ホストファミリー の てがみ

私のしゅみ (^-^) !

                       私のしゅみ  (^-^) !

I have a few pastimes I enjoy......

でも わたしの一番すきなしゅみはえをかく!

I picked it up as a hobby late in middle school and really came to like it over the years. Its one of those hobbies that's relaxing but challenging at the same time since you're always trying to get better. This is a really short post, sorry! (とても いそがしい です （-。-）) I'll say more about it later but I thought I'd post a sketch or to here to see really quick.

                                  

All of them are quick sketches and none of these are finished by the way, i'm still working on all of them. 

  くろいすみとチャコールが大すきです。

(I started this one last night, probably should've been studying -.-')

                                    It's Blaire Arch :) I drew this when I got accepted (still not done though)






アマチュアですでも , when professionals use charcoal and ink...とてもきれです!


Also here's some music.  It's one I usually listen to when drawing by Utada Hikaru. Sanctuary
(The Japanese Version is called Passion)

ひかりのこども : おんがく

Just like I said with おおかみ, I think the music in Child of Light made up a huge portion of the game's artistry as a whole, so I thought i'd post it's main theme and a couple of game excerpts here.!


The gorgeous theme of the main character Aurora.

Its pretty much a good representation of the tone of the entire game. Very slow and entrancing, like a long, old story.

And here's one other song (all of them are good) this is just another traveling theme.

(More) Traditional Art in Games: ひかりのこども

So I mentioned my love of traditional art in games before, namely in the Japanese PS2/PS3 RPG game   おおかみ (which thanks to some advice from さとう先生, I have since learned is not spelled おかみ, despite the English in-game translation! But i'm learning haha!).

Anyways, another game that has a similarly beautiful watercolor art style is the recent award winning game Child of Light aka  ひかりのこども. (Also for PS3)

これゲーム はにほんごのゲーム じゃありませんでも.... The producers have said that the art is heavily inspired  by a multitude of watercolor styles including Japanese watercolor styles and stylistic inspirations.  

See  that beautiful cherry tree? :D
Not only was the art beautiful but it was entirely hand drawn and scanned in by a team of artists instead of being computer generated which is amazing when you see how detailed everything is

aaand what's even MORE amazing is that the dialogue was entirely written in rhyming poetry! Now that might sound cheesy and tiring after a while but it was actually really well done, and it made the entire game feel like an old storybook come to life.
This is the game trailer and you can hear some of the rhyming in it..

So all in all....

Just like おおかみ I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who loves action RPGS, beautiful storytelling and amazing art! 

にほんごのじゅぎよう:New Goal Statement

Now that Japanese 101 has been going on for some time now, I think I have a much better sense of what I need to do to improve and keep up with my lessons in a manner that's satisfactory to me.  I think its easiest to compile a short little list of the major changes I'm going to try to make.

-まいばんにほんごのきょうかしょをよみます。:

This might seem obvious but it's a major change I need to make. Most days of the week I tend to simply do my homework, study for a quiz (if there is one) and call myself done for the night. I think I would feel a lot more comfortable in class, especially in terms of speaking and general grammar structure if I spent time with the book every night regardless of whether or not I have homework.


先生の Office Hours に いきます :

I definitely haven't been making good use of the office hours available to me. Mainly because my tight class scheduling makes it difficult. But I think that if I took the time to go, a lot of the points in class that move a bit quickly for me and adversely affect my speaking would get ironed out rather easily. 

Those are the two major changes... but in general I also want to...
-Practice Dict-a-conversation exercises more
-Speak more in my free time and make a greater effort to attend language tables,  
-Ask more clarifying questions in class
-Take more organized, thorough class notes
I think that if I can at least meet some of these goals, my fluidity of speaking will improve massively and i'll be much more comfortable forming and responding to questions in class.

One of my Favourites! 天元突破グレンラガン

I feel like no Japanese blog could be complete without mentioning one's favorite animes! I have quite a few favorites recently but one of the older ones that I found a couple months back and loved was the anime グレンラガン It starts off pretty typical but by the the end it became one of most innovative, surprising animes I've ever seen.
Not to mention it has a fantastic opening theme!

