This week

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Until today, we have been on the longest string of holidays in the year, called “Golden Week,” here in Japan. But as far as I'm concerned, it made little difference. I spent the better part of it doing my thing as usual and the remaining two days were not long enough to do anything special, like going on a trip. The only choice available to me then was either studying English at home or going on a bender for days on end. So I did pretty much nothing. To put it more exactly, I watched some movies on DVD, had quite a fun reading a couple of books despite having said something disparaging about what would be best described as “paperbacks” in the previous post, had drinks at various places, planned on going to Ueno zoo next year, and so forth.

The DVDs I watched were “Collateral damage,” “Cat woman,” and some other stuff. With English subtitles on, I was intrigued that in the middle of “Co… Damage,” a glib Latino guy, who purports to have learned English in New York, speaks English in a rather different way from the other guys on it, his conversation being peppered with words we don’t learn at school in our country, like “raunchy," “marinate on,” and many other slang words that I had to look up in dictionaries afterwards, and that were in stark contrast to the wording of the other characters which basically consists of the words we learn in school, except that they combine those basic words in ways that are not so easy for us non-native speakers to follow despite all of them being so familiar to us.

Part of the reason for the speech of the guy being like that seemed to be that his character was set in such a way as to make him sound like he wants to show off that he knows English very well by using the kinds of words I mentioned. This is only my guess and I don’t know exactly what effect it will have on the intended audience, that is, the real native English speakers.

Quite obviously, listening to and/or reading DVDs is one of the best ways to learn English since it allows us to get into a learning process where we can associate words and phrases directly with images and situations they are spoken in, without the intervention of Japanese translation, that could make things complicated.

The rest of the time I had a wonderful time drinking at various locations. On my way back home, I ran into a homeless girl in her early 30s and ended up befriending her in a way. I was kind of surprised to hear her say pretty much the same thing as the heroin on the other DVD I'd just watched, like “I like to live an untamed life and freedom is the thing I value most,” etc.