bsod+driving school

my laptop got the bsod today at work, unrecoverable. thank god for incremental backup. I did what work I could, and then left a couple hours early after about 5 minutes of tapping my pencil and staring at my empty docking station. It should be good to go in the morning, but I still have pretty much all day tomorrow to reinstall and reconfigure my environment...ugh. I had driving school today from 5:30-9:00pm. I studied Japanese almost the entire time. My brain is still a little bruised i think :-p. almost 4 hours(i got there early) of fairly focused study, more than i've done at once thus far i think.

check out this link about organizing and decluttering your living space with an inventory.

late febuary resolutions

- Never use food as entertainment or comfort. Make a conscious decision that I will not regret before every bite of food.

- Make Japanese study a more significant part of my day. Make it highly enjoyable. Never let it become a chore, but at the same time make it an unavoidable and required daily routine until it is a solid daily habit.

- I threw some stuff away this weekend, stuff I didn't and probably will never need. I also cleaned my apartment alot, did dishes and stuff. It didn't really take so much time that I couldn't have studied Japanese, but in my mind it did, and I badly needed to straighten up, so I chose to let the weekend play out how it did. I would like to get to a point where I have few enough posessions that I can evaluate the place that thing has in my life on a weekly basis.

tldr; make decisions instead of following habits, but replace good habits with bad habits where that's not practical.

tool roundup

found a great addon for firefox to let you capture dynamic media(sound,video,pics) that may be hard to find a direct download for. I used it to pull some sentence audio off iknow.co.jp a little while ago.

hiveminder.com - if the todo list in your brain would be like the terrible offspring of a perl script and a soap opera(or worse, if it would look like a freshly erased sheet of notebook paper) then hiveminder is worth checking out. It has a simple interface that hides its many features until you need them. It also interprets natural language between [] well enough for my needs.

wiktionary.org - everyone knows about wikipedia.org, this is its compulsively thorough cousin. Need to make certain you haven't been misled on the meaning of 'the'? What about 'hey'? wiktionary is the place to go.

ubiquity for firefox - it's the cli of the future for the internet.

日く

約 yaku - about
国 kuni/koku - city,homeland

あの ふたり　は そ くりで くべつ できない
ano futari wa so kuride kubetsu dekinai
those two look identical and i can't tell them apart

くつした に あな が ひらいている
kutsushita ni ana ga hiraiteiru (audio i have 'hiraiteru' sounds more like hiiteiru)
there are holes in my socks


pretty slow for 4 days. Time to reevaluate how much effort I'm putting into studying.

日はち

new words
市 , いち , ichi- market
市 , し , shi - city
者 , もの , mono- person
前 , まえ , mae - past, front
できる, dekiru - to be able

new sentences
そこ の かいだん を おりて ください
soko　no kaidan wo　orite kudasai (i'm not really sure where the words end or begin anymore)
go down the stairs please


しゅくだい は まだ おわって いません
shikudai wa mata owate imasen
i haven't finished my homework yet

learning full sentences seems to be a good strategy, now that i have some hirigana learned, learning a full sentence is not much more difficult than learning a single word, because I don't have to guess how the words should be put together.

日しち

I cut down the word count to 6, but added a sentence.
その sono - that(near speaker)
問題 mondai - the matter,problem,question (this one's a pain to draw)
的 mato - mark, target
です desu - be(polite)
について nitsuite - about
これ kore - this one

here's the sentence
keんこう が いちばん たいseつ だ
kenkou ga ichiban taisetsu da
your health is the most important thing.

I'm not even trying to tackle the kanji on this one. I plan to add more sentences a day at the expense of words, not sure how many. A whole sentence was suprisingly easy to learn, I may just pursue this route, thanks to the internet, I can find ALOT of whole sentences to use in different situations.

日roく

I read this article and found this site and decided that I need to just memorize whole sentences. I'm a proponent of figuring out things for one's self, but language learning is really just about imitation. The better you imitate, the better you speak the language(up to the skill of the original speaker).

new words
同 dou - similar
へ he - synonym for に, but with different connotations
東京　toukyou - Tokyo
時　toki/jii - time
中　chuu/neka - inside,middle,during
ば ba - means if/suppose when ending a sentence
くる kuru - come(closer to speaker)
もの mono - thing, person, (also what?)