I happen to play Team Fortress 2 in my free time, and oftentimes I end up playing on Japanese servers. For obvious reasons, the ping tends to be quite low.
I also found it amusing when I noticed that at the beginning of most every round most of the people mic on and say　「よろしく。」 or 「よろしくお願いします。」. [...]

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I was trying to update every Friday, but that didn’t work out. Too bad.
Anyway, for those who don’t know (which is probably most everyone reading this), as of a few months ago I put my unicycle to the side and bought a new bike. I’ve been wanting to do more distance stuff, and as fun [...]

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I’ve noticed a trend.
In nine months I’ve been here I’ve gotten quite a bit better at Japanese. I’m still an extremely long way from where I want to be, but looking back to my initial arrival I see that I’ve come quite a decent distance.
But…
I talk less to students now. I talk less to teachers [...]

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I gave in and bought a Wii.
I played a decent amount of Wii at Alex’s back in the US. While it was fun at first, once the novelty wore off I realized it really lost its appeal to me. That all changed when Smash Brothers came out, followed by Mario Kart. I’ve been itching to [...]

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My Japanese is nothing even closely resembling perfect. Because of this, sometimes when I order at food establishments the clerk second-guesses what I say. Yes, I really want two cheeseburgers. I said “two” as I held up two fingers, so yes, I really did want two cheeseburgers, not one. Yes, I really meant that I [...]

Popularity: 16% [?]

This past weekend I went down to Tsukuba to visit Beth, and as usual, on the way back we took the Tsukuba Express back to Tokyo so I could catch my bus back to Fukushima.
Now for the few people who don’t know, Japan tends to pride itself–and with good reason–on having reliable, always-on-time trains. If [...]

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Tonight I had about two of the most confusing hours of my life. I shall relate, but first there’s lots of pre-story to get up to the interesting stuff.
It all started about halfway through the workday today. This particular school is about a 25 minute bus ride away from the city. The particular bus I [...]

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To my dismay, today I found out that I failed 3-kyu of the JLPT. For those who don’t know, JLPT = Japanese Language Proficiency Test. There are four levels, from 4-kyu being the easiest to 1-kyu being virtually fluent.
With the amount of time I’ve been studying Japanese, there isn’t really a good reason for me [...]

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Today (as in February 3rd, today) is Setsubun, which means it’s time to cleanse the evil spirits from my home. Unfortunately, I like my evil spirits, so instead I went around and cleansed some of the other JETs places.
Usually what happens today is that the father of a family puts on an oni (demon) mask [...]

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The ride to school yesterday was far more eventful than any occurrence at school, and it all began in a crosswalk.
Every morning there are lots of people, mainly high schoolers and some older people, who walk or bike to their schools/jobs. Yesterday, like most any other day, I was a member of this crowd. We [...]

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