Flat3D » Language

Snow festival and more…

Ormo — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:28:11 +0000

This is a little bit late, the Sapporo Snow festival finished last Wednesday… But here are some photos from it!

Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival! I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up… The ice ones look much better by night!

Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru. It was delicious and we all ate far too much! I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning. The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening. My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little. We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!

Then just the other day my internet began working! The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running. The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment… Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.

The final bit of news is I am on Twitter! If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too… I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable. In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations. It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.

The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan. It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…) At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!

I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile… Some more thought required I guess…

懐かしい (Nostaliga)

Ormo — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:11:00 +0000

懐かしい。。。(natsukashii)
is what a Japanese person says when something from their past tickles their nostalgia bone.
In English we tend not to have these little outbursts with such coherence. Either we don’t say anything and keep these little experiences for ourself, we make some kind of a noise that signifies our emotion or feeling without saying an actual word and sometimes we have actually turned that noise into a word for this very situation… But life with the Japanese is filled with little personal narrations that let the world at large know what the individual is experiencing… おいしい (oishii – tasty), 眠い (nemui – sleepy), 寒い (samui – cold), 厚い (atsui – hot), 痛い (itai – painful), 気持ちいい (kimochi ii – feels good), 気持ち悪い (kimochi warui – feels bad, the first time I actually heard this I actually laughed out loud, it was someone expressing their feelings over seeing a rather portly chap in latex or something doing aerobics in a commercial) and the list goes on and on…
Now it isn’t that we don’t have these words in English… We do, they are mostly just plain old adjectives, but we tend not to use them in quite the same way… We tend to form sentences and only exlaim things that are useful to those around us. Perhaps expressing something expressly useful to others around us. But in Japanese they are going on all the time, often simply to give expression to the wider world of what you are currently experience.

But to go back to the top, 懐かしい (natsukashii) or “nostalgic.” I experienced this very feeling this evening as I was having a jeffries in iTunes and came across Today FM’s Ray D’Arcy show podcast. Now those of a similar ilk to me will remember Ray presenting Den TV on Network 2 (RTE) every afternoon after school, like RTE’s CBBC, featuring young stars such as Zig and Zag and Dustin the Turkey…
Well of course I signed up to see what the guy was up to these days and to my suprise (and delight) I was joining in just after a whole show devoted to Den TV!
If you remember Den TV and all the stuff on it, you might want to head over to Today FM’s pages and check out the episode…

Landed, luggage and language!

Ormo — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:09:08 +0000

I am in Sapporo!

I arrived here on Tuesday and luggage came too. My big box from the UK hasn’t got here yet, it is taking it’s time through customs with a complication or two… But DHL is keeping me up to date and I hope it will be here next week!
I have moved into my new apartment. It’s great! Actually larger than I expected and really nice… I will post pictures sometime soon I promise!

I also spent some time today talking to Miriam Davis, the language co-ordinator here. We were discussing the syllabus and how things work for me in terms of language study. I was also introducted to Saito-sensei who will be teaching me Japanese for the next while. I will start before Christmas with two lessons a day, including some kanji (the chinese characters) and going up to three in the new year… I am really looking forward to this part now! I think I will enjoy language study!

While I was on the plane from singapore I saw an episode of Flight of the Conchords and this song made me laugh. So practise your french with the Conchords!