2004-11-08
the Trev Report 2004-11-08
Welcome once again to your monthly dose of my life! The Trev Report is
brought to you by your friends at the JET Program: Spreading
International Understanding to Japan, Today. And now on to this month's
news:
Trev's Lovelife
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Signe and I have been talking about what we will do next Aug. lately.
Come Aug. 2005 I will either be working in Matue as a PA (se previous
Trev Reports) or staying here in Akagi as an ALT. Signe is also applying
to the JET Program, so she will either be placed near me or far away
from me. In any case I have been worrying too much about this lately,
especially since I have little control over the placement of people.
Besides that we are doing well. Signe's parents came to stay here for
three weeks this month and we took them many places around Japan. I write
about it in my daily bilingual blog at http://jumex.blogspot.com/ .
Trev's Work
-----------
Work has been keeping me busy lately. There have been lots of events
going on in the past few months, like Sports Days and Culture Days. My
most recent event was a Halloween Party for the local elementary school
kids. We carved pumpkins and made masks. It was a blast, and lots of
local ALTs came as well. It was a great turnout. A couple weeks ago I
went on a two-day cycling trip with the local elementary school kids
to a series of bridges and islands that connect the islands of Honshu
and Shikoku called the Shimanami Kaido. It was a really fun trip; I had
never done something like that with the local kids before. Besides all
that, I have been busy with the normal stuff like writing newsletter
articles, the English conversation TV Show, and classes. I am having
a great time here.
Trev's Japanese
---------------
Although I write in my journal everyday and try hard to study daily,
this month I have been slacking a little because of all the extra things
we have been doing with Signe's parents around. Just today I feel that
I have finally caught up with everything, including the CLAIR Advanced
Japanese Language Course (which I should be working on at a rate of one
lesson a day) as well as putting my journals on the net at
http://jumex.blogspot.com/ . When I was at Mt. Tsurugi with Signe for
vacation a couple weeks ago, I bought a charm at the top of the mountain
for help in studying. I hope that pays off. :)
Trev's Computers
----------------
My most recent project on the computer has been my daily blog formatter
at http://trevreport.org/blogForm.shtml . It is really useful. I simply
fill out the form and hit submit and I get perfectly well formatted code
to paste in any blog I want. I DO have a little problem with overlapping
text in Firefox, but if viewed with any other browser there is no problem
with my CSS. The problem comes from an alleged error in the CSS spec
that Firefox implements as per the erroneous spec and other browsers
ignore the spec and fix the problem. I look forward to finding a workaround
for it. In the meantime, I am working on a perl script to autopost to
both live journal and blogger. I have successfully written code using
the AtomAPI to connect and post to blogger, but I am still having
trouble using Atom for Live Journal. There isn't much info out there on
it. With any luck I will crack it soon.
Trev's Anime
------------
AniKi (http://trevreport.org/aniki/wiki.pl?AniKi ) is going well, thanks
to a couple people that are adding context to it. Thank you to you guys.
As for watching anime stuff, I haven't done much lately. The most recent
thing I did was watch "Cashern" which is a live-action movie based on an
old anime. It was pretty good. I recommend giving it a chance if you see
it out there. I've been wanting to watch some anime, but I don't know
what I should watch, I have been so out of the loop these days.
Trev's One Point Japanese Lesson
--------------------------------
So you want to learn Japanese, huh? Great. How about a little lesson on
being polite.
Being polite is important in Japanese, especially when speaking to
superiors. The key to politiness is "longer is more polite."
For example, when you want to say "thank you" to a teacher, instead of
just "arigatou" you will say "arigatou gozaimasu." If you can say it
longer, do it. This is an important point that many Japanese learners
forget.
Some examples:
arigatou = arigatou gozaimasu - thank you
ohayou = ohayou gozaimasu - good morning
kudasai = onegaishimasu = please
That's all for now. Keep studying hard!
Well, that's about it for this edition of the Trev Report. I hope you
are all doing well. Drop me a line sometime, I love to hear from you.
Take care,
trv
Posted by jumex at 17:16
1 Comments:
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9:50 PMã
Jason H. said...
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Cashern - dude, Dustin in Izumo made me watch that movie last weekend. What a trip! It was beautiful and all, but what the F**K was going on? He tried to explain some of it, but even with the good subtitles I was still lost.
Give me Ju-on or Battle Royale instead... ;)
Cya,
Jason