オレがヤツらをたおす！

[ORIGINAL POST]

The Japanese Speech Contest was today and it was great. I'm glad that I went to see it and I stilldon't have any regrets not participating this year because I don't really have much to talk about, especially in Japanese. Come on... I'm not known for talking... I'm happy being the quiet, good-natured doormat type. Lots of good topics and even better speakers... makes me wonder what I've been doing up till now. I'm not even sure I'm physically able to speak any faster than I can right now. I'll admit - saying stuff like みられる and ちつじょ（秩序）is hard!

I know I don't speak well, but that only strengthens my resolve. Hopefully my "20 kanji a week" plan will pay off eventually. Here's the short version of my kanji plan:


1) The more kanji I learn and the faster I learn it, the less time I'll waste studying it in the classroom. And there's no way I can ever learn the entire Joyo Kanji List (常用漢字表) in class. In other words,the sooner I learn all the kanji I ever need to know, the more time I'll have for learning the REALLY hard stuff like grammar, vocabulary, and honorifics. It's one less thing I have to worry about. Helpful links: Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server, Learn the Japanese Kanji

2) The sooner I learn kanji (trying to remember all the readings), the sooner and easier it'll be learning new words. Just today I was looking over someone's speech and I was able to pronounce 「内容」, so I asked "What does ないよう mean?" and the guy answered, "contents". Makes sense... 内 = "inside"; 容 = "contain / appearance". If you ask me, recognizing the kanji and knowing how to pronounce the kanji in compounds counts as a victory. Helpful links: Quizzes on Commonly-used Japanese Words

3) The sooner I learn words, the sooner I can read books, newspapers, and magazines to solidify my grasp of the grammar. And that's really all there is to learning a language, right? Helpful links:POPjisyo.com, アサヒ・コム


It was also good seeing my old JAPN 320 classmates (who didn't recognize me immediately)... they were great too.

What wasn't great? I would have liked an intermission (I was hungry and nervous and tired and I wasn't even participating!). Also there was one guy who already won some prize (he was good but I'm sure he had some unfair advantage), and then when he won something from the raffle, he was all "I don't need another dictionary! I have three dictionaries at home!"... I don't know about you but I thought that was pretty rude. It was being given away and he said he didn't want it... and I'm sure there were many people (myself included) who would have wanted it!

And before I forget... CONGRATS TO FIORE FOR WINNING THE DAMN THING!!! (...even though he's probably not going to read this.) Others from our class won stuff too, but I already forgot who won what. We're all awesome anyway.

ONG-BAK!!! (...and some other stuff)

[ORIGINAL POST]

Man. Today I just saw the movie Ong-Bak with my brother, thankfully in its original Thai language with English subtitles. I can honestly say, without the slightest fear of being accused of hyperbole, that it is the most mind-blowingly, super-fantastically, time-stoppingly AWESOME movie I have ever seen,or will ever see, in my entire life. The things Tony Jaa does... I swear. Wow. Now, the movie experience would have been perfect if some jerk wasn't kicking the back of my seat everytime the guy did something amazing... which was pretty much all the time. And seeing him nail guys in the head with flying elbows kinda made me want to try that on that jerk. I'm planning on seeing it again with a friend and / or my cousin next week. I don't know if I'm ever getting that DVD I bought on eBay though because the seller replied in an e-mail, "some mail has been lost / stolen"... just great.

Let's see what else happened:


Wednesday

I didn't have class that day so I told my cousin to take me to his school, Cal Poly Pomona. It was the school I was going to go to (my brother graduated there), but the Japanese program wasn't great. So anyway, it's... very big... and they have a recreation place not unlike our Pit (before it was closed down, that is). Of course, I was good enough at the games I played (including a game I haven't ever played before ) that I gathered more than a few crowds and met some cool people.

I probably should have done some homework first because I had two big projects due on Thursday...


Thursday

I slept at around 3:45 am and woke up at 7:00, not feeling as miserable as I thought I would be (and for the record, the least number of hours I slept was 2... and of course that was because I had someproject due in a matter of hours).

Would you believe I still had homework in addition to the project? That turned out to be fun, actually. It was like a puzzle, and I was able to figure it out on the two buses to school. It turns out I was learning Swahili...

Language lab! Winnie gave me something incredibly cool and cute. How like her.

