Also, the redesign of my site Learn That Language Now is coming along. I finally got a finished copy of my new ebook that I wrote (a 30 day training course for learning languages) from a graphic designer who spiced it up and made it look really nice. Now all I have to do is fill in some last bits of content on the new site design and set up some back end coding in order to handle automatic delivery of ebooks once a customer has bought one (before and now I just manually send an e-mail to someone once I see they have ordered a copy and paid for it).

My other website projects are coming along. I am slowly getting various systems of people working together running so hopefully in a week or two, I will have a smooth system that can output a high number of sites in a short period of time. It is somewhat of an investment on my part since I have to pay to have these sites created and promoted before I begin to see a profit from them but I am hopeful that it will be profitable. If nothing else, it is a very good learning experience.

Also the French video learning website I am creating with my friend Michael is almost at the point that we can open the doors to customers. I had to work out some kinks with the back end payment system that took a few days but tonight I finally got it working so I am very pleased with that.

The German studying is coming along. I have decided to do a lesson every few days instead of a lesson everyday since this will allow me to focus more on each lesson and learn everything in it. It will also take some pressure off me so I won’t feel bad if I don’t end up studying one day because I have to work late on various issues coming up in my work projects. In any case, I am almost finished unit 4 now. I am feeling a lot better about some grammar points that I remember having problems with back in high school. For example, feminine nouns in the nominative case take the definite article “die” and masculine nouns in the nominative case take the definite article “der”, however, in the dative case, feminine nouns take the “der” article! As you can imagine, this can get pretty confusing. I think the Foreign Service Institute program works out quite well for this point because it has drills that are just so repetitive that you cannot help but learn the grammar point. It is a kind of mindless drilling that seeps the grammar point into your mind so that it feels natural after a certain point. For this reason, I now have a pretty good handling of the feminine noun switching to “der” for just the dative case.

Also, I am still picking up words in Tagalog from one of my workers who is in the Philippines. I am able to learn them pretty quickly because I get to use them in a real context as I am talking to him about work. This continues to confirm the idea that it is much easier to learn a new language when you have additional meaningful context surrounding the words (rather than just studying them in an unnatural environment like a vocabulary list on a piece of paper in a book).

In any case, hopefully work will continue to go well for the rest of this week and I can start getting some projects towards the stage where I can present them to customers (the redesign of my Learn That Language Now site and the French video learning site, in particular!)

Anyway, the movie I saw this time was Kaiji The Life Reversal Game (カイジ 人生逆転ゲーム). It was actually a pretty good movie, I liked it a lot. It involved a lot of interesting card playing which reminded me of my younger days when I played Magic: The Gathering a lot. The basic plot is that Kaiji, a young male, has to pay a ton of money because his friend who took out a loan from a loan shark failed to repay it and so because Kaiji was foolish enough to sign on as a co-signer he owes quite a bit of money. The loan shark suggests he goes on this cruise where he plays a card game that could earn him all the money he owes the shark. He ends up losing and becomes basically a mine worker for this huge corporation and eventually has to work his way out by eventually going through weird trials (walking across a 3 inch wide beam thousands of feet above the ground between two buildings in a city) until he can play another kind of card game against one of the top guys in the company that owns him.

Anyway, click on this link to get a feeling for the movie, it’s a preview for Kaiji Life Reversal Game (カイジ 人生逆転ゲーム).

I want to see more Japanese movies here in the theaters. Now that my Japanese is at a pretty high level, I am able to follow the story along without any major problems. It is very interesting to have the experience of watching current Japanese movies coming out in Japan and seeing them in theaters here in Tokyo. Luckily the film industry here is developed enough to make decent quality movies (unlike perhaps India (Bollywood) and Nigeria (Nollywood) although one might say that these film industries are also specializing in their own particular way).

In any case, going to the “late show” was pretty nice because there weren’t a ton of previews and there was hardly anyone else in the movie theater. The other times I have gone to movies here in Japan, the movie theater has always been packed. This time, however, there were only maybe 15-20 other people in a theater that could easily sit over a hundred. It was a pretty good theater so the screen was nice and big, too. So, I’ll have to remember the “late show” next time I want to see a Japanese movie.

Work has been continuing along nicely and hopefully I will begin to see some profits from the work in the near future. I have even started to learn some Filipino from one of my workers in the Philippines. They speak many languages in the Philippines but probably the two most popular languages are Tagalog and Cebuano. So far I have learned some phrases like “magandang gabi” (“good evening” in Tagalog) and “maayung gabie” (“good evening” in Cebuano). Also, “paalam” (“bye” in Tagalog) and “salamat” (“thanks” in Tagalog). Then, even more complicated: “maraming salamat” (“many thanks” in Tagalog).

Hopefully I will continue to pick up some phrases this way. I would like to take a trip to the Philippines someday. If I do decide to go, hopefully I will have a good base of words that I can use and then quickly learn the grammar so I can make basic conversation.

In any case, I will continue to push on in my efforts and hopefully start to generate some money from the projects I am in the process of creating.