Cramming my brain

So I have been using Smart.fm, the site that contains the IKnow study program. But I have run into an impasse. The program gives me like 12 words a day to learn and I have been having a really hard time trying to keep up. 12 words doesn't sound like a lot but that is 84 a week, 336 words a month. Now this is a little bit of an exaggeration because there are only 200 words in each unit and I only work on one unit at a time. More over after I finish going through all the 200 words the program will continue requiring me to learn and relearn these 200 words until I have gone over each one several times over a recommended month. so really its like learning 6.7 words a day but not really. Ok back on track... My problem is that I am not that great at straight up memorization so does any one have some suggestions on study methods (other than flash cards, I use them constantly) that may help me out? Thanks a lot!

Dream

Last night I had an odd dream. I get rejected from the JET program. So I decide to take the money that I have been saving and go to Japan any ways. I buy my ticket, which costs a measly 50 bucks (I am budgeting for a $2000.oo ticket), hop on the plane, and fly over there. The flight only takes a hour in the dream. Once the plane lands, I decide to walk around Japan. In my through the city that I landed in, I some how manage to get to an old country road that is totally abandoned. After walking a little while I come upon two individuals who talk to me in Japanese, Which I some how understand clearly. Next a third person walks up to us and tells me that I need to speak to him in English because my Japanese is terrible. While speaking to him I learn that he is my real life friend Toby. At this point he shows me around the city and explains what he has been doing for the past year in Japan and talks about how he has fallen in love with the culture and has decided to never come back. After that I decide that it is time for me to come back to the USA and I tell him that I will come see him on the weekends because it is so cheap and easy to get there. When I arrive at the airport I run in to my professor, Cook Sensei. She asks me if I enjoyed visiting, to which I respond, "that I love this place. It just makes me sad that I cannot stay." At which point Ashley wakes me up by turning on the lights to find some cloths that she needed. When I woke up I was filled with disappointment. I wonder what Sigmund Freud would say about that.

sexy pictures

I was thinking of some ways to get more hits on my blog when this thought hit me... If I saved all of my images to photobucket and named the files using sexual names, then embedded them in to the blog instead of uploading them would that boost my hits? wouldn't browsers like Google's image search pull these up when they searched for scandalous pictures? hmmm have to try that some time.

Adventures in Mississippi

I went to Mississippi a few weeks ago and I just remembered that I have not written about it. So, after work I drove five hours to my mothers house in Mosspoint Mississippi on the coast. Upon arriving I crashed out until morning. Upon waking up I had to make my way out to the largest store (Walmart) in that tiny ass town to purchase jeans because all of my cloths were dirty before I left and Ashley had kindly taken all of our dirty clothes to her parents house. It was like walking in to the Twilight zone. All of the men and some of the women seemed to look like Limmy from the band Motorhead.

So I start looking for paints in my size and I start to notice another trend. All of the pants sizes seem bigger around than they are long. I wear a 33X34 pants size and all the pants were marked things like 38X28. After looking for about 15 minutes I find a pair that will work and start up to the counter. On my way I see some neat fedoras and decide that I didn't know which I wanted so I bought them both.

The last time I was in Mississippi I went to this great PoBoy restaurant that use to be a Chinese restaurant, that was run by Koreans. At this restaurant you can order PoBoys of various sizes from 6" - 36" and they have all the good Asian condiments such as my favorite, Saracha sauce. I tell my mother and step father that I would really like to go find that place again and my mother declines going but my step father says that he would go with me. It took about an hour but we eventually found it again (it had been about 2 years since I had been there last). I walk in and start talking to the lady at the counter, who seems to have some difficulty understanding my questions, when a man walks out at starts(in broken English) impatiently asking what I want. I tell him that I want a 12" shrimp PoBoy only lettuce at which point the lady starts to write down my order and the man turns to her and screams what I said into her ear. "12 INCH SHRIMP POBOY! ONLY LETTUCE!!! she finishes writing it down, ignoring the man and takes it to the back. I get my sandwich a few minutes later, put some saracha sauce on it and head out.

