kalin

Today I’m going to provide some pro-tips. When you go out to a bar, at which there may be karaoke, you should be sure to choose a song that you know the lyrics to quite well. The karaoke machine at the bar I was at was this small handheld touch device, which changed the monitors/tv’s around the bar to the song you select, wirelessly. The microphone was a small wireless thing too. Convenient and simple! Not a big fuss to be made like there would be for getting up in front of a crowd or something.

I was cruising along to a nice song, I knew most of the words, and then I hit a section I was never really aware of, despite listening to it alot.

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After 13 long days in a hotel in Osaka, we’ve finally moved into the apartment in Kyoto. The hotel was nice, but it gets dull after a long stay. It’s good to have a personal space again. And a desk. And a chair. Except the chair sucks. The apartment was built last november, so the engineering is quite modern.

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It’s been a little while since I wrote a post, and I’m posting this to let everyone know I’ll be putting it off a bit longer.

In the meantime, I’ve added this page, upon which I will add interesting (or not) tidbits of information, hopefully one-per-day. I also took some photos of the apartment on this page.

That’s all for now! I’ve got to go eat THE CURRY.

The transport system in Japan is superb. The subway trains are very frequent, very punctual, and very heavily used. The few times I’ve caught a train so far, I’ve not waited more than 4 minutes; and these were not peak-hour times. Getting a ticket is fast and simple too, at least once you realize how it works.

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It’s been nearly a week here now and we’re getting into a bit of a routine. There are some nice restaurants around, we’ve managed to eat nice meals for about 500-600円, although it’s a bit hard to tell what you are actually eating. It still continues to suprise me how cheap things are compared to Australia.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I’ll try and write more about the process of actually preparing for, and travelling to Japan, for those who might be curious. Prior to leaving, all that is basically required is getting a new passport, plane tickets, and a Working Holiday Visa, which is a fairly straightforward process — although it takes a couple of weeks to process, so be sure to start sorting it out at least 3 months prior to departure!

You need a flight booking to get the Visa, and you need a Passport for a flight booking, so all 3 elements are non-parallelisable, which makes things a bit slower.

I’ll write more shortly about the exciting part of discarding everything you own, and fitting your whole life in a suitcase and a backpack. Hooray!

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.

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