ダニエルの冒険

I’m definitely back on top. New Approach Chapter 10 is much kinder to me. Check out these results from this week’s tests. 13/13, 14/14, 16/16. By the way, circle means “good” in Japan, so they use them instead of ticks on homework. A big swirly circle is really good. A circle with petals coming out of it (花丸, “hana-maru”, “flower-circle”) is really really good. I did not get a hana-maru but I did get 「すばらしい」 (“subarashii”) written, which means “wonderful”. The red stamp at the top right is a “hanko” (判子, also known as an 印鑑 “inkan”) I got made recently. In Japan, when you buy a house or get married or do anything else important that requires contracts to be signed, you use an registered inkan. Mine is not registered though, and is just a simple personal one that I use for homework and anywhere else that needs a signature.
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I got the results from one of my tests this week and it was 13/13. The other tests I did, I feel fairly confident about either full or close to full marks. I did really well with our kanji reading today (we were reading a newspaper article about Microsoft’s recent attempts to buy Yahoo) and though my list of unlearned words has grown from 200 to over 270 in the last two or three days, I feel like I’m making progress again. Maybe it really was the lack of sleep that got me last week, thank you Moonlight Nagara. Or maybe it’s my new high-peanut-butter-content-diet. Either way, I did well, and in the conversation class today I was flying through our work (first finished all the time, even repeating our conversations two or three times). I also did well in our song class, and ended up unconsciously singing out loud a pretty fast “rap” part from this song (Sunrise by Bennie K) during the song class, which surprised some people (hopefully in a good way).
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Recently I’ve noticed a few mistakes I’ve been making in Japanese and I believe I’ve found the cause. I’ll use two examples, related to pets.

The first is how you count pets. In Japanese, there are “counter” words, which you append to numbers. 10字 (ji) means “10 characters”. 5個 (ko) means 5 small things. 7本 (hon) means 7 long things (beer bottles, trains, pencils). 3台 (dai) means 3 machines (TVs, cars). ４人 (nin) means 4 people.

There are lots for animals. 羽 (wa) is for birds (and also rabbits, as monks long ago were only allowed eat birds, so they started counting rabbits like birds so they wouldn’t feel guilty eating them), 頭 (tou) is for large animals (it actually means “head”, as in “head of cattle”), 匹 (hiki) is for smaller animals (cats, dogs, etc). The problem lies within hiki. I have no problem when using it to say how many dogs I see on the street, but when I’m talking about my own cats at home, I keep using “nin” (人), the counter for people. I clearly consider my own cats as people on some level so I keep making that mistake.
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Here are some of the songs sung at karaoke this weekend. My favourite right now is Sakura no Toki by Aiko.
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The next day, Sunday, I woke up and came down stairs and saw that everything outside was covered in an inch of snow. We were planning on leaving at 10am and driving to Takasaki in Gunma to be there for 11am but Ayumi told me that she’d heard from Saharu that the trains were slow and so she’d be a bit late, and with the amount of snow outside we decided not to take the car and to get the train for safety’s sake.
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I had breakfast with everyone on Saturday morning and gave the family a Irish turf-made clock which they loved. After Kaori arrived at the house, herself, myself, Ayumi, and her parents headed out for Nikko, where Tokugawa Ieyasu is buried. I pointed out that Tokugawa Ieyasu was born in Okazaki and is buried in Nikko, and I had come from Okazaki and was then in Nikko.
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The Yamasa Speech Contest was Friday so the class all left the school in the morning and walked to the Civic Centre down the road. It was pretty good and my friend Scott took first prize with a speech about how Japanese language learners don’t actually interact with the native speakers in the country and just live in their own 外人世界 (gaijin-sekai, foreigner-world) at Yamasa, with people who speak their own native language. After the contest everyone was going to eat Yakiniku together but I had to excuse myself so I could get to Tokyo on time. I would have been able to do that if I’d got on the right train.
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There’s always been something about my friends from Gunma/Tochigi. I’ve never had a similar relationship in my life. I’m in contact with them all individually but when we meet up, we’re usually together in a group. Honestly, I usually prefer hanging out with my friends one at a time but the more of my Gunma friends I can meet together, the happier I am.
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We did two tests this week on Chapter 9 of our textbook, New Approach. In the first, I got 5/12, which is officially the lowest result I’ve ever gotten in any Japanese test ever in my life. Today we did the second test and the teacher looked through them and said 「みんな、ちょっと・・・！」 (“Everyone… hold on a minute…!!”) and handed them back to us to correct them during class. People didn’t do so well in it. I got about 4/12 by my marking.

I believe the problem is that this chapter has a lot of grammar which is either the same or very close to what we’ve studied before a long time ago. So long ago that it’s just part of our Japanese language and not something our brains have flagged for “being learned right now”. So when there’s a question asking me complete a sentence using the grammar we’re studying now, I just can’t see what it is that it wants from me.
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The zipper broke off my sheets recently so I informed the school (as I’m renting them) and when I came back to the apartment yesterday, all the bedding had been replaced, futon and everything. I finally got my sheets clean