So this morning I ventured out in search of breakfast. It was cold and a few people were setting up shops and stuff. Everything seems to open a little later in the morning, it was nearly 9am and most stores were closed.
Yesterday we did a big walk around Osaka, from our hotel, up past Tennoji Park, and through Shin-Sekai to Namba. The first thing you notice around is how incredibly dense the city is. Every street and alley is packed with shops. Noodle bars, Cafes, and Pachinko. There are pachinko places just everywhere, it’s crazy. Most of the pachinko places have arcades too, and seem to have a bunch of people in there pretty much all the time. The arcade games are about 50円 or 100円 to play, which is fairly cheap.
Last night we arrived in Osaka, about 8pm. Getting out of immigration and customs was a pretty painless process. The airport was fairly quiet and coming outside it was a nice, cool, 4C. Yay! After a few warm and humid nights in Brisbane this was a welcome change.
Well, it’s time to write a post, now that I have free time, and no job, since my workplace liquidated.
I’ve been spending lots of time studying Kanji and Japanese Grammar. Using a DS for Kanji study is excellent, my game of choice is Nazotte Oboeru Otona no Kanji Renshuu ) (なぞって覚える大人の漢字練習).
The hardest thing about Kanji practice is that most of the words have no conceptual attachment. Even if you understand one of the Kanji, having context of the sample sentence or word is necessary to help memorize the different readings of the Kanji. Since most of the DS games are made for native Japanese speakers, this is a problem for non-natives using it for study.
Still, digging through it with a dictionary at hand is pretty good, and you expand your vocabulary while memorizing the readings of the Kanji. There seems to be a lot of transformations of the pronunciations of a Kanji that are not actually listed in the dictionary, but where the pronunciation changes due to surrounding sounds — this is probably much easier if you can find and learn the linguistic-based reasons for these changes.
Why is it so difficult to keep blogging?
It seems like the worth of rambling upon a given topic is too low at most times, and not worth the effort. However, I’m sure blogging provides and requires momentum, thus, it’s time for a new post.
So I’ll be heading to Japan early next year, that should be interesting. There will probably be lots of neat (crazy?) stuff to blog about… it seems like quite a unique place. I’m excited to see the level of tech around, it seems so high, and so much further ahead for mobile computing devices.
It’s interesting to think that Japan after WW2 was in the sort of position that China is in now, being a source of cheap labour for other countries. After seeing how Japan has progressed to now, I wonder where China will be in the next 50 years. A country the size of China, with a rate of advancement like that of modern Japan would be pretty enormous in the scale of things. Huge amounts of awesome research and technology progress, moving us humans towards redundancy much faster. Fun times!