  
(So I mentioned before that I really enjoy some of the art styles that have stemmed from Japan recently.) Well that love of art kind of stems into what I enjoy about this show as well.

This is my video self introduction for my JPN 101 class assignment.
I'm naturally extremely camera shy

but I gave it my best try so I guess its fine!

Goal Statement For Class!

Alright so in regards to my weaknesses and goals...

It's not too hard for me to memorize vocabulary, grammar and other technical points like that, in fact I feel like that's the part of learning a new language where I have the most fun! For me the main thing I need to work on is the pitch and intonation part of my prosody. My speed of speaking is adequate at this point but the feedback I received from Shibata Sensei let me know that I tend to raise my pitch at the end of sentences and that this isn't good in Japanese unless i'm asking a question. (Which I wasn't doing so, oops!) I guess the problem is I'm perhaps still imitating a more English way of speaking where slight raises in pitch (regardless of words) indicates a bit of deference and cordiality.

Hopefully I'll be able to work on this and improve a bit by shadowing  and paying extremely close attention to that particular aspect of speaking when listening to music or anime for the next couple of weeks. I watch anime and listen to music a lot most weeks so I won't set an exact time that I'll be doing this but I'll say that for at lest five minutes of every anime episode or for the first chorus of each song I'll try to listen to/ imitate pitch patterns very closely.

Some Great Music From Okami

One of my favorite songs from おおかみ, the game from before. :)

Such a beautiful singing.

A Little More About Me; Art!

One other thing that's related to Japanese 101 and my study of the language and culture is my love for some of the modern and traditional styles of art seen in a lot of Japanese anime and video games today. Its a hard thing to describe but one of my all time favorite examples of a modern fusion of traditional and contemporary Japanese art styles is the Japanese RPG game Okami. Not only is it a FANTASTIC game. (I'd recommend it to anyone :) ) but its some of my favorite artistic visual work to date.

The dark stylized lines are really pretty and inspiring to me as a developing artist myself.!

This is more of an example of the art in-game which is great but the really gorgeous stuff is the more traditional versions the creators also did to supplement it...

One of the typical pieces you'd see on a loading screen or start menue.

The game itself is meant to be based off of Traditional Watercolor Techniques

I really love the use of line and color and the way games like these try to fuse traditional and modern art styles! 

So I guess you could say art is one of the parts of Japanese culture today that I really appreciate, and that it helps motivate me to learn the language as best I can.

げいじゅつ  が 大すき です!

Japanese Introduction Practice :)

はじめまして、 れのるどです！   いるのいすのしかごからきました。ぷりんすとんだいがくのいちねんせいです。わたしのせんこうはせいぶつがく。 にほんごがすきです！ どうぞよろしく。

First Post: Why I Choose to Study Japanese!

それ は わたし の "Blog" です!
(^ That might not be gramatically correct but that's why I'm in 101 :)

This assigned class blog sounds pretty fun, so hopefully I do this right!
 I guess I'll start of with a more academic, serious-sounding reason for why I decided to take Japanese...

For the past 6 years or so I've been devoted to studying Spanish and consequently did so all throughout my high school career up until the end of my senior year when I completed the AP exam and tested out of my language requirement as a result. But even though I'm not required to take a language I love the process of language learning and decided that Japanese would be the next most relevant language for me to learn personally, so here I am now in Japanese 101. I self taught myself the basics for the past year or so as a hobby, so I have a little past experience but nothing major!

Now the less academic reason is one I'm hoping at least some of my classmates can relate to, and that reason would be simply having a positive personal interest in the culture and things like video games, anime, art, music, and light novels etc. that are originally in the Japanese language.  I love to read and watch shows and listen to music in English but the Japanese equivalents grab me as well, so the fact that I enjoy those cultural things and love language learning made the choice to take Japanese in Princeton a no brainer. I'm incredibly excited for this upcoming year and it's good to meet you all.