Good morning from Piermont, where the river is starting to freeze. My brother is trying to froth milk without any success and getting quite frustrated. Thanks to all my fans out there, sorry to keep you waiting. In answer to all your questions, "bao kang rui" is my Chinese name, I'm hoping to remain generally anonymous on the internet at the moment, So far it's working. Also to elaborate on some other reasons for taking Japanese, my dad married a Japanese woman and she generally doesn't talk that much because she's not very confident in her English (although if I could speak Japanese nearly as well as she speaks English I'd be very pleased with myself), so now we have something to take about, namely, Nihongo. So she helps me out. I think she's taught Japanese in the past. Also I have a little brother who is very small, but I imagine one day he'll be able to speak Japanese, so I can chat with him. At some point. I hope. So I go out to there place every Wednesday night and hang out with my little brother, and then Fumikosan (so she said I could refer to her as Fumiko because she's my step mom, but it would still be polite to refer to her as Fumikosan when I mention her in the third person, correct?) comes home and we talk about Japanese. Actually my Dad speaks a little bit too, so he can explain everything to me so far.

Okay so I'm a bit anxious about learning how to type in Hiragana. How do I do it? Help! I'm not super capable with computers. Okay I'll give it a shot. Argh.

Also I'm getting a bit frustrated with myself learning in hiragana. It will get easier, right? Like I think I wrote iraku instead of ikura. Why? Also kurasai instead of kudasai. Where am I getting this from? I'm hoping if I recognize my deviant ways in my blog I will somehow be forgiven. What a strange idea that I have this indirect method of communicating with my sensei. Okay I'm going to explore this typing in hiragana concern.

Also since I know the Chinese characters for a lot of the words we're using should I use them or just Hiragana for now? I still have an automatic reaction of translating them into Chinese so I think it would be helpful for me to accustomize myself to seeing them in a different context. Maybe I can write the kanji with the hiragana on top the way they do in the textbook? This leads me to another topic which is that I was explaining the whole writing system in Japanese to a friend and he said, oh, are there other languages that use Chinese characters? And I said, maybe Malaysian (there's a Malaysian restaurant a couple of blocks from me and their sign is in Chinese characters), and then he said oh so the languages are symbol based because there are these symbols and they are read differently in different places? And I didn't really agree with him, for some reason I found this very offensive, but I couldn't really disagree with him. There must be some linguistic argument about this but I don't know what it is. Alright my mom is here so I need to be familial.