この冬休みは友達と一緒にたくさん遊んだ。昨日友達と一緒にスパーマリオワールド（スパーファミコムの）で遊んだ、めっちゃ懐かしかった。

今日と昨日は平安神宮に行って、初詣した。初詣する時にちょっといろんな事を考えて、お願いをあまりしなかった。でも、将来を自分で作るので問題ない！今年は成長年になります。その後は皆は面白いカフェに行った。そこでテーブルに座って、足をお湯に入って、お茶を飲んだ。そこでカードゲームを遊んでいた、楽しかった。

それから面白い立ち飲みやに行って、喋った。その所はすごく安かった、飲み物はシングルは百円、ダッブルは二百円。

明日から仕事を続きます。冬休み終わり！　もっと休みたいが、やっとプログラムするのが楽しみしているね。じゃ、明日にもつまらないブロッグを書きます！

今年のお正月に友達と一緒お寺に行って、ゆっくり朝まで遊んでいた。けっこう楽しかった。休みは今まですごく楽しかった、日本語喋り練習が多かったし、勉強時間もあった。出来なさそうやけど、冬休み終わり前にやっと常用漢字を終わりたい。まだ五百字後！

じゃ、今日のブロッグはなんか簡単なブロッグ、これからもっと面白いブロッグにしましょう！

じゃあ、今日のブロッグは短いだけ。これからブロッグを書く事は日常に戻ります！

That’s all for today, time to get back to Kanji study. I’ll post again once I hit the deadline (aug-20) that I set for learning the 2000 Jouyou Kanji, and see how badly I failed. T_T

今から、ブログを翻訳にしてみたい。
おひさしぶり、さっきブログから長い時間だ。　ここからもっともっとブログにしたい。

最近会社にめっちゃ忙しいです。　もうすぐピクセルジュンクエデンを終わります。　みんなは遊んでいることを見ることを楽しみです！

このプロジェクトの最後はとても忙しかったら勉強時間を見つけることが難しいけど、本と楽しかったプロジェクトでした！　次のプロジェクトも面白いそうだから楽しみだ。

日本にきったら日本語をまだ上手じゃないだ。-_-　毎日は難しい話がある。知らない言葉を聞いた、文法を分からなたら、こんな時でどうする？　だれか何かいってだれも笑っていることがある、どうする？　作り笑い？　それで自分に何か聞ければ「全然分からない」と言わないといけない。さぁ、難しい。

さて、毎日会社で日本語を聞く、差ベることがいいです。英語を使いたくないけど本間複雑話を英語を使うけど時々ほかの人が英語ぜんぜんわからないのでほかの方法を使わないといけない。その時でノートをいつもめっちゃ便利だ！だれかの説明をかんたん分からないことので図面が見せたらばか感じだ。（すみません、その文がへんな～、分かりにくい）

最近ヘイシグの漢字本をまた始めた。昔、始めたけどちょっとだけ勉強した。混同は全部を勉強します！この方法で今週は三十から五十までぐらい漢字の書くことを習った。それで一ヶ月半で序用漢字を書くこと出来るになると思います。その時の日本語文保、単語がもっと早く習えます！

今ここまでだけです！次ブログでほんと面白い情報を書いてあげます。

おつからさまです！

Recently its been very busy at work, finishing up work on PixelJunk Eden. It should be out really soon, I’m excited for people to start playing it.

It’s been a really fun project, though quite busy at the end, making it difficult to find time to study. I am looking forward to the next project, I think it might even be a more fun game!

Learning Japanese over here is still taking a while, and every day is filled with akward social situations when you hit words or grammar you don’t understand. It is hard to know what to do in a conversation when you completely don’t catch a sentence directed at you; if someone is laughing, do you laugh? If they ask you something about it then you just have to akwardly point out you didn’t understand anything. -_-

Still, being in the office and hearing Japanese all day is a good thing, I try to use as little English as possible, but usually for complex technical stuff I still need to use English when speaking with some people. Sometimes it is necessary to discuss these sort of things with people who have no English skills at all and you need to somehow understand what’s going on. Having a pen and paper is always good, but you feel rather stupid when someone has to draw a picture to explain something that can be rather trivial.

