Tuesday 3 July 2007

しつぼ Disappointment

I was going to post today about how, now that all my flights are sorted out (Manchester - London Heathrow, London Heathrow -Tokyo Narita, and Tokyo Haneda - Nagasaki), I'm feeling a lot calmer. Then, of course, comes the phone call from Lancaster University informing me that the 5-day intensive Japanese course that my brother and I were enrolled on has been cancelled. Great. I was relying on that to allow me to get used to conversing with a native speaker and to improve my mediocre, self-taught language skills. Ugh! I don't know what to do. I'll go out to Japan with low level Japanese skills if I must, but I'd feel so much better if I had spoken with an actual Japanese person before I did so. I should probably start looking into private tuition.

This year out was never going to go exactly to plan, but to have a set back so early on... that hardly bodes well. *Sighs*. Oh well, no point dwelling on something I can't change.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear that, love. No other courses available, then?

What do the kanji on your titles mean - the same as the English, or something else?

Lily Monk said...

No, there aren't any other courses at Lancaster University, at least not this term.

I'm putting my titles in both English and Japanese - for my benefit more than anyone elses. I'm finding it is good practice, even if I am just looking things up in the dictionary every time at the moment. The Japanese in this particular title is all in hiragana, not kanji, but some of my previous posts have had a mixture of the two.