Embracing One Facet of 日本語だけ

I think I've now come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to get any more reading done before I leave on the 10th (sorry, Genji. ...Again).

My bookworm demise started last night. I had to drive (eek) my aunt to my cousins' house in Jamaica (Queens lol) because she just came from Colombia. (Side note: She has a 5-year visa so she routinely comes and goes.) I got back around 11:30, and then started looking up things for my JR Pass online (JR Pass is basically a rail pass bought outside of Japan that offers unlimited rides on regional trains for an allotted amount of time), because I thought I would be going into the city today. There are about 2853629586 locations in the city, which means I just picked the 4 closest to 34th, where I thought my mom and I would be buying something else.

And this is where I have to say that clearly, I thought wrong.

...There's no real continuation to that part of the story, I just thought that phrase sounded appropriately dramatic, lol.

But anyways. My mom had me call several of the places, because even though by now it was past midnight and no one in their right mind would still be crammed in a cubicle on Avenue of the Americas, their answering machine recording might tell me their hours of availability. All the credit of that genius plan goes to my mom, haha. The fourth 212 number that I called actually went to a recording, and I could feel my jaw drop and my eyes get big.

They were speaking in--wait for it--...JAPANESE! I know, right! What are the odds that a travel office that sells JR Pass vouchers has their recording in Japanese?! My mom kept asking me what was going on, but I just shh-ed her as I was trying to get my head to revert back to "Listening to Japanese" mode. The script was repeated in English afterward, at which point I remembered why I had originally called and quickly jotted down 9am to 6pm.

And then I called back two more times, just to listen to the Japanese half of the recording.

I've gotta say, I did not understand everything, though based on the English counterpart, I probably should have (story of my life!). And that's basically the theme of my experience with Japanese--I kind of suck at it, but I like it so much that I put in a lot of effort. Sadly, there's no "A for Effort" at Yale (WOMP WOMP!) but things are beyond letter grades right now (High School Me would never have believed that College Me could say that, lol). Thanks to my cousin Daniel, I've discovered the best way to "waste" (nothing is ever a waste!!) my time until June 10th--animecrazy.net.

I've spent the past several hours working on my listening skills while experiencing an aspect of Japanese culture I've always liked (though I'm nowhere near hardcore about it). I'm currently on Cardcaptor Sakura, Zettai Kareshi (Absolute Boyfriend--I started watching from the beginning so I could fill in the gaps of what we saw in class), and just now, Hana Yori Dango ("Boys Over Flowers"...ahem). As Kisho would say, I realize I just lost some serious street cred, but whatevs. I'm so set apart from Japanese culture in my everyday life (you know, being all NOT Japanese and stuff) that any chance to have a bit of it in my day makes me really happy =] And I'm hoping, as surely our Sensee did as well, that the more I listen to spoken, natural Japanese (with the English subtitles for help), the more accustomed I'll become to the way people actually speak in Tokyo. Kind of.

Might be a little bit of a stretch, and I can't deny that part of it is the simple joy in being able to watch Cardcaptors again (though without the US censoring things like Tomoyo/Madison being in love with her best friend Sakura), but I like to believe that this will also have a positive affect on my study of the Japanese language. I mean, I know that "kareshi" will come in handy.....haha.

PS Totally unrelated, but my fortune cookie's fortune just read, "If you are still hungry, have another fortune cookie." NO LIE.

PPS I forgot to mention in the last posts, but Nick showed me how to make it so that when you mouse over a Japanese character or phrase, it will show you an explanation or translation. I haven't done it (or added pictures) for this post yet because my desktop computer doesn't recognize characters as anything but little boxes...workin' on it =]