Week Seven: No Phone, No Problem

Hey.  What's up.  Hello.  It's time for another blog post.   First I'd like to talk about how I finally cracked my phone screen.  See I was planning on having a relaxing afternoon with my friend Caleb and reading by the Buckingham fountain, but after getting there and fumbling around on my phone for twenty minutes trying to download the book, my phone fell on the ground and the touch screen shattered.  The interesting thing about this unfortunate event was that it forced me to go without my phone for about a week.  At first I was annoyed that I couldn't message my friends, check my apps, and take pictures.  But after a couple days I started to notice some small changes like how I had slightly better focus and tended to talk to others more.  It wasn't a night and day change, but just enough that I noticed it.  It doesn't surprise me either considering how frequently I check instagram, snapchat and all the other bullshit I don't really care about.  But then I got the replacement screen in the mail and was more or less back to my old habits.

For some reason (probably in order to cope with the phone breaking) this was the week I decided to dust off the old GameCube and play some of my favorite Nintendo games with Caleb.  This was honesty some of the most fun I had all week.  You wouldn't think it, but Mario Baseball gets pretty intense if you're at all competitive.  Caleb lost 11 intense games in a row, managing only to win the last one after much persistence.  It was fun.

When I think of Chicago I don't think of sandy beaches but this week I discovered that it has a very nice one.  We went to go play some volleyball but it was so crowded that we ended up relaxing on the towels.  It was great weather and we were playing the Beach Boys.  It doesn't get much better than that.  

Since I'm in the college of LSA, it's required of me to take 4 semesters of a language and because I didn't want to learn Spanish, I signed up for Japanese.  I know it's going to be hard and know that I'm still probably seriously underestimating how difficult it's going to be, but I ordered a textbook with the intent of getting a head start over the summer and finally cracked it open this week.  The most daunting task when it comes to learning the language is that there are three sets of characters to learn.  First there is Hiragana which consists of about 50 characters, Katakana which also has 50 characters, and then the Kanji which consists of over 2000 characters.  Yeah, 2000.  And they have multiple meanings.  It's a lot, but I think I discovered a method that works extremely well.  I saw it in a YouTube video from one of my favorite newly discovered channels, Abroad in Japan.  The method consists of using your "imaginative memory".  I'll go through an example.  Let's say I have to memorize 20 new characters.  I could make 20 flashcards and cycle through them until I have them memorized.  It works yes, but anybody who was tried to do this knows it's frustrating,  takes a long time and is not effective for the long term.  Instead what you can do is look at the characters and make a story about them.  For example, the Hiragana character circled in black in the picture, pronounced "na", looked a lot like somebody dunking a basketball on a shorter player saying "na, you aint gonna stop me".  So I wrote it down and now everytime I see the character that's what I think of.  Doing this I was able to memorize all of the 46 Hiragana characters in three days.  Seriously, it works like a charm.  Also, my brother and I want to go on a trip to Japan in two years so I (and him!) have to learn quick!

Lastly, this week my brother and I were able to convince my mom to let him come to visit for an entire week.  This means an entire week of iced coffee and Super Smash Bros. This will be a once in a lifetime opportunity for us and I can't wait.  Really excited for what's left of this internship!