I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t studied Japanese in a while. I read a bit of manga last week and I’ve been keeping up with my SRS reps, but apart from that it’s been English media all week. I could blame it all on the lack of decent coverage of the US elections by the Japanese media, but I’ll just be honest and say I was lazy. Still the week off has given me a bit of fresh perspective …who am I kidding? I took the week off Japanese and now I’m back, end of story.
Mort was good, though. It was the only Discworld book I hadn’t read (apart from the two most recent ones, which I don’t particularly want to read). It made me pretty nostalgic, really. Right now I’m strongly, strongly resisting the temptation to read Small Gods again.
Well “The Fifth Elephant” by Terry Pratchett turned out to be a terrible book as far as Discworld novels go. Among the bad Discworld books it’s slightly above Monstrous Regiment and slightly below Men at Arms, about on par with Night Watch. You know, I don’t think Terry Pratchett has got it any more. Or maybe I’m just too used to him now. Or maybe it’s the Spirit of Japanese, punishing me for daring to stray from the path of immersion.
Anyway, this is a blog about Japanese, not a blog about books (English ones, at that) so let’s get back to the point, which is… GAMES. To be precise, Ar Tonelico 2 and Mana Khemia 2. I should be buying stock in Gust right about now, really. I can hardly wait for the weekend to start so I can sink my teeth into them. Which one should go first? I enjoyed AT more, so maybe I should keep the best for last? Then again why suffer through MK2 when the first Mana Khemia wasn’t really up to scratch? It was made after AT and it had worse graphics, can you believe that? Okay, so it’s settled. Ar Tonelico 2 it is. At least it will keep me occupied (and learning Japanese) until Fire Emblem DS comes out on 7th August.
I can never resist a good Terry Pratchett, so I’m cheating a little this week. I’ve been getting into some Japanese novels (一般小説) and light novels but nothing comes close to the power of a good Discworld novel. I’m not too fond of the Watch stories though, give me a good Rincewind book any day. Or Small Gods. I could read that book 10000 times.
Studying is going well this week, cheating aside. I hit upon the idea of reading online Japanese reviews of my favorite games. There’s nothing I love more in the world than a well-written bad review, especially of games I love, so I’m in good company there. I was hoping for more trollsome posts, but we’ll take what we can get. So anyway I’ve been getting loads and loads of sentences out of those reviews, sentences written by and for ordinary Japanese.
Re: Youtube project, I’ve dled tons and tons of videos but I haven’t watched a single one yet. Watching stuff is WORK! Here’s a long list of the stuff I’ve gotten so far. I don’t know what link corresponds to what file though. I wasn’t being very discriminatory in my downloads, I just grabbed anything that looked like an interview or a 記者会見 and downloaded it. And geez but there are a lot of Gackt files in there. He’s not a bad musician – not good either – but he’s a BORING interview. Tries too hard to look “cool” and “mysterious” and stuff. Be yourself, man! Yah, whatever. Here goes. (Warning: long list is long!)
