Update

I must apologize for the lack of a "creative" title, but today was my Friday and we practiced pitch accent quite heavily in Japanese class today, so my brain is a bit fried. It's been a productive couple of weeks (2 and a half, maybe three weeks since school started? I don't remember, because you are tossed directly into the work, which is fine with me, but something's gotta give and that happens to be everyone's sense of time), but it's been worth it. I came into my Japanese class an hour before the class started the other day and found myself with only the teacher (we are to call her Ebanzu-sensei, but in English we could call her Evans, though the title that she is given in Japanese does not show gender or marital status, so it's hard to tell if she is married or not). I put my stuff down and brought up to her in the front of the room a book that I happened to find at Barnes and Noble Bookstore at the Scottsdale 101 which was written by a very famous Japanese author (Kawabata Yasunari, or in English, Yasunari Kawabata), called Yama no oto, which roughly means "The sound of the mountain." She leafed through the pages and started talking to me in Japanese, asking me questions like "Where did you buy it? How much was it? Do you read the book out loud to yourself?" To the last question, I told her that I only read it out loud when I am by myself, and she said, "That is why, then, you have very smooth Japanese, without a thick English accent, and your pitch is quite good, too." That made my day, so I had to share that here. I'm sure it may have been something of an exaggeration, a polite lie, if you will, but it sure has given me the motivation to work harder at it, because our imperfect state as humans will obviously cause me to continue to have a slight accent and trouble with the pitch from time to time, but that won't stop me.

Aside from that, I've been delving into Greek lately and I am seriously considering pursuing the language to fluency, but my dilemma is that I have also considered aiming for fluency in Russian and Chinese. Should I do all three of them? Or should I focus on two or just one? Why? I obviously won't kill myself trying to work at them right now but if I have the time and the motivation, I'll try to learn as much as possible.

Anyway, I'm not dead. I'll be back to post something quite interesting, possibly considering another comparison post of two different languages, looking seriously at Russian and Greek due to a number of similarities in the writing system (no surprise, since the Greek alphabet did influence the current Cyrillic alphabet developed for and used by Russian), as well as cases and their usage. Forgive me for my lack of posts, but keep on checking. You may see it in a few weeks--either a preview or a full post. Who knows. 'Til then.