Darlo's World

After watching an episode of ‘Are You Smarter Than a 10 Year Old’ on Sky One the other day, I thought I’d have a go at the online version just to see how I’d do. Admitadly up until today I’d not managed to complete the entire quiz, always falling at the final question where they throw a history or natural science question my way.

Well anyway, when I was playing I noticed something odd on one of the questions; a spelling mistake. Ironically a game to test whether you’re smarter than someone only a decade old had it’s only mental problems.

The question presented to me was “Near WHIOH of these would you find a lighthouse?”, and I could only presume that they intended to use the word ‘which’. The main thing that stumped me is if you have a look down at your keyboard, where is the ‘O’ key in relation to the ‘C’ key? Sadly enough I “hit the wrong button” and got the question wrong.

I had another moment of ‘eh?’ last night when I was flicking through one of my Japanese grammar books. Oxford Japanese Grammar and Verbs by Jonathan Bunt was recommended to me by a friend and to be honest it’s a very good little book. It’s explanations are clear and easy to follow. However it seems that even the Oxford University Press has it’s off days.

授業が早く終わったら電話電話します
Jugyō ga hayaku owattara denwa shimasu
If the class finishes early, I will ring

For those who don’t do Japanese you might want to just skip on ahead. For those that do, have a look at ‘電話電話’ which is apparently read as just ‘denwa’. If you have the book and want to have a nose it’s on page 134.

Taking a break from my learning 1200 new kanji, vocab and grammar points before Friday for my “pass the year or fail the degree” exam, I’ve found myself stunned with the progress I made today and at the same time sickened by the fact I really didn’t put the effort in earlier when I had much more time. I’ve managed to cover 4 of the 76 chapters we needed to do, and although the odds of me passing on Friday are about the same as me bungee jumping from the Tokyo Tower by that time, we can take a resit in September. However failing in September will mean … well, let’s not go there.

I’d printed off the target kanji, vocab, grammar in such a way across 40 sheets of A4, giving me the challenge of learning one a day. This means in 40 days (I’m aware that the test itself is in 5 days, but I’m planning to make sure I can pass the resit having accepted the non existance of the aforementioned bungee jump scenario), I will have covered everything and still have time to go over it for a good revision session. The main negative part is obviously I won’t come across these words written in the street in daily life. Though to be honest the only time I saw the word 売春 (baishun, prostitute) since being here, was in the Kanji in Context textbook and anywhere I happened to be practicing writing it down (not in public this one).

I did manage to put another upload on the videos/photos of Japan section, though it’s only one today. However, tomorrow I’ll try to whack on even more. So here’s a video of part of my daily commute to Kobe; Juso to Tsukaguchi on the Hankyu line.