What a clever pooch… thanks to Kika for the heads up!

Don’t you just love the power of the asterisk to render English meaningless?

I think it’s possible to be too hard on oneself. I’ve been having major trouble progressing my Japanese and wrote a blog entry bemoaning the fact…

日本語のべんきょうはとてもむずかしいですよ。日本人に話すはしたいです。日本語でもっと書きたいですけど何と書きますか？

少し漢字がわかりますから新聞を読みません。

日本語のラジオをもっと聞くと思います。

This translates to something like:

Studying Japanese is really difficult. I want to have more conversations with Japanese people. I want to write more Japanese, but what do I write about?

I understand few Kanji, so I don’t read newspapers.

I think I will listen to Japanese radio more.

Then it dawned on me… I’m not really doing too bad if I can express all of that in Japanese.

I guess I feel frustration because there are a whole slew of subjects I just don’t have the vocabulary for - but it’ll come. A bit of patience and a bit of graft. It’ll come.

Ok… I’ve put some of my photos up from the Ireland trip…

click for full size

click for full size

click for full size

click for full size

click for full size

click for full size

Ok… super-quick holiday round-up. We went to Ireland and saw…

A moderately famous house - should I offer 10 points, or is it too easy? What with Mork and Mindy’s house and now this one, I’m starting to wonder whether I should collect TV Comedy houses!

Some incredibly crap parking - granted it wasn’t on the double-yellow line, but it was out in the middle of the road and across a pelican crossing. It also belonged to a nun:

A GOAT! - despite having been promised swathes of feral goats, we only saw one, and that was on the last day:

Some nice cliffs

A friendly dog(ga) - she just turned up one day, so we let her in and gave her some water and a bit of fuss. She hung around until we went out later on. Animals seem to be very casual in Ireland. She also had a comedy wag:

Some fresh crabs - no need to ask how fresh they were in the supermarket…

Proper pictures coming later.

…like at Shannon Airport, they, for example, turn the sensitivity up on the metal detectors and even though you have absolutely no metal items on you (apart from one), the machine still beeps.

Oh yes.

Beep. Blush. Frisk. Etc.

It doesn’t. My nob, that is. At airport security. So that’s nice.

KittenPhone is dead. My first ever mobile phone, I fixed the microphone a couple of times and it always did everything I wanted a phone to do (talk, text and… erm… well, that’s it actually).

I have replaced it with a new one which does phone and text AND has a camera, so I don’t have to carry my pocket camera around - though the image quality is poo.

Long live PuppyPhone.

My Japanese Blog has received it’s first hit today from Google. Someone searching for “ユーロヴィジョン” which, as you all know is “yūrovijon” or “Eurovision” (though I, along with many others spelt it in the more traditional form: ユーロビジョン yūrobijon).

How pleased am I with that? Very pleased. That’s how pleased.

Now I just have to keep it up, unlike the Finnish one which fell by the wayside. However, I do know Japanese that much better, so hopefully I won’t be held back too much by my grammar and vocab which is what led me to ditch the Finnish one.