Second Day of class hits even harder

Maybe its because I was going from 9:15 - 20:15 with a whopping 7.5 hours of classes (its pretty hard to be retentive for 7 hours straight). Anyway, with day two out of the way I think I've settled on my classes for this semester, so I'll go ahead and lay it out for you.

Intensive Japanese 3 - basically the same class as last semester. 3 hours/day 5days/week. This class takes up a lot of time, and I probably can only retain 50% of the material we cover, but I think that is still more than enough. Sure it starts at 9:15 in the morning, but what would be the point of living in Japan if I didn't get to ride the rush hour trains!
These aren't my pictures, but I'm sure you can get the general idea of what my morning commute looks like. I haven't bothered taking a picture, because frankly, I have enough trouble just finding my own hands in this mess.

History of Japanese Language This looks interesting. It basically covers the changes in the Japanese language reaching back to the around the 10th or 11th century. Quite a lot has changed since then, and I'll try and bring back few select tidbits that I learn in the class to enlighten you guys as well. Though I'm not sure how many of you are interested in Japanese linguistics. As for today's fact, The Japanese language is unique in that it is one of the only ones with more than two first person pronouns (ie.. I, and Me in English). Which is true, because off the top of my head I can already name six.

Translation Methods: Japanese to English Finally this class rounds out my schedule. My hope for this semester is to bolster my language abilities, and hopefully this class will contribute the most to that goal. For one, the class is meant for students at a Japanese level two above my own. So that is a good start. I don't think it is insurmountable though, and with some hard work I should be able to make it to the finish (albeit not with a good grade). As the name implies, the class is about translation. While we just work on about 10 1-page articles, review, stories, poems, etc it is unfathomably difficult (at least from what I gathered at the first lesson) to craft an appropriate translation for any piece as you undoubtedly have to sacrifice literal translation for natural sounding translation and aspects of the meaning, tone, or intent are bound to be lost. Anyway, if I ever drop-off the blogosphere, its probably because I'm wildly lost in a mess of Kanji in this class.

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On a side note, I bought a PSP with my job money!

I went with the sexy Mint-Green color exclusively available here in Japan! It functions as a web browser, music player, video player, and of course a game player (which I haven't money to buy). But besides that, my main reason for buying it was (parents take note!) its SKYPE functionality .
Essentially, at any wireless hotspot I can hop online, log into my skype account and with my headset attached make cheap phone calls to anywhere in the world. For those that are unaware, skype allows you to make class to any computer for free and any land-line for a little under $.03 per minute. So basically, as long as I have my PSP when I travel, I won't have to worry about being completely without a means of communication.


TO DO UPDATES:
JOB
APARTMENT (its dirty....)
花見

Also how many people that view this have Asian fonts installed... just out of curiosity... does my next line look like crazy japanese characters or a bunch of boxes/random characters (note... that may be a silly question... as Japanese and random characters could potentially look the same to you!)

日本は、東アジアの東方、太平洋の西部にある島国である。