Unfortunately, I only was able to stay for 2 days, but on the second day fulfilled the last objective that I had come to do, other than seeing my mother, walking on the beach, and shrimp PoBoys. I went out to find an alligator. Mississippi has 3 major natural resources: Mosquito's, Spanish moss, and alligators. None of these things are very hard to find but I had forgotten that I was still technicaly winter time and Alligators were fairly dormant at that time. The first place we went to find them was a place called Sou Bayu. We went here for several reasons: It is the home of one of my step fathers best friends, it has a bar on the property (so we can drink while looking for the alligators), and this is the last place that I saw alligators in the wild... about 10 of them last time. oh and did i mention that this place is a mobile home park too? oh yah classy! So we get there and grab some beer (bud or miller are the only choices... sigh) and walk out of the bar to talk to the locals and find some gators! to no avail unfortunately, all of them were sleeping where ever alligators sleep in the winter. So we left. On the way home my stepfather had the idea to go to an alligator ranch to at least get some pictures so we did. Not quite as much fun as finding wild ones but at least I was able to get my pictures.


After that I headed back to Birmingham so I could get back to the grind of studying and working. It is always lots of fun to go to odd little towns and see the local color, take in the local cuisine, and find the local wild life. I hope to be able to do it again soon.

exam results!

Yay I passed my first Japanese exam with flying colors! five pages and a Hiragana chart in 50 minutes and I received a 93.25% woot Ill take what I can get! so now it is time to start the next half of my semester with a bang and work with the Iknow.co.jp site. I would like to finish one section of the Japanese 2000 series by the end of the semester. It is only learning 200 words oh and I would like to finish the Katakana section on it as well because I think I have my Hiragana down fairly well. But just to be sure I will finish the Hiragana practice on the site. I'm about 50% done with that and should be finished by next week.

Blog PR

I want my numbers to go up on my blog so I think I need to do some PR for it. What am I doing about it currently? Well I am attempting to post at least once every 3 or 4 days. I am reading other blogs and posting on them including blog sights other than blogger.com, such as Live journal.com, thoughts.com, wordpress.com, etc. I have added an updater to my blog on my face book page. So I am thinking about ways of getting my numbers up. I have come up with a few ideas but my favorite one is to take out a personal ad for my blog. Though this could bring in the wrong kind of attention so I need to be careful about how I word it. we will see...

Japanese Midterm

yesterday I had my Japanese midterm and I am not really sure how well I did on it. I thought that I would blow the test away the night before but when I started to do it I began to have second opinions. The answers seemed to come easy enough. I hope that my second guessing is just lack of confidence. I guess we will have to wait and see. On the bright side at least I now know what the lay out of my sensei's exams are so I will be better prepared for the next one.

Thinking in Japanese

It is really surprising how much you can say with only a few words in your repertoire. I have been attempting to make sentences with the words that I currently know and in doing so I not only found out what words I need to learn next but I get a great boost of confidance that I may be able to comunicate enough to eat or communicate on the most basic levels if I make it to Japan.

Anime

The Japanese will make an anime about anything. Case in point Yakitate!! Japan (fresh baked Japan) which is about making bread. Yes 69 episodes of bread baking battles. By the way, this is actually a fairly funny anime even with the ridiculous subject matter. But I digress, as the Japanese mesh together new ideas to make original anime they some times hit on a really odd but neat concept that is not embarrassing to tell your friends that you spent 2 hours watching it. Which leads me to my next selection.

A friend of mine told me about this series that he enjoyed Toshokan Sensō (Library wars) and it is really neat. Basic plot, in the future the government begins destroying books (I know what you are thinking this plot has been done a million times and it has but some incarnations are better than others) and librarians take it upon themselves to fight back by basically becoming elite military forces complete with fatigues and fully automatic weapons. This concept hits home because my mother was a librarian and my ex-girlfriend was one as well. I can see my mother supporting the idea but I can see my ex picking up a gun and saying that no government bastard is going to take the Kage Baker series from me! any ways it is a good series that I would recommend watching.

Away from computer

Sorry about not posting lately My truck is having a new clutch put in so I am stuck at my girlfriends house, so I cant use my desk top. I left my power supply for my laptop in Mississippi so I cant use it (more on my adventure in Mississippi to come). My girlfriends laptop has a nasty key logger that I haven't had time to remove, so I wont use that computer. and I have not had time to go to the library to use their internet. ah well Ill make sure to get some of my posts up today because I am off.

better than Anki

There is a seemingly better flash card generator based on the same principles of Anki, but it has made the cards for you. The web sight Iknow is really cool it has a lot of lessons not only for Japanese but for several other languages as well. In the lessons are the words, an audio pronunciation, pictures, scentances and other stuff. It is also based on memorization curve like Anki but in a nicer package. Oh and the best part is that it is free.

