Music playing: Otsuka Ai - Kingyo Hanabi
It's been a long time since I've written the last time. I've been very busy before the spring break. With all of the work for other classes, studying for midterms and my internship combined it was impossible to keep up with the blog.
Japanese no longer seems easy. It requires a lot of hard work and memorization. I think I'm so focused on the language that Japanese culture started to stand out from the crowd. I keep hearing spoken Japanese and seeing Japanese places everywhere in the city. I was in Greenwich Village last week. Walking around I kept noticing a Japanese Restaurant on every block. I counted more than 12. I started smiling. I never thought that NYC has so many of them! Still thinking about the culture, I saw a European guy approaching me. He was on his cell phone and I heard a part of the phrase: ikimasu. My first thought was, that's crazy! So now they speak Japanese in Europe?! And then a few seconds later I realized that he said "y que mas?" in Spanish. I couldn't help but laughed about it for a minute.
A few days ago I overheard a phone conversation. Not a polite thing to do but I couldn't help it. It's New York. Everyone is on their cell phones. A girl was late to work and called her boss to tell that the trains are not running well. I even understood the first few phrases. That was exciting. =)
Learning new language have helped me to make new friends. For exmaple, I've met a very interesting person from Tokyo and now we are good friends.
I'm happy that the break is over and I can return to the classroon to learn more.
7 comments:
I liked the part of your blog when you mentioned "y que mas". It had me laughing. I have a parallel, but completely different problem.
I learned Spanish all throughout high school and so got to be relatively good at expressing my thoughts in Spanish (I still can't understand what anyone says. They talk so fast!). But anyways, I've gotten to the point where now when I can't express something in Japanese I tend to revert to my other foreign language -- Spanish. So I sometime mistakenly utter Spanish words to myself while doing Japanese homework. It's rather strange.
There's nothing, literally nothing more satisfying in language-learning than successfully eavesdropping.
yes! I'm glad to be back in Japanese class (but not school) The "y que mas?" was so funny, I just laughed out loud in class.
おもしろかった ですね。まいにち にほんごを べんきょお します。はる やすみに なにを しましたか ？
おもしろかった ですね。まいにち にほんごを べんきょお します。はる やすみに なにを しましたか ？
wow, everyone knows so many languages. I feel behind. Olga san, that was a good story. but for me, i still haven't figured out why I'm learning Japanese. There aren't many japanese people in U.S, however, i don't think i'm going to go to japan to live in the future since it's so expensive!
Olga-san,
I too have noticed people speaking Japanese all over the place now, when they're not speaking Korean, that is. Right, we should practice more.
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