First of all, I'd like to apologise for failing to write a blog for so long. My neglect has partly to do with the fact that I haven't done anything especially interesting of late, and a lot to do with the fact that I've been on-and-off unwell - curse you glandular fever!

However, it does me no good to dwell on negatives like this, so, at the behest of my friends back in Adelaide, I will once again write a blog! But what to write about?
In the first few weeks that I was here, it was always easy to find a subject to write on, for everything was new and exciting. As I have become more accustomed to life in Japan, though, things that were once new and wacky are now simply part of my every-day life; but that's not to say that things aren't exciting. Far from it - I'm having a great time here!

One of the things I am enjoying the most is gradually being able to understand (and to a lesser extent speak) Japanese. The multitude of Kanji (Chinese characters), of which were once all but incomprehensible to me, are now revealing their secrets, and I can gradually grasp the meaning of Tohoshinki's ballads. Indeed, it seems that sometimes there are things that can be better expressed in Japanese than English - or at least they come to my mind in Japanese first. I am taking that as a good sign that I am learning!

Japanese is particularly interesting because of the great subtlety of meaning that it can convey. Often, tone is conveyed not through the tone of a speaker's voice, but by their choice of words. There is polite speech and there is casual speech, there is masculine speech and feminine speech, and so on. In contrast to English, where one's type of speech (formal vs casual) is largely dictated by choice of words, Japanese uses the same words but with different conjugations - for example, 'to go' is ikimasu in polite/semi-polite form, but merely iku when speaking casually. Not only that, but because the Japanese love to shorten EVERYTHING (to give a familiar example, 'Pocket Monsters' becomes 'PokeMon' ), listening to casual speech is like listening to another language entirely! And I haven't even mentioned keigo, the super-polite way of speaking, because I get annoyed when all of the shopkeepers etc speak it to me and I cannot understand them. Oh well, it's quite the challenge, but I guess as I've always found understanding things to be satisfying,  I am enjoying it.

Another part of the language that doesn't really translate into English is that many words have the same pronunciation but different meanings. This can be interesting in two ways - firstly to create such confusing sentences as:

橋の端で箸で食べた。
Hashi no hashi de hashi de tabeta. 

I ate with chopsticks on the edge of the bridge.

Of course, there are subtle pronunciational differences between all of the above hashi, but I can't pick them up in everyday speech. That's why I found Chinese so hard ~_~".
The other is in creating multiple meanings in things like poems. As my Japanese is nowhere near good enough to create a poem (or to find a suitable example), I'll just give you one example of where it's similar to English:

松 ＝ matsu = pine (tree)
待つ = matsu = to wait

It's not hard to see how you could do a similar play on words in English with the word 'pine'. This is just the tip of the iceberg, however, and you can see why it'd be hard to translate a poem from Japanese into English if it contained things like this.

Well, it seems like I have run out of steam for writing this blog post - I hope I didn't bore you to death with my ranting on language! To make up for it somewhat, I suppose I'll post up some pictures of food to torment, er, show you what my life is like in Japan!