I just read koda’s post about fansubbing and I couldn’t agree less with it. She claims the same thing she’s claimed already when I showed up on Rizon four years ago: fansubbing is dead as it’s pointless to keep it up with simulcasts all over the place, and people who still stick to it are either delusional in that they can do better than the official, do it for the e-peen and/or simply don’t have a life.
I still call that bullshit.
“Why did you come to Japan?” I don’t know if I’d written about this before and I just forgot or it’s just the almost-daily repetitions of this question that make me feel so bored of it. I just realized that I didn’t really elaborate on this part when I wrote about how I learned Japanese earlier.
I feel that I must add one thing to that earlier post about language learning: I didn’t put any effort into it. Sure in the first year I had to study pretty hard to keep up with the curriculum, but in retrospect even that just felt like a nuisance. I wasn’t actively learning vocab and I’d never sit down to memorize kanji if I didn’t absolutely have to. I just went with the flow and did what was necessary to get a pass grade.
On the other hand I know people who really care about Japanese as a language and were as fluent when they first came to Japan as I was after three years or so. The point is rather that even a slacker like me can pick up a language eventually. (It might be that translating loads and loads of stuff during my university years helped a bit.)
Just now I watched this TEDx presentation about learning languages quick. Chris Lonsdale claims you can become fluent in a second language in six months by following the principles he outlines in the presentation. To me it kinda feels like he’s just pointing out the obvious.
Today we paid a visit to a contractor, and got to see how animation drawings are scanned, digitalized and colored. Honestly I was just shocked at how ineffective and outdated everything is, and yet they manage to create content that we see airing weekly.
On the other hand I found it amusing when people who work on computers all day complained about how it tires the eyes. I don’t understand how that works. The last time I felt that looking at the screen tired my eyes was back a decade ago with a 15″ 60Hz CRT monitor, and the past few years I’ve spent more time in front of the screen than elsewhere.
I almost forgot how nice translating a nice load of stuff can feel. There were seasons when I had my hands full with 3-4 shows a day, but once the spring season ended last year, I started tuning it down, so by autumn the number of my running shows was halved, and last season I only had two ongoing. I was just about to forget how translating even feels (and I just made a fool of myself in front of the HR guys when I failed to instantly write down a word I’ve never (sic) used in writing before), so driven by some sudden urge I cleared a good bunch of episodes this weekend. Felt good.
I thought if I already did one of these yesterday, I could as well do another today and call it a weekend. I checked the McD menu online, trying to find something nice and found a quite promising item.
Someone shared a CH collection of McDonald’s stuff that aren’t available in the US. What a surprise (not), a good bunch of them are Japan-only. So I thought, let’s take advantage of where I live and hunt those available now down.
Today the plan was that I’d go to the sushi place in the neighborhood and socialize with whoever’s there at this time (it’s friday night, so I had my hopes up). Except when I entered there was no one but an older lady who looked really surprised at me. That in itself wouldn’t be weird (after all I’m a westerner in a japanese living neighborhood), but instead of welcoming me, she started with a “what do you want?”. Now that’s weird.
Yeah I know it was too good to be true. Get an internet connection that is in theory faster than what I used the past three years, for half the money, and I even get a discount on my cell bill. Can you guess where’s the catch?
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