Most cultures have a food that we find difficult to fathom eating: haggis, Tripe, fish eyes, etc. I wonder what Americans eat that the Japanese find odd or unpalatable?

randomness

This little girl is the essence of American randomness.

Anki

I have been reading many blogs to learn about studying Japanese as well as JET and other things that interest me. While reading the blog Hopeless romantic The blogger suggests several study methods that I think will be really useful one of these is a method of learning kanji, when I get it and use it for a while I will write a small review on it to tell you all what I think about it. But for now I am going to talk about a really cool program that he suggested, Anki. This program is great! it is used to make flash cards that adhere to research concerning memory studys and the amount of time that you should wait between reviewing older material. Basicaly if you know some information on a flash card well, then the next time the program uses that specific card will be in the more distant futre than the cards that you have more difficulty with. The best part is that it is free! but there is a place to donate and I would recomend that everyone does because this is made by an individual and not a corporation and the product will surely become a valuable tool in your self study regiment. So go out and try Anki! It is a great program.

sub-piphonie 2

here is the next sub-piphonie in the series: Never let anything as common and easily obtained as money get in the way of something as important as a good friendship.

A Friend of mine owes me a nice amount of money and unfortunately he is so embarrassed about it that he has stopped talking to me. it has been a few months now and I have finally caught up with him and told him that he owes me nothing. Unfortunately he still feels that he does and I think it is going to take a lot more persuasion to get him to hang out with me again and that is a shame because we have been Friends for over six years... so to all you out there: Money is everywhere, all you have to do is go get it, but good friends are hard to come by. So unless it is a huge amount of money that they owe you like $5000 (why would you lend a friend that much money?). Don't let it tarnish your friendship. that goes for the other way around too if you owe some one money don't just disappear, it makes people think you don't care about them.

Sub-piphonies

This year I have had several small Epiphanies that have happened to a million people a million times but I feel they need to be said in case some have not experienced (or realized that they experienced) them. I will start a new label called "Sub-piphonies" and hopefully they will help some people out as I deliver them or at least make people think or reflect. The first thought in this series is: Human emotion is the most urological thing that I have ever encountered. One might think that this is common sense but I never knew how true it was until I had some experiences recently and after thinking back this statement proves its self many many times in what I have seen and experienced over the years. And it can be any emotion: anger, greed, happiness, sorrow, elation. Absolutely any of them. More over any combination of emotion seems to be compatible with any other at some time or another. Emotions are very odd things :)

Snow?

If you ever come to Birmingham and talk to people, about snow, who are above the age of twenty, that have lived here their entire life, about eighty percent of them will begin recounting the "Winter Storm of 1993" where 13 inches accumulated for about five days and brought this city to a stand still. Needless to say we do not get much snow here, but when we do every one freaks out. For the last few days I have heard of this cold front that is bringing snow to Birmingham. I am usually skeptical of winter weather advisory but apparently they were right this time. I woke up this morning to my boss calling me ... unfortunately I can only assume that he had the phone in his pocket and accidentally called me an hour before my alarm went off. Any how, in my groggy daze I looked out of the window and was blinded by the reflection off of snow that had covered every where. It really is a beautiful sight if you are not use to it. Still sleepy I went back to bed until my alarm went off. After explaining why I could not stay home just because it was snowing to my girlfriend, I got ready for work and walked on out side to my truck. By that time the snow was melted off of the roads so I had no difficulty going in to work. It continued snowing for hours until about noon when it stopped. The sun came out, the temperature increased, and by 1:30 you could not even tell that it had snowed. Yesterday we had probably 1700 visitors to our mu seam, and that has been standard for the last few weekends, but today due to the snow, I bet we only had 150 visitors all day. People here are so afraid of the snow that they postponed all plans for some thing that was gone by 1:30 and we don't close until 6:00. It really is amusing to watch people react to life. I really do hope that I get to go to Sapporo and experience snow enough to get tired of it.

This is the snow at around 10:30

And this is a picture at 1:30... man I wish it had stayed longer.