Gengo Ahoy!

A week ago, I met one of the Brits in Aeon, and we shopped for CDs together. I mentioned that I was taking Korean classes in the prefecture capital. He mentioned that he'd been trying to learn Korean on and off for a few years.

Imagine my surprise when I turned around in my seat next Friday at class and there he was. Well, that's cool and all, but he can't speak Japanese, so I had to give up my seat at the front of the class and go sit by him to translate. This was slightly irksome because I get there early every period so I can sit in the front.

People will tell you that you have to listen closely to the way a language sounds to acquire a proper accent. This is bullshit. The trick is watching what a native speaker's mouth does. Which is why, when I'm suddenly two rows from the back with tall women in front of me, there's a problem. I think I'll reserve two seats next week.

That said, Korean is fun. I love the way different languages use different facial muscles and tongue positions. Latin's a really open language - your mouth has to stay really loose and relaxed and the words just roll out. In contrast, Gaelic's spoken in the back of the throat; your mouth is spread horizontally and you push the sound out with your diaphram, with little flourishes for the rolled r's and lenitions.

Japanese is fun because it's such a percussive, measured language. You keep your jaw dropped and your lips barely open and focus the sound through that small windway. Korean seems like you need to keep your face pretty tense to speak it, but unlike Japanese, you move your lips into different positions.

I was hoping to start Russian lessons in two weeks, but I might be taking on an eikaiwa instead:( That'll be kind of nice, as the first lesson I teach will pay for my year of Korean lessons and then some, but damn. I've been trying to learn Russian since junior year of high school and something always comes up.

On the other hand, I'm hoping someone will have dropped out of the Chinese classes, and I can take those instead.

You know how some people get this Pavlovian sexual thrill out of looking at cars? That's pretty much what happens to me when I think about learning a new language. I spent $25 on a second Korean textbook last night, and it made my day. I carried it around with me like a new toy.

Seeing as I am being taken for a ride have so much free time at work, I've been going back over the textbooks I used in my Japanese classes in high school. It really made me realise how much I love learning languages. I was miserable to the point of being suicidal in high school, but I loved Japanese class so much. I can remember just about everything about each lesson - where I sat in class, what I was wearing, what worksheets went along with each grammar point, funny mistakes people made, and these were things that happened almost a decade ago. If I could have spent eight hours a day in language classes instead of wasting my time getting a 'well rounded' core 40 education (read: being required to learn subjects I knew I had no interest in pursuing), I would have been on cloud nine. I would also have been a linguistic mac by now. Too bad. It's not like I remember, or have any need to know, calculus.

But I could have told you that back when I was fourteen.

READ THIS. NOW.

( The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute )

So basically, the argument is that we had to invade Iraq because they aided al Quaeda I mean, because they had nuclear capability I mean, because they had weapons of mass destruction I mean, because Saddamn was A Very Bad Evil Man who tortured his citizens. But it's okay for the US to torture people as long as they're some other country's citizens, and we have a document that says we're permitted to do so.

Does this mean that if Saddam can produce official Iraqi documents stating that it was okay for him to torture his populace, we'll have to let him go?

Fuck Saddam. It's the President of the United States - and his cronies - who are the most dangerous, evil human beings alive.

That will be fucking all.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Shooting Yourself in the Foot

or Gee, Didn't See That One Coming, or perhaps even I Told You So, Asshole.

All my lessons this week were cancelled, by the same woman who told me last week that I wasn't doing my job and needed to teach more of them.

Why were they cancelled, one asks, when said supervisor was so adamant that I do my job more?

Because with my new chock full schedule, there wasn't time to meet and discuss lesson plans. Which is why I try not to fill my schedule to its recent capacity.

So thanks ever so much for making me create and discard two lesson plans, keeping at work for three days doing nothing so you could make me stay for unpaid overtime because you were too busy to discuss during the day, and then deciding that you're rather not have me do anything for a week, which wouldn't have happened with the old schedule.

I'm pretty fucking sick to my stomach from this whole business.

Oh, and I want a new motherfucking apartment. By yesterday. Thank you.

That will be all.