Following on

That's five gym badges now. Making slow and steady progress, I like to think, though I feel I may be being overtaken by the entire eastern Asian subcontinent. Hoping I'll get plenty of time in the coming weeks to get some serious work done on it.

And not on a dissertation.

So now let's talk about classes. This semester I've got five classes... well, more like four and a half. Monday mornings in 'Japanese to English Translation', which is dead simple. Not that it's easy, it's just a very predictable format of get a Japanese text, turn it into English. We've been looking at the same sort of things that we have in our second class, 'English to Japanese Translation' which is on Tuesday mornings. This one's looking a lot more at the theories behind translation, a good example being today which looked at loan words that have different meanings to when they were in the language they were loaned from. 'Advanced Japanese Writing' follows on from that, though we only have two classes in that this semester. The rest of our time goes into writing a long-ish Japanese essay on whatever we like, due in start of next semester (interestingly AFTER the dissertation due date). Finally it's 'Advanced Japanese Speaking', which is preparation for a couple of tasks. Last couple of weeks we've been looking at half of our assessment which is a presentation in Japanese for the second-years on an aspect of Japanese culture. Natasha, Connor, Alison and myself have nabbed ourselves 'Shame culture', which we'll be starting work on in the weeks to come.

That was a long paragraph, let's start a new one.

Linguistics is assessed through a single course this semester: 'Syntactic Systems and English Grammar'. It's as thrilling as it sounds. In all fairness the lecturer's pretty cool, certainly very passionate about his work, but you just can't quite make grammar interesting that easily. There's a short essay due in next week which I'll need to start some time soon. Next semester will see the start of 'Second Language Acquisition' and 'Psycholinguistics', which look far more interesting. Syntax is on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons.

On top of that there's volunteer admin work at the church on Monday, the J2 class on Tuesday with anime in the evening, NOTHING (yes, nothing at all) on Wednesdays save roleplaying in the evening and the church student group on Thursday nights. And that's my week.

'Scotland Loves Anime' starts in a couple of weeks. Films on include Eva 2.0 (still my all-time favourite animated film), the Haruhi movie (at long, long last), Professor Layton and Trigun (the director of whom is hopefully going to be shown around Edinburgh by yours truly). I'm only gonna see Haruhi, don't really want to be spending massive amounts of money right now.

And I still stand that Summer Wars ripped off Digimon 2.

Might ply a bit of Pokemon now, actually. Connor's not back from work yet, he said he might be up for some gaming this evening, so I've got a little time to kill. Currently facing off against the Plasmas (who seem to have ninjas in their employ) at the bottom of a big, electric cavern with some adorable fluffy, yellow spider Pokemon. Wanita the Meguroko is doing superbly, as is Guru the Munna, with Lazarro, Patty, Afro and Iko completing the squad. The shape of the hole where my next badge goes is decidedly feather-shaped, so I'm thinking it'll be fliers. Gotta get Afro's rocky goodness on top-form for that.

Thanks for reading.