Bilingual songs Cool

Hikki (宇多田ひかる) is pretty cool. I was listening to her song "Distance" I think, I like how she goes back and forth between Japanese and English lyrics. It's a really cool effect.

There was a movie about a decade ago directed by Shunji Iwai called 「スワロウテイル」or "Swallowtail Butterfly".　It takes place in a town called "Yentown" where everyone speaks a mixture of Japanese, Chinese, and English.　The result is really cool.　It's an awesome movie as well, but beware: lots of Iwai's movies are a little depressing at times. I saw a few other movies he directed, including 「花とアリス」(Hana and Alice), 「Love Letter」, 「リリイ・シュシュのすべて」(All About Lily Chou-Chou). I liked them all, but this was a few years back, so I'm not sure if my tastes have changed.

にほんの ドラマ

にほんの ドラマ みてほしい　(I want to see a Japanese drama)
でも、どれがいい、しりません
僕に いいドラマをRecommendして　おねがいします。

Densha Otoko　電車男　とても　おもしろかった！！

Food

Sushi is ok. Some kinds are gross...I'm thinking of this time at a Japanese レストラン where they had a sushi platter with different kinds of sushi. Tuna, shrimp, eel, salmon, other kinds of fish are mostly ok... but there was this weird looking brownish (?) one with a lot of green onions on it, and it was really sour and nasty. I gave it to my friend.

I really like the different kinds of katsu. Katsu is breaded fried meat, right? Like とんかつ is pork, uhh I forget the other ones. But I think they make chicken and beef katsu too. かつどん is tonkatsu with たまご on it. I like that.

にほんの snacks (おかし I think) も rockin' ですね。Pocky of course, and those bean things enclosed in soft flour, 「もち」 right? Those are so overpriced at M2M, but so good.

I'm also fond of the large number of snacks for kids, like "Koala March" or whatever. And snacks that look like little cars or that have pictures of Hello Kitty. They might not taste great, but they are fun to look at.

せんしゅう の しゅうまつ (last weekend)

せんしゅうの　どようびに　プローグラミング　コンテストを　しました。
じゅうにじから　ごじまで　CLIC ラボに　Javaプローグラミングを　しました。
たのしかったです。

ろくばん　(sixth place) に　おわりました。
Google mouse を　GET しました。

にほんご novelty

にほんごは、for many learners, seems to be a novelty.
When they first start, the class seems interesting and おもしろい。
As the difficulty increases they lose interest pretty fast. This is, of course, a common phenomenon.

Judging by the pace of our class, I can sort of see why this is the case. The people who are really interested in learning about the Japanese language and culture have already been exposed, to a quite large degree, to a lot of the idiosyncrasies of にほんご　and get past the initial learning stages with no trouble at all.

I get the impression that a lot of people are turned off because the pacing is a little quick, with a lot of vocab and not too much cultural immersion.
When I was in Japan this summer, every minute I felt like I was learning so much about にほんのculture and language (even when I wasn't doing anything!). It really is the feeling of immersion that you need to be really interested in learning about a language and culture.

Same with ちゅうごくご。　I'm a pretty pragmatic thinker, so I would never learn Chinese if I didn't feel a reason to. Even now I know very few people who only speak Chinese, so I don't have much interest in learning it. I'm starting to listen to some C-POP and Taiwan-Pop so I have a little more impetus. And why learn かんこくご？　That seems more practical to me than Chinese, since a lot of Korean people seem to speak exclusively in Korean to each other, and I want to know what they're saying. It's also a little novel, since I know lots of people study Chinese and Japanese but not Korean for some reason...

Japanese songs

My favorite part of class is listening to Japanese songs.
にほんのうた

I like J-POP, especially the girly kind and music from anime.
For some reason I like Asian pop singers better than American pop singers. Maybe because they're not all effeminate guys or degenerate into crack hos.
「くらっく　ほうず」ですか？

I think the coolest people in Japan listen exclusively to American and British bands. Girly music is for otakus and little girls. Then there's lots of in-between, for the majority of people.

I don't know what to think about Asian rap. It's kind of funny. But then again most American rap is pretty (unintentionally) funny. I like when rappers do duets with pop artists, those are pretty sweet.