BLANK SPACE OHMYGOODNESS

This week, I learned all about what is expected of me in the presentation and I learned about the grammar regarding ことにする and ことにしている, as well as the 方 grammar point, even if that last bit was self-taught. Based on my understanding, ことにする means that you have decided to do something, while ことにしている is one of your daily habits. For instance, if I wanted to say that I decided to play guitar, I would say 「ギターを弾くことにしました。」Now, if I were to tell someone that I have a habit of practicing my guitar every day, I would say to them, 「私は毎日ギターを練習しています。」And then they would think I was good at guitar, because of my practicing. As for 方, it’s just a way of saying “how to do” an action. Say that I wanted to ask my guitar teacher how to play the song “I will follow you into the dark” on guitar. I would ask him 「I will follow you into the darkという歌を弾き方を教えていただけませんか。」And then we would have a jam session and it would be awesome good times.

I tend to enjoy class, so I really don’t know what was the most fun. Nothing particularly sticks out in my mind, so there’s not much I can elaborate on.

Success…success… I hate thinking about these sorts of things. I mean, I feel like my academic work wasn’t a whole big bag of suck this week, but I can’t really think of anything I did well. I think I did a pretty good job coming up with the translations that we needed to do for the task though. I only had to look up a few words since they weren’t in my working vocabulary, and I don’t think they were present for a lot of other people either.

My greatest challenge? Geez, I can never think about these sorts of things either. It’s not that anything was particularly difficult, other than speaking, but I didn’t have any major trip-ups. I suppose my biggest problem was trying to find an idea for my presentation. And the only problem with that is the fact that my humor makes a lot of sense and is easy to catch when I’m speaking in English, but I feel that it doesn’t translate very well. And that’s the thing that has me the most nervous. I hate making presentations that are boring that no one laughs at. Hopefully the American students will be able to provide a laugh track.

There’s not a whole lot that I can do for my presentation nervousness since I can’t become fluent in Japanese humor and I can’t expect that any Japanese students who view my presentation will understand my…unique…sense of humor. All I can do is hope, right now.

日本の男の人の洋服をはき方は変だと思います。彼らが女の人みたいです。どうして。私は女の人になりたくない。日本の男の人のファッションを見る時、笑います。

Seriously, no matter how hard I try I will never be able to understand this phenomenon. All the Japanese pop culture icons and the youth that copy them look like women. I’m not saying this to be a jackass, I just find it absolutely baffling.

And as for my presentation: I’m going to either do: How to pick up chicks, or how to write a basic song on guitar. I’ll do a rough draft for both; I just have to find out which one I’m more comfortable with. Though, if I do the guitar one, I would definitely be singing in English.