Stumbling Through Japanese

五月につまと一緒には新しい家に移りますよ！　　家をはりるの近所が大好きで、ここに家を買うとけっしんしました。　　アメリカで家を買うのがビクビクして、私たちは、ストレスをかかえているね。　　移るのだけでなく、七月にむすめが生まれます！　妻と私は超忙しいですな。

The other person is Kazushi Ohno in that show. He has been mainly orchestrating  in
Europe. He is not so famous in
Japan, but his schedules are fixed already these three years. When he was young, he could take a position in Zabreb the first time in
Europe. Being attacked in
Zagreb during the war, he conducted his orchestra. He didn’t run away to other countries because Zabreb people eagerly came to the concerts. The concerts were more crowded in the war time than those in peace time under ordered blackouts. 

He can speak four languages including German,
Italy. The MC asked him, “Do you think that you are Japanese, being Japanese is advantage or disadvantage for you?” 

He replied slowly, “I like Enka. (That is traditional Japanese songs.) If I were Italian or German, I would be obsessed with my own country traditional music when I conducted other country’s European music. Luckily I am Asian, I can conduct tunes keeping from the same distance from European music. That is my advantage. Learning languages wasn’t big problem.” It’s difficult to learn only one language for me. 

He communicates rhyme with his right arm, and feeling with left arm. As a result, each arm separately is controlled by his brain. When he was a university student, he practiced that everyday. Now he can easily move his arms differently.  

Gift may be given to each person but they must have been always more striving than others. That is sure thing. I was inspired. I need to more struggle. The program “Professional” is shown at 10:00 pm from this April. (This time I am very serious.) 

March 22 2007 Professional 

I couldn’t go to sleep soon as usual. I turned on the TV around 2 o’clock. A program was called “Professional” on NHK. Two great Japanese were guests. One was Naoki Urasawa, Monster’s author, the other one was Kazushi Ohno, an orchestra conductor. 

The program has usually one guest for each time. The last program was irregularly edited, two people’s stories were showed in one hour. Those stories were interesting like inside stories. 

I browsed the “Monster” manga about one month ago. I wanted to know what kind of person the aouther is. What’s a coincidence!! It was the first time that I‘d ever seen Naoki Urasawa. 

The MC asked him, “How do you usually make your stories?” He said, “In my case, the last scene sometimes comes down to me something like a spiritual epiphany after I take about one hour sleep. I feel as if I saw a movie’s trailer. Next, I will make the first part and then put the details.” 

When he was young, any idea didn’t come up with. He was kept thinking about something to good and he finally fell in sleep because he was too tired to think of it all day long. But he hadn’t given up drawing manga. 

He has been drawing Monster series about for eight years on a book (1994 - 2001, 18 stories). I’ve heard the series of books sold well as many as 20,000,000 copies totally. 

He broke his right shoulder since he had worked too hard to draw. He, however, has been still drawing. He said, “It’s very important for me to draw even one thin line in a frame so I don’t want to ask my assistants to draw.” The Monster animation has already created and aired on TV in
Japan. Now a drama version of Monster has been making by New Line Cinema in
Hollywood. ( to be continued) 

太ったな！　　料理を教えたからはずっと太っているよ！　　仕事を終わってから運動した、でも天気が寒くなって家に散歩できない。　　それから、運動しなくてますます太っている。　　やせるかそれとも新しい服を買わなければならないんですよ！　そうして、今朝、はしるに行った！　　外がまだ寒いからむねを痛めて足を痛めた。　やめるにがっかりしなければいいでな。

——

I’ve gotten fat! Ever since I learned to cook, I have started gaining weight. I was working out after work, but the weather turned cold and I couldn’t walk home anymore. Since then, I haven’t been exercising at all and I’ve gained more and more weight. Some clothes don’t fit anymore. It’s either I lose weight or I buy new clothes! So, this morning, I woke up early and went for a jog. It’s still cold outside so my chest started to hurt and my legs started to hurt. I hope I don’t disappoint myself by quitting.

I passed the JLPT 3級「さんきゅう」 with an 80%.

95/100 - Vocabulary/Kanji
52/100 - Listening
173/200 - Grammar

320/400 = 80%.

I got destroyed on the listening part which is probably the most important part for conversational japanese! There are direct reasons I did so well on the Vocab/Kanji and the Grammar sections - I’ll write those reasons up as posts soon!

I ended up wiping the old Nihongo-a-go-go when I rebuilt my server. There wasn’t too much of interest. At the very least, I’ll be using this blog to practice my Japanese by writing -in- Japanese. Anyone is welcome to comment, correct, criticize and critique!