In Japanese class, Fioré was teaching everyone (or at least, just the girls) how to write Korean. I wish I got a chance to ask him some things because there are lots of Korean words I've learned (from the dozens of k-dramas I've watched) and I would have liked to see how they were written in Hangul. And before that he was showing how in Chinese, all the characters have only one pronunciation, and how tones are important, giving the tired old "ma" example. Bah, I could have told anyone that. Ok, well I know he's just a more popular, better-looking, successful version of me (if I can even be compared to him), but his knowledge of two foreign languages (not counting Japanese) compared to my one(counting Japanese) makes me feel less special. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the class who just knows English, and you know... there's a part of me that always hated my parents for not ever teaching me Tagalog. It wasn't a problem up until high school and including today. When I think about the number of opportunities I missed or the friends I didn't get to make because I didn't know Tagalog, I feel like crying... or punching walls. And now all I hear from my parents is "If you can learn Japanese now, you can learn Tagalog now." So I'm supposed to waste time as an adult learning something I should have been born with? What a load of crap!

...and after Japanese class I went home and to my surprise I didn't have to pay for the bus to El Monte Station because it was packed, or something. I still had to pay for the bus from the station to my house, but that's still $1.50 saved. Woo-hoo.


Friday

Spent most of the day wishing it was Saturday so I could go see Ong-Bak.

I also did a little translation job for someone. It was a good exercise.


Saturday

After Ong-Bak, my brother installed that bigger harddrive (leaving me with some... tens of dollars). Now I don't have to worry about running out of space when I capture shows from TV. The original plan was to copy my current (C:) drive to this bigger harddrive, but after about 4 hours of waiting, we found out it didn't work because the harddrive was too big for the program... without the patch. So he gets the patch but says we have to start all over. I didn't want to wait anymore, and I'm sure he didn't want to stick around any longer than he had to, so we went with Plan B: get rid of my CD burner and put it in that slot. I still have my DVD burner and I don't really burn CDs anymore, but if I needed to burn a CD I could still use the DVD burner.


Time to go to Target again...

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

[ORIGINAL POST]

Today in my first class, I got the instructions for the second assignment even though the due date for the first assignment is still weeks away! I'm not looking forward to either of them.

Then in my second class, I struggled through a mid-term. It was multiple choice, sure, but choosing between things like "acute / chronic exercise", "resistance / endurance training", and "life expectancy / life span" just killed me. And I just know that if I didn't have to memorize the Japanese roleplay I would have done at least a little better...

Oh, but the fun didn't stop there! Winnie was at the language lab so I thought, "Well, today's not all bad..." But when I was about to leave, I realized I couldn't find that yellow attendance slip! After making a whole scene, I just ended up filling out another one. You know, it's kind of funny how I always act so clumsy with that one piece of paper - but only when Winnie's around... uh, heh... *nervous laugh* By the way, I found that yellow paper real quick... I was using it as a bookmark for the Japanese book! Though I suppose I am a little lucky that I finished my mid-term early enough (such as it is) that I was able to finish the language lab assignment before 1:00 because I don't think that other guy would have been so cool about it.

My Japanese roleplay was pretty bad... just incomprehensible in every way... and not that I don't like Jason but I WANT A NEW PARTNER ALREADY! Because hey, it wasn't my idea to say ガキ instead of 子供... I heard Zabuza say it when referring to Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura, so I had an idea of how it was used... but by the time I remembered to point it out it was too late and it would have taken too long to explain, and without the episode playing, my own comments wouldn't have held much value anyway.

On the plus side, I downloaded all 16 episodes (700 mb each!) of the k-drama Full House, and I don't feel bad about wasting space on a third DVD-R (six 700 mb episodes can fit on one DVD-R, so there's only 4 episodes on the third) because I also got the Full House Extras, interview, and OST! I still have to watch them before I burn them to DVD, though, since those subtitles could use some cleaning up.

Also I made my first eBay purchase yesterday. It's the movie Ong Bak (aka Thai Warrior) on DVD with English subs. I heard it was all sorts of awesome so I just had to get it! And it's a good thing that guy accepts money orders because I don't have a credit card and I don't use PayPal. Usually I just bug my brother.

I still need to get that bigger harddrive with whatever little money I have left... but I can't afford not to download all day!