Soshite...

I added three new links to the sidebar:

Danny Choo - Portal to Japan and Akihabara News are in the Links and Downloads section, and I put Really Cute Asians in the Blog List (insert "The Todd" innuendo here and proceed to high-five anyone within arms reach).

I like Japanese girls. It's no secret. I'd love to meet a cute Japanese girl that was happy to spend time with me. At least that way it would make learning the language interesting; and a whole lot more productive.

My skillz is lacking, yo. Language frustrations continue. At least I've started focusing a little more on learning necessary kanji. That will take time also, but it is all a process. I just hope that once I've been here for a year I will be at the point where I can actually put words together into a coherent sentence and will actually be able to think of something to say to people.

You see, my biggest problem is not being able to phrase what I want to express. We are spoilt in English with our vast range of vocabulary and having to compile everything into its appropriate contextualisation. The thinking behind how to structure what you wish to express in Japanese still eludes me; as do these notorious particles.

Learning various forms is all very well, but when one thing goes in, it seems that two things go out. I may learn the informal way to command someone to do something, but the next day I learn another way of doing it and so what I learned previously is no longer there. At all.

And so it seems that all of the study I have done these past four months has amounted to my learning a bit more vocab and just confusing myself on when to use which particles. I cannot as yet put a coherent sentence together, even though my studies have gone over how to do so multiple times.

Perhaps the futility of it all is just really wearing me down. As I said, it's frustrating not being able to think of anything to say to people. At all. Sure, I could say something like: kono neko ha oishii desu ne (this cat is delicious, huh), but it would probably freak people out.

I'm not worried about making mistakes. I just don't have a single thing to say to people that would be relevant to anything at all. The conversation would consist of my opening with a sentence I had painstakingly constructed - most probably completely butchered anyway - and then if someone responded I would just stare at them blankly and wonder if what I said meant what I thought, or if they were asking me a question in response.

It's a dilemma and not one that I see any form of solution to. I do try talking to people at school, but it often ends in neither one of us being able to express enough of either language to form a complete understanding. General conversation in English is hard enough for me. When a foreign language is introduced, I'm just at a complete loss for words.

My life is far from boring. I just don't have anything worthwhile to talk to Japanese people about. Yet.

Timotheos