Nemui... (sleepy...)

Current temperature in Sapporo: -14 degrees.

And I'm going there on Sunday. Huzzah!

Admittedly, it is midnight right now. When I go there, apparently, the weather should reach a toasty 2 degrees during the day and -6 at night. I have a crafty strategy for dealing with this, known as 'wearing every item of clothing I own'. Haha... actually it shouldn't be that bad. I've walked around here when it's 2 or 3 degrees outside; it is cold but if you prepare for it it's fine.

***

My regular Japanese teacher is a new teacher. She's a volunteer, and she just started. So in our first couple of lessons we did a real 'okay, let's go through the textbook together, step by painful step, repeating words and phrases and doing the activities together'. (This is the kind of pain I sometimes put my private students through, hahah.) We would take a 'break' to have a conversation, and she would often answer my questions in English, though I would always try to answer in Japanese.

Then I said to her, 'Nihongo o hanashitai' (I want to speak Japanese). I didn't know a polite way to say it; she speaks a little English but our 'polite' way of speaking is so indirect that only more advanced English students can understand it ('I'm sorry but would we be able to speak in Japanese a little more...')...

But it certainly did the trick. Every since I said that, we haven't touched the 'Minna no Nihongo' once. Hahah! I tell you what though, she is a very patient lady. I am so determined to get my ideas out there and SPEAK, I do strange and terrible things to Japanese grammar. :)

***

Today one of the grammar classes was on using a particular kind of compound adjective, like 'sweet-smelling', 'awe-inspiring', 'sun-drenched', 'flower-covered', etc. A student asked me how you make this kind of adjective. It's a perfectly reasonable question, since the whole subject of the lesson was about them. But the book doesn't explain how to make them. And I don't know how to make them! You can't just take any old verb and noun and whack them together.

The annoying thing about this kind of question is it always seems to end in me saying 'I'll get back to you'. Then it's two or three hours on the Internet researching grammar. I just wrote quite a decent piece on the difference between 'what' and 'whatever'. Every time I finish one, I have another one to get onto...

By the end of this year I'll have produced my own grammar book, hahaha!