Quick update

Well I finished up all the kanji and I must say, it is awesome looking at a sign and understand what it's trying to say.  Or look at a compound and know that it says "outside...country" and then know it must mean "foreigner."  I have like 20 of those moments each day and it's awesome.  My latest task is to translate 10,000 sentences.  I hope to finish them up by like Juneish or so.  I finished up the kanji on Sunday and it's been 4 days and I have only translated 20 sentences.  I really need to pick it up, but I kind of got burnt out on the studying what with the 80 kanji per day for about 20 days.  This is kind of my week off before I dive back in full time next week.

I'm hoping all of this studying will pay off, I really want to pass the JLPT level 2 before I leave and talk to Aki and Sugi and Ryo (and their families) in Japanese whenever I see them.  And I want to teach my kid(s) Japanese and would like to teach them non-terribly broken Japanese.  Who knows, maybe I'll get out of teaching and get a job where I can use Japanese too.

But the week off has been good, helped Heather got a new laptop, bought a new pair of Vibram 5 fingers, went skiing a bunch (up to 8 times now, and tomorrow is a school ski trip so that will make 9), and  I finally got my new anki decks figured out and now I just need to get back in my study at school study at work routine and hopefully I start reading these kanji.

Story time;

So I was talking as usual and the kids were talking like usual (the students at Noheji are very talkative), and my super awesome Japanese teacher (Narumi sensei) started dropping the hammer and gave the students a long yelling while I was just standing there not understanding a word of it.  From time to time, the students would say something and I guess I must have had a very strange look on my face and understood one student was like "Tomasu sensei is just standing there and doesn't understand anything.  Poor Thomas."  And I couldn't help myself but give a giant smile and of course this caused the entire class to erupt with laughter literally 5 seconds after my teacher was yelling at them.  I felt pretty bad but the kids were good the rest of the day.