Blahg

Well, I don't have a whole lot going on right now. I spend my days watching court reality shows and entering random sweepstakes, my nights working at the ghost tour company downtown. In addition, I've wasted countless hours reading strangers' blogs, stalking people on Myspace and viewing skydiving mishaps on You Tube. Fruitful times indeed. These are the days of nothing that I longed for as a graduate student, but which seem long and boring now that they are reality.

In nerdier news, I'm also trying to learn this. Hiragana. Apparently, the Japanese use three different syllabaries or system of characters: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Kanji is the one with thousands of characters that foreigners like me have virtually no hope of learning, so naturally it is the one used most often. Katakana is used to represent foreign words, while Hiragana serves to indicate the readings of Kanji or to replace Kanji all together. This information I learned from the website of my employer, and I don't quite understand the differences yet. I've chosen to learn Hiragana first because apparently that is where Japanese language students are supposed to start, and because many train station signs are printed in Hiragana as well as Kanji. That sounds rather useful. I've memorized nearly all of the characters and their corresponding syllables, so I could likely figure out how a word written in Hiragana is pronounced, I'd just have no idea what it meant.

Hiragana appears in this strange little video. I recognize all but two of the characters.



I can't wait to get to Japan and see this stuff for myself! Too, too funny.