Imagine if I got a friend of mine high enough on paint fumes to hold the camera whilst I talk about giant message tickers, video games I’ve never heard of, and kebabs. Now click this video! It will be exactly what you pictured in your head! Or maybe even better if you’re dumb!

Yeah, it’s really quite different from the last few videos I’ve done, but I really wanted to get out and shoot something for once, rather than just relying on talking really fast and being mean about stuff. Speaking of which, I have another drink lined up for a drink review. I’ll do it as soon as I get a free bit of time and also manage to find a place to buy the damn thing.

What do you guys think of these ‘Let’s go to X’ / ‘Exploring X’ type videos? Are they better/worse than the drinks reviews or the recent snappy comedy ones? Let me know and maybe I will tailor my next video(s) to your very desires! Although probably not!

Here’s this week’s video, a day early. Procrastination leads to wonderful things.

This one was a bit more random than the last two, because I felt both topics didn’t really warrant a full video. I also waited until the last moment to shoot it as I was hoping an awesome news story would break, but no luck!

Anyway, I’m now aiming for 500 subscribers! Tell your friends! Then tell your enemies!

This is a follow up to my Sophia FAQ which I posted in January. Now that I have had a few weeks doing Advanced Japanese 1, I feel like I can shed some light on that too.

First off, it’s a heck of a lot better. Much more focus on speaking and listening, and the content of the textbook is now challenging because it’s advanced Japanese, not challenging because it’s mind numbingly boring. There are four 90 minute classes a week, two of which are spent covering reading and grammar, looking mostly at newspaper reports and so on. The other two are spent watching TV content, having discussions, giving speeches and so on.

Again it’s not what I would call ‘on the street’ Japanese practice, but I think you get to practice that… well on the real street. There’s still a lot of stuff to memorize, although it’s not quite as much as intermediate. I think you’re simply supposed to learn everything that comes up in the content that you didn’t know before. It’s working for me, anyway.

Overall I would say it is a considerable improvement from the intermediate Japanese class, to the point that I would recommend it to most JLPT2+ students. At this point you really can just memorize your way up to JLPT1, but by taking this class I think you might be able to round out some speaking/listening skills quite nicely, too.

The ideas in this video are 100% not cool for kids. If you subject your children to them, don’t come whining to me when they get taken away by the state.

Three video posts in a row! Oops! I wanted to focus more on Youtube (as I’m finding it a lot of fun right now) but it seems I’ve somewhat neglected the written word. As I mentioned in the video I will be doing a Sophia blog post soon, so I’ll try to get that out next to break up the video posts. As I totally forgot to mention in the video, I’m also watching a drama from a few years ago called 流星の絆 (Ties Of Shooting Stars) so I will probably review that in the near future.

Alright, enjoy!

Two videos in a row?! They said it would never happen! They were wrong! This video was based on this news report (Japanese) I am really happy with how it turned out. I am really getting into editing and cutting videos, so expect to see many more!

Note: There are swears in the video! Sorry! I will never ever swear again!

As I mentioned, I really like this video. It’s snappy and fun, and it looks good too. I finally got the lighting in the room sorted!

Now that I am using cuts, I can make a mistake and rather than having to start again, just retake the same line and continue. As a result filming now takes about 10-15 minutes, instead of 40-50 minutes of filming the same 4 minute segment over and over. Moreover, because I’m no longer trudging through a 50 minute clip for the single take that went well, editing doesn’t really take much longer!

Now to just win the lottery and upgrade my computer so it doesn’t take a week to export and upload the videos! (Translation: Y’all need to buy me a computer)

Later this week I may gat chance to shoot a video (or even write a blog post, although that is pretty 2006…) about my second semester at Sophia. It might be a bit boring though so I might not bother! Who knows?!?!?!