Mr. Robato

The first week of practicing golf 3x a week so far has gone well, with 2 days at the range and one day on the course, as planned. I already feel like I'm better at it, so that's good.

In other activities-I-have-no-time-for-but-do-anyway news, I've gotten the Rosetta Stone Courses 1,2 & 3 for Japanese and am through unit 1 of 4 in the first course after a little less than a week. The format is nothing like you'd learn in a classroom- you're not consciously conjugating verbs and whatnot, it's more like you'd teach a baby to speak. "Where's the red ball?" "Yay! There it is! It's that one!" *click*
So the part of me that realizes the most important things when traveling or speaking with a native speaker are things rated to politeness and respect is a little frustrated that I've learned what to call my non-existent little sister, but have yet to have it teach me to say "thank you" and "please"...by far the two most vital bits of communication in *any* language. But if you think about it, those weren't the first things you learned as a baby, either. You learned how to point to a swimming fish and repeat: FISH! So I suspect I'll get there and I'll just need to be patient. It seems a very effective method of teaching though, it reminds me of being at Anneliese's school- where I was "immersed" in Spanish, French and most of all, German. And a lot of that has stuck with my whole life, and I realize that a lot of that has to do with my 2 year old brain more readily absorbing language than it does now, but some of it has to do with the teaching methods too, and this feels like that. So I'm hopeful. Meanwhile, I'll continue to point at the cats and declare: "Neko wa nete imasu!" like an overgrown toddler.
Lance is doing the Spanish one and the funny thing is the lessons are *exactly* the same, so when I peek over his shoulder, the stuff he's been trained to blurt out when looking at a picture is the same as me, so I bet "El gato duerme!" will be exclaimed before long.
I also put together some hiragana flashcards to supplement the writing lessons and am listening to the audio cd's in the car. And you thought singing in the car was weird! Speaking of writing, check out what I got:
Buddha Board
I used to have a nicer version of this in my office at MP3.com and I sure wish I knew where it went, but with all the moving since then, it's probably long gone, hence the new one. Fun for painting and practicing my calligraphy. Yay!
Another note, in case anyone looking for a review of Rosetta Stone finds this- another thing that's frustrating me at this stage is my inability to "check" my understanding of a word. There's nothing you can click or do to make sure that "neko" really means "cat" like you think it does. I'm resisting the urge to look this stuff up on line, sort of throwing myself at the mercy of the program and trusting they did this for a reason so I shouldn't muck with the system. But it's tough to know I can just go look it up online somewhere when I'm confused- but I just...*shouldn't* Obviously, my opinion of the program will change as I progress, so I intend to revisit the topic in the future.