Today I learned that my initial euphoria over Japanese verbs was misguided. There I was this afternoon, sitting in a café, casually reading along in the same grammar book I have alluded to previously (Master the Basics: Japanese), when I…
The beginnings of unfamiliar languages with different writing systems and sounds are always a little tough. Sushi Hana Part of the problem in this case is that I am still feeling under the weather. My brain is stupid with this…
I find myself automatically making a mental checklist of what seems hard, and what seems easy—or at least less hard—about learning Japanese. First the hard things. One is that you have a lot of courtesy-related language stuff to…
I have a cold. Colds are not good for language skills, including in your native tongue. Today I got out my Rosetta Stone disks and tried to install the software. I promptly got trapped in software-bug hell, in an endless…
I am sick with a cold, so Japanese did not start off too energetically. To launch my first day, I did about 50 minutes of Pimsleur Japanese lessons. It went okay, but I am not highly functional. Rosetta Stone for…
This is the last day of German, and in honor of it, I am going to come clean about my dictionary addiction. It is pretty obvious by now that I am addicted to Pimsleur, but I haven’t yet confessed…
Today I flew back to New York (more specifically, Newark). Before I left Amsterdam, I enjoyed my first full-body scan. The flight was amazing. I got an aisle seat, plus an empty seat next to me, and I worked the…
This weekend I went running along a canal dating back to Roman times. Holland is beautiful. We are staying in Voorburg, but our host took us on a tour of The Hague, which is nearby, yesterday afternoon. The Hague,…
Today was my last day in Germany—we are going to Holland for the weekend, and then I am flying home—so I went into downtown Göttingen one last time before our late-afternoon train. I wandered into bookstores, again.…
Today I enjoyed a wonderful conversation, in German, with a longtime family friend. She has a daughter my age, with whom I used to play when I was a kid. Pancho the German Cat She (the friend, I mean; not…
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