Apologies for not posting anything for a while. I’ve been very busy this week as I’ve taken up Japanese before a trip we’re doing in April. Better late than never, hopefully. I’m learning on Duolingo and somehow this week I’ve stumbled into a group of high achievers and have been languishing at the bottom of the table all week, at serious risk of dropping out of the diamond league. This probably means nothing to you if you don’t do Duolingo but some of us care about self improvement, dontcha know.
Bizarrely, for the first time ever I have one of my Duolingo contacts in my group. Who would have thought my sister in law was such a high achiever? Actually, anyone who knows her could guess. She’s whipping my ass this week, that’s for sure.
You can’t even see me as I’m way down in the demotion zone. I’ll be busting my gut over the next 24 hours to avoid that at all costs.
The other thing I’m doing for my Japanese is watching “Shogun” on TV. I’m a bit late to the party as it was a big thing last year. I can remember watching Shogun as a kid, it was the first of the newly invented “miniseries”. Watching someone commit seppuku was a real eye opener. This new version is even more brutal for one with such delicate sensibilities as myself. I’m still having nightmares about someone being (spoiler alert) boiled alive in the first episode. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep watching but even though the body count was even higher in the second episode it wasn’t quite so disturbing. More importantly, there is a lot of Japanese spoken, with English subtitles. Very educational.