I’ve started going through the Heisig kanji book again. I started on it a while ago, but never made much progress. The past week I’ve been comfortably getting through 30-50 kanji a day with it, so hopefully within a month or two I’ll be able to recognize and write the 2000~ Jouyou Kanji. After that I can properly begin to learn to read and learn vocabulary faster.

That’s all for now, I’ll try and post some actual interesting information soon!

A 飲み会 is usually held when employees leave or join the company. We are all going to a nearby restaurant for dinner and, I presume, some drinks. It should be fun, and there will be lots of opportunity to practice speaking in Japanese.

Most of the employees in the company are native Japanese, maybe 30% are not. There are a few English people and some from other various countries too. The general chatter around the office is pretty much exclusively in Japanese. Every morning we have a 5 minute stand-up meeting with our team to just say what we have been doing, and plan on doing, and ask any questions — and that’s all in Japanese. I’ve managed to somehow understand what has been going on, to my suprise.

I’m not sure if the technical nature of the discussions make it easier or harder, since alot of words are foreign, but the Japanese words used are frequently words not oft used in regular conversation. Despite that, the variations of how people speak makes it easy to understand some people, and extremely difficult to understand some others. It’s frustrating when you successfully parse what you are hearing, and break down the sentence structure and every word used, but lack the vocabulary to understand what was said.

Hopefully all this practice will allow me to improve my Japanese skill quickly. It was suprising to see how well all of the foreigners can speak Japanese. I’m curious to learn how much they have studied, or if they have just acquired alot through day-to-day use in a workplace.

It’s been a bit hard to get used to such a shift in working hours. I start at 9:30am, lunch at 12:30pm, and then work 2pm to 7pm. It’s a long day but the break in the middle is nice, enough time to even come home for lunch, since it’s only a few kilometres by bicycle. I don’t think it’ll be quite so nice to ride that far in the middle of summer.

The afternoons are fairly flexible in terms of schedule, which is nice. A couple of times I’ve went out for a coffee break with a few people, it’s good to get to know some of the people there, and having a break makes the last few hours a bit more productive I think.

飲み会あったら今寝る時だ.

Not much else has been happening over here. It will be nice to have a schedule to start planning things around. Now I can afford to go to a gym again and start doing some other neat stuff. It’s hard to bring yourself to spend much money when you have no income.

There is a local community center which has a message board for meeting people for language practice and things, it’s quite good. I met up with someone to practice some language one night for a couple of hours. It was pretty difficult to convey detailed information about english in japanese. I still had alot of trouble understanding japanese during the meetup, I need to practice alot more. Hopefully at my new job I’ll have alot of opportunity to talk to some japanese people and start getting regular speaking and listening practice.

I finally purchased a new chair today, because the chairs we got with the apartment were really crap. It was only 1000円 (10AUD), but it’s alot more comfortable. I had to carry it home in the basket on my bicycle, the store was a couple of kilometres away. It was an interesting ride.

Everyone here seems to quite often use bicycles for transporting alot of stuff. Often you will see people carrying various giant cases while riding (lots of very large instrument cases from students around the university), something I’ve never really seen in Australia. Pretty much every bicycle has a basket on it by default, I wonder if bicycles would be used more often if this were the case in Australia. Even when it is raining here, everyone just rides while holding an umbrella, I think in other places people would just opt for an alternative transport method. It’s awesome to see such an energy efficient transport system working so well.

There are always people around sitting in parked cars, resting, on a phone, or sleeping. I’ve no idea why this is so popular, or why they are parked there. It’s an unusual place to sleep.

The most continually suprising thing is the age of people riding bicycles. Some of the people I’ve seen around have looked over 80 years old and are still just riding around like it’s nothing. I’ve only very rarely seen people even over 40 riding bicycles in Australia. It seems to keep everyone fit and healthy, quite a good thing.

Last week I applied at Q-Games for a job, and got a Programmer Test which I spent a couple of days doing. Yesterday I went for an interview which seemed to go pretty well. There wer four people on one side of the table and me on the other; a little intimidating at first, but it ended up being a fairly comfortable and casual sort of chat.. a few of the questions were in Japanese, but I understood most of what was said and was able to answer with rudimentary responses. So now I am awaiting a response to see if I get the job!

It seems like a nice place to work, DS and small PS3 projects. Small turnaround on projects is a definite plus after my previous work; years on one project is just too long and large teams are difficult to maintain — communication can breakdown easily and lead to an array of other issues.