Flickr got more love today. No time to talk about it; tagging took long enough, and I have a big final tomorrow! Just look:
Rice-planting study trip photos
Spent last Saturday with my host family and took pitiful few photos. Oh well, here they are:
Dazaifu with my Host Family photos
Way back in January I wrote about the courses I thought that I would take. The list hasn't changed that much, but now that the semester is nearly over, you could say they've solidified a bit.
- Cultural Evolution of Japan
- Enculturation and Education in Japan
- Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture
- Urban Psychology in Asia
- Linguistic Description of Japanese
- Japanese Speaking
- Kanji
- Independent Study
The first five meet once a week. The next two meet twice a week. The last is a pseudo-class: there's no set class period, but I dedicate 5-7 hours every Monday to this project.
This Saturday I visited my host family and did lots of fun things. One of the least interesting was setting up my cell phone for watching television. They broadcast television over 1seg here, so I can watch for free. But since the feature was hidden behind 4+ "please press OK" dialogs, I wanted native speakers to do it for me to make sure that I wouldn't agree to something that would cost extra.
Anyway, it's been a mixed experience so far. I've only gotten reception of one channel from my room, and it's not a channel I'd normally watch: the current show features two women embroidering their purses and sharing them with what appear to be neighborhood friends, and the previous program was a cartoon grandmother sharing her cooking secrets.
Despite this, what I love is that there is closed captioning for all of this. It scrolls by faster than I can read all of it, but I can catch some known kanji this way, and can also quickly scan it for the sentence structure based on particles and spacing.
Just another plot to up my exposure for this last month before I go.
Edit: Here's how it works while the phone is docked, which is convenient for home use.
I was away all weekend on a study trip, so if you tried to call over the weekend (ahem...), that's why I didn't respond. I really do have Skype on all the time when I'm here!
Oh yeah, I was on hiatus.
The dorm is right next to an elementary school and playground, so I'm becoming very used to never having silence with an open window during the weekend. They seem to have a game which involved one or more kids screaming at the top of their lungs something like "MOOOOOOOOIIIEEEEE!!!" and then everybody responds with "RRREEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYY!" It reminds me of Marco-Polo, but with words I don't understand.
P.S. I think the game just broke down. Now they're just screaming constantly.
We talked a little bit about food today in my "Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture" class. Here is a paraphrase of what someone said after a comment about accidentally getting fish sausages: "It's like they take fish and disguise it as all the foods that I want to eat."
