So I apparently I will be appearing in the school newspaper... it's about participating in a hike around to six area universities as one of few international students, and mostly I think to encourage other international students to participate in it next year as well, but still!! The interview was in Japanese so it was a learning experience in expressing myself and how much farther I have to go...
Speaking of which I realized how much easier it is to advance in a language if you have some training in it/some of the basics down. I want to learn Guang Liang's 如果你还爱我 before the end of the year, and on nciku the other day I found a Chinese, translated, and pinyin-ed version of Alice in Wonderland which I was actually inspired to use as a text to learn. (I should have sprung the extra $100 for a dictionary that can do Chinese ><;; but I was too cheap...); thought recently about how easy Spanish would be because of English synergy, and saw a friend learning Korean through a Korean-Japanese text book (double the study!!). I realized I can pick out words and basically repeat them from Japanese and even Chinese songs, but while I can sing some Korean from sheer repetition I have no idea what it means. So I need to find a way to study or buckle down and actually get through the textbook I bought. I am also going to get serious about studying Japanese again, I checked out a lot of books and stories last night to study from; listening I think is my only strong point (I was acing most of the practice questions from the JLPT 1 CD I checked out), but even then I still need to expose myself to more and more words....
At the library here you can't check movies out... the reason is because you can copy them, which was exactly what I was intending to do hahaha, but it also means that it's hard to find anything good to watch since you can't look through a series of cards or aisles... So I think for Japanese movies I will either have to watch them online or rent them from the store. Either way I will be watching on my laptop so I guess it doesn't make too much of a difference, but still it's a little disheartening.
I have only a few more Korean and other movies left to watch on my harddrive and then I can go hardcore into improving and speaking to people. I don't know if I ever wrote about it, but I read a theory that the way we learn language is from hearing it in context and learning from how other people use words. It's kind of scary to think that maybe all these expressions are really just samples being selectively played back (maybe with new context and meaning, but you know how they say no idea is original!), but it would explain then, why my language use (writing style at the very least) is easily and tell-ably (I can't think of the word!!!! I've had so many of these moments... at one time I thought it was impossibly to forget your native language as an adult, but lately I haven't been so sure...) influenced by whichever book I read last, how babies learn to talk, and why my English ability notably degraded since I started hanging out with Emmie and them (just kidding!!! hahahaha. Although certain expressions like FAIL take the place of a lot of dialog, along with something Fagan used to say... I don't remember what it is though.)
Off to check out some more CD's (going to reformat my ipod soon, too much English and Epik High, not enough Japanese!! I want to start my day in Japanese from now on.), get to reading and translating and studying kanji. Tommorow is the first day of a huge festival (actually I think I might go to the opening ceremony for it tonight, which means I need to go eat now...) But yeah, something is happening and I'm taking off lol.
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