Free Ipod Shuffle Reminder - Movie Bash - Haircut - Langauge Stuff

First off, I will remind everyone about the fairly good chance of me getting a free ipod shuffle. I've had one sign-up already. That leaves two more. I'd appreciated if you guys would at least check out the offers to see if there isn't something you would at least consider signing up for to help me out. Not all of them require any cash.

I went to the city last night. It wasn't very fun and I don't see any reason to complain past that (surprised?). I've managed to spend $80 in two days and I haven't really done anything. Only $7 was for beer! I did get my first Australian haircut. When I got back from the mall, there were balloons everywhere as well as a big "congratulations" banner. I asked what it was about and it seems that one of my house mates, Dan, proposed to his girlfriend while they were away this weekend. Congratulations is in order as she said yes. I am very much out of the loop with the Americans here hehe. Ah well, they are missing out.

I saw Be Cool today. Being the sequel to Get Shorty, I guess I wasn't expecting very much. Thats probably for the best because it wasn't very good. It was one of those movies where you pay a bunch of famous people to hang out with each other and acting stupid for a month or two. Waste of money. Even more annoying than Oceans 12. It did have a few funny parts, but they weren't worth the pile of crap that they surfaced from.


fugacious - adjective:
-Lasting but a short time; fleeting.
Fugacious is derived from a Latin root, some of which you are likely familliar. The words it was used for in Latin relate to fleeing, or one who flees. In English we use fugitive and fugue (a musical 'flight')

I don't know where to apply for the job of "Wordator", but I think I could do better than fugacious. How about fugalicious? fugarific? fugatorium?

I may have found another Japanese club which involves pubs rather than a meeting room. I think this would be considerably more helpful considering my anxiety problems. Speaking of which, I was considering elaborating on the specifics of my condition. Would anybody be interested in this?

Ok, as most of you probably don't know, I use a program called V-Train for learning vocabulary and sentence structures. Basically, its flashcard software that gives you almost complete freedom in how you want to set it up while taking care of some of the more complicated aspects. It tracks the scheduling. All you gotta do is put in the cards. This is of course quite a bit of work in the beginning. If anyone gets interested in this and wants to use some of my flashcard decks, do let me know. I'd be happy to save you some work. In my decks, I have translation of sentences going both ways, kanji reading, writing, Thai spelling, romanized Chinese to Chinese charactars, German phrases, Indonesian, romanized Arabic (since I can't really type yet), and much more. I have about 1600 cards split among various decks with around 1200 of those considered 'learned' are very close to being learned. I've been kind of lazy about it lately, but tonight I put in a pile of Eng to Jap translations for me to learn. Heres a few examples of how I set it up.

I'll have a sentence on the left (visible) side of the card. Such as, "It looks cold outside." Then on the other side I'd have the Japanese (or whatever language) translation of this(外は寒そうです）. Usually I stick to the general idea or thought that I want to express rather than a literal translation. Sometimes I'll use literal words as hints for me to remember the format in the other language. I find this pattern very useful for helping me subconciously sort out the differences between intransitive and transitive verbs in Japanese. Rather than memorize both forms of all the words, I find it much more effective to learn them through use. And by forcing myself to learn how to translate them fairly quickly, once I've used it once or twice, it sticks without having to translate it again. This is one of my many language-learning tricks. Memorization is boring. And reading something than trying to use it in conversation is ninja-monkey difficult. The trick with this stuff is to just do it 5-10 minutes twice a day. And if your so stressed/tired/lazy/bored/whatever that you can't handle that(somedays I can't process information so well so I can't even last 5 min), 2-3 minutes twice a day will still take you far. Thats all I can go into for now. Jeez, if I had the time and money I would buy this damn software company and beef up their software so its perfect! I'd hire native speakers of both sexes so that you could record sound files spoken by native speakers to all the words and phrases (you can record sound files or add pictures as it stands now, but good luck trying to find native speakers of 8 languages who are willing to sit around and record 1600 words/phrases for you)into a delightful mix of learning. One of the problems I had with pimsleur is that its only one or two people speaking everything. If you had the same word/phrase recorded by 10 or so people and the particular voice you heard changed all the time, you'd never get attached to any particular accent or intonation (for some languages) and it would give you a better chance of absorbing the listening ability for a wider variety of situations. I think I'm getting a bit complicated and I don't want to make any of my posts too hard to read, so I will stop there. Or rather I will post a funny picture next to lighten things up. Good luck!


I'll never understand golf.