In this video I say nice things about Sophia! The truth is I did a blog post here in which I was kind of negative towards quite a bit of the university’s administration, but luckily in the interview they didn’t ask about that, they just asked me what I’ve been doing. So I didn’t really sell out but if you think I did that is OK too!

As mentioned, no weekend video. I really missed shooting in daylight today – things look so much better with natural sunlight. I’ll make an effort to make sure the next one is so bright it blows your eyes out.

So, wish me luck in racquetball!

On Sunday I joined a couple of friends and headed to Chiba, to have a BBQ with my friends Leon and Saori. Leon is Australian, which means he is legally required to hold at least three BBQs a year. They also have two dogs, named Moro (the white one) and Yakul (the brown one). They are super cute.

Since I know people are easily won over by pictures of cute animals, I have chosen to post a whole bunch as opposed to narrate the post, because you can’t fawn over text.

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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.