So, here’s the proof I ate pizza on my birthday…
I went to Shibuya to eat at Shakey’s, a chain started in California I think. Anyway, hopefully I’ll be eating more and better of this when I get back home.
On Thursday, one of my friends from America, Josh, came to Tokyo to visit so I’ve been hanging out with him.
One of my friends from Middlebury, Andre, who graduated a couple years ago and is now working in the country side of Japan teaching English, is coming to Tokyo to visit so I’ll be seeing him tomorrow.
Today, I was in Shibuya and I finally opened an account at Tsutaya which is a sort of Japanese version of Blockbuster. It’s a place where you can rent DVDs, CDs, video games, etc. It costs about 350yen (about $3) to rent a CD for a week. So, I now have rented five CDs of Japanese artists that I’ve been meaning to get.
If you think CDs are expensive in America, you should see Japan. One music CD usually costs around 3000yen! That’s about $27. Perhaps that’s why Tsutaya and other rental places are so comprehensive. Also, the funny thing is that at the counter where you rent the CDs, they have stacks and stacks of blank CDs that you can buy. They realize that everyone is just renting the CDs and then ripping them to their computer or just copying them on to blank CDs, lol.
Even though it’s break, I’ve been trying to keep up my studies of Japanese a bit. This “studying” involves mostly talking to my Japanese friends in Japanese, reading Japanese manga (comic books) and watching Japanese TV. Admittedly though, I have been studying vocabulary. When I come across a word I don’t know while reading manga or talking to my Japanese friends online, I look it up in an online Japanese-English dictionary and then copy it into this program Mnemosyne (http://mnemosyne-proj.sourceforge.net/) which is a flashcard program that shows me the vocabulary at varying intervals depending on whether or not (and how well) I knew the word last time it came up. It’s pretty useful for keeping track of words and also learning them. I have about 365 new words entered in now.
The other thing I’m doing is studying kanji (the Japanese characters of which one needs to learn 2000 to be able to read properly). I found a really nice site (http://kanji.koohii.com/) which is based off of Heisig’s method of learning kanji and is similar to the Mnemosyne program I was talking about before in that it keeps track of which words you knew or didn’t know and then shows you that word next time at varying intervals depending on how you did before. There truly are too many kanji, lol.
Anyway, it’s getting pretty late now so I’m going to go sleep in order to wake up tomorrow to meet up with Andre.