Sons of Loki

Has it really been a month? 30 days since five confused and bewildered individuals, one of whom with a nasty case of the sniffles, boarded a 777 headed straight for the land of our dreams, this distant home of the rising sun, this Japan?

Apparently.

In honour of this momentous event, I have revamped the site banner, and also done some heavy thinking.

I think we are all of us beginning to wonder why on earth we started learning this damn language, and at the same time realising that if we could go home tomorrow, we just wouldn’t. It’s tough, yeah, but it’s what we have to do.

I don’t think it has to be this hard, though. We’re taught Japanese entirely in Japanese, and it’s absolute hell. Maybe some day we’ll be at the stage where we can understand convoluted explanations and examples of Japanese grammar in the language itself, but right now it’s just agonising lesson after lesson of trying to keep up with streams of Japanese that we just don’t get and just won’t get. They say you can pick a language up eventually just by hearing it, and maybe that’s what they’re aiming at, but I would just prefer a simple Minna no Nihongo style “This grammar thing is equivalent to ~ English” for everything in our textbook, and then I could learn it instead of stabbing in the dark at what it might mean, if I understood the examples. So I sit in the classes, and I don’t get anything, and my attention wanders.

I don’t know. Einstein said the only thing that interferes with learning is education. I kinda feel like I’d get better with a couple of months, a stack of Heisig’s lovely books, and a textbook that actually tries to explain things, than to be stuck in the classroom for a year.

Fuck!

Went and deleted the Sons of Loki SQL database entirely by accident.

Compila inform me that the backup has been overwritten, which slightly negates the point of a backup, but then it’s my own stupid fault.

Uh, start again then, I guess.

My ass has been slightly saved by Google Cache, so I’ve just rapidly gone through and saved all the archived posts from July and June, so my journals from Korea are safe – which is the main thing I care about. I’ve restored the last ten or so posts by the magic of WordPress time travel, too.

Note to self: never be an idiot again.

I’ve also opened a DeviantArt account, so go there for some writings from a year or two ago.