickedly have the Wicked pleasure of Wickedly seeing. Wicked.
I felt kind of bad for breaking out of my immersion environment. Though, that’s a bit a weird since I break out of it all the time anyways…but, regardless, I still had this huge guilt trip. Then I remembered that when I was in Japan I saw a bunch of posters on the train advertising Wicked.
It turns out they released a Japanese version of the Wicked soundtrack on iTunes Japan. I listened to the little 30 second clips and was impressed, so I watched a few of them on YouTube. Dude. It was awesome. It’s a little difficult to digest at first if you’re used to the Engrish version (like me), but some of the songs are pretty good.
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I’ve also been poking around other parts of iTunes Japan. It turns out that the podcasts section is really a thousand times more awesome than I originally thought. Check out the video podcast section. There’s this one called ワールド•リポート. Flipping awesome. 5 minutes-ish, slightly educational, fun, and just plain awesome. And the two host(esses?) are awesome. After the end of one episode that was about some food/treat shop thingy, they commented on it. I have never heard so many ね’s in my whole life. Seriously. This ne? That ne? おいしいね！ Wow, ne. Ne, like, that was so cute, ne?! Let’s count how many times we can say ne is a sentence, ne? Ne, I could totally like beat you, ne. Ne, like, I win ne, you silly ne!…
Wow. Sorry. But there are all kinds of different podcasts. For me, I really wanted to watch the news for half an hour in the mornings, but, because my internet sucks, I was forced to find podcasts.
Anyways, that brings me to my next point. Have you heard of that Steve Pavlina guy that Khatz always talks about? Well, I read a few of his articles on waking up early. I never thought I could do it, but I’ve been waking up at 6am ever since. I have anki reps done w/o fail by 7:30 am. The discipline and other benefits gained from waking up early everyday are just awesome. I love them. I can get all kinds of things done. You should do it, too. I had always generally ignored advice on getting up early to do stuff on a regular basis because “I’ve tried that and me and mornings just don’t mix.” Ignore that feeling and just do it. It’s pure exhilaration.
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I’ve read that a few other people use Anki for school stuff, so I started doing that for two classes at the beginning of this semester. It worked for a while, and I was really getting a kick out of whipping out random dates in history class to impress my classmates (that’s a big motivational boost). But…it didn’t work out. I’ve quit doing it. They’re in separate decks than my kanji, and I don’t have enough motivation to keep up with it. Every day, I’m like “hmm, looks like I have a bit of history and weather/climate to do…PSYCHE! Let’s do Kanji!” So I quit. Plus, I had a lot of trouble trying to format information into questions, etc. Whatev. I’ll just study stuff the “normal” way and review my notes every week or something. It was an interesting trial run.
I’ll give you an update on “the kanjiposter” later. I’m in History class right now, so I don’t really have access to my camera or poster 😀
iNIHONGO 