Sarah In Japan

Hmm, I just go up and down about how I feel about my Japanese skills. I'll do just fine at work having things explained to me completely in Japanese, and then I'll go humilate myself at Subway by somehow not expressing that I wanted my food to go (the question I dread the most at restaurants because I still don't know the phrase or the proper replies) and so had to carry my sandwich & cookie back without a bag. Something that struck me as truly terrible and proof of an embarrassing lack of proper Japanese knowledge!!

And then I will randomly discover that I can read manga a lot better than I thought I could. In fact, I might be able to graduate to actually reading it raw, something I had previously thought was impossible for me. It's easy enough online when I can turn on Rikaichan and have kanji & unknown words automatically looked up for me, but it's different with paper of course. And as much as I procrastinate about studying the kanji we learn in class they are probably the #1 most important thing for me to be actually paying attention to. And this just opens up worlds of possibilities, I could actually buy a Japanese manga/novel and read it without needing scanlations. Just now I read the newest chapter of xxxHOLiC, and while I consulted a translation when things got a little complicated/kanji-overloaded, I could read the majority of it on my own. Amazing. Plus you pick up all these nuances and speech patterns that get lost in translation (no matter how good a translation), which is so cool. :D

"Isn't it funny how people can change the way they 'look'?"
"I'm all minstrel" (referring to her music preferences)
- Aly (both)

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And here's some other cell phone pictures that I never posted.