journal features

Japanese lessons again

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2009.04.21

I had an entire month off, since I last took Japanese lessons. Now I'm back into it, with a twice-weekly program that will I hope cover a lot of the same ground as my previous class (and give me some more practical exposure to all that stuff that came at me like a freight train during the eight week, five-days-a-week intensive program).

Only four of the eight people signed up for the class attended our 'orientation' session this past Thursday. I hope the class size stays small, but to my surprise I noticed that among the missing four was another Canadian. We Canucks are pretty rare over here and I've certainly never had one as a classmate. If he does show up, it might be good for my classmates, serve as a brake for some of my elaborate tales about life in Canada (I have claimed, for instance, that polar bears set the Federal election schedule in Canada).

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)