Thursday: Reentry workshop, which was pretty useless. I am expecting reentry culture shock to be a bit worse than my adjustment on arriving here, though ( Read more... )

The upside to all of yesterday's drama was I got a good night's sleep, and felt refreshed this morning. In the afternoon, I had a marketing class field study at Kokuyo, which was nifty. After dinner, I enjoyed watching Pressure Study (a rather strange Japanese quiz show) with Kyoko-san, with us both trying to guess the answers and translating ( Read more... )

Lovely weather this weekend. Too bad I have so much homework ( Read more... )

I could have stayed home and worked today, but I decided I needed a break, so I went into town and wandered around Ueno and Akihabara. It was fun. I had lunch in a pash cafe [sic] (unfortunately smoky, but the pasta was good and the waitresses were friendly), did a decent job of conversing in Japanese, bought an extremely tasty pastry from some ( Read more... )

Tuesday: Talked about "foreigner talk" in sociolinguistics class. Among other features, English speakers are a lot more casual and use a lot less grammar when talking to English learners, whereas Japanese speakers do the opposite (more grammar, more polite wording). Japanese learners also tend to use more grammar than necessary (trying to ( Read more... )

Today, for marketing class, we went to visit the headquarters of Avex in Harajuku (unfortunately, I forgot my camera at home, so I have no pictures from the field trip). We watched a promotional video, talked to their representative about Avex marketing strategy, then recorded some karaoke in their practice studio (which is equipped with a fairly ( Read more... )

今日じしんがあった、でもみじかくて強くなかった。 そとはいいてんきだから、ごごは外で勉強した。 勉強の間に順天堂大学から音楽を聞こえできた。　そして勉強を終わって、順天堂大学へさんぽに行きました。 一見、今日は順天堂大学のはだかまつりの中だ。 (カメラをうちでわすれちゃった。) ぜんぶよかった日。

（日本語の先輩： しっぱいがあったら教えてください。）

Translation ( Read more... )

Today was an odd but busy day. I woke up, ate breakfast, missed the bus twice, took the train to Ebisu, bought books, ate lunch at the aptly-named Bagel&Bagel, spent an excessive amount of time hanging out in Roppongi (for no reason in particular), encountered another discount English-language bookstore and bought a few more books, saw Pirates of ( Read more... )

The trip to Okinawa was a blast. Quick recap ( Read more... )

Today was a rather lousy day. I had a test in kaiwa, did all right on the listening but totally screwed up the conversation part. Definitely didn't practice enough. Conversation teaches you how hard a language is... up the speed a bit and everything you learned has a tendency to get lost in the wake. I also missed taking a kanji test that I ( Read more... )