日本語

こんにちは！

Let's get down to business. Japanese kicked my ass tonight.

I don't know if it was because I haven't done it in a while, or what, but it was rough. Some of the things in the lesson were NOWHERE in the preceding lessons, so I was super confused.

You'll have to forgive me if this one is a little short...I'm kind of discouraged.

I took phonetic notes, and wrote in the Japanese script, but I'm going to wake up tomorrow and, for lack of a better phrase, talk to myself. I was sooooo good in the beginning, but tonight...I was just off. It doesn't help that Japanese is a weird language anyway.

I had some help with the writing. I've got the Random House Japanese-English/English-Japanese Dictionary. It is a BEAUTIFUL piece of work. Of course all of the conjugations aren't there, but once you learn how to write 'imasu ka' and 'desu ka,' everything begins to stick, and it becomes a matter of "copying and pasting". Some of those characters took FOREVER to build. I don't know the proper way to write them just yet (stroke orders and whatnot), so tonight, it was as if I were drawing lots of pretty pictures.

Japanese is just like Thai. Don't look for many spaces. Look for lonnnnnnng lines of characters.

Tomorrow I deserve a break. I'm thinking Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and/or French. Romance languages all DAY.

さようなら,

Your Favorite Polyglot