Week 29, 2023

✱ I'm on vacations! That'll be 15 consecutive days to rest... from my formal work. With all that's going on with preparations for my oldest son to eventually get his Japanese college scholarship, I'll be traveling a lot, only just inside our city: I'll need to take him to perform some medical examinations, to the notary public in order to authenticate more documents, to his former school to retrieve a translated recommendation letter and to other places as well. Fun enough for me, because I feel I'm watering the seeds of his dream, so to say.

✱ As for my remaining spare time, if I'm lucky enough, I want to dedicate to reading — maybe finally finish The Fiery Cross, the sixth volume from Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, and The Elven Star, the second one in The Death Gate Cycle series. They're both bulky volumes, so this is definitely going to be challenging, but still I want to try it.

✱ I'm also — still — on my quest to learn hiragana. I noticed that I started to forget some of the most recent ones I had learned, so I'm taking my time on this. I don't have to hurry, after all. I'm also owing people who read my humble posts on this site a brief story of why I'm learning Japanese and other posts on my few discoveries. So this means I'm still determined to learn 日本語 in public... bear with me 😅😅

✱ During the last couple of weeks my son would invite me to watch the melon bread series, which we have finally finished watching this week. Strange as it seems, melon bread would mean episodes from the MIU404 Japanese drama series, where a relationship develops between Kazumi Shima, an experienced, rule-following cop with a secret in his past and his new partner, an impulsive idiot named Ai Ibuki, whose impulsiveness makes him loveable. Only 11 episodes long, the 2020 is very enjoyable, as I surprisingly found out. The two main characters end up having to drive a meron-pan van instead of a normal police, or detective car, due to an incident taking place in episode 1, giving a humorous touch to the story and becoming, IMHO, the show's trademark.

✱ I'm looking for some tool I could use to memorize vocabulary. I need to acknowledge my son's determination for he's been using Anki during all his Japanese learning journey — an app whose UI I find horrible, along with its awful UX. Besides, although his clear results, I'm not really a believer that Anki's SRS is the best implemented one, nor that Anki is the best approach to learn Japanese at this early stage where I'm now... if you've read these week notes of mine this far and have any suggestions other than Anki, I'm all ears.

#english #weeknotes