#2nd week

Alright here is Week 2: Connection for @stanuary The other prompts for this week are Father Figure and Twins.

Well, I decided I had to draw Stan and Soos hanging out!

This is my (late) contribution to Klance month’s 2nd week “Movie”. Sorry to all the Star Wars and Reylo fans! 😅

Wednesday it is, what means that I’m late to talk about my second week studying the Japanese language. The thing is I wasn’t as engaged as I was in the week prior. Lots of things happened, college duties have started their call so I didn’t have much time to focus exclusively on this, but I tried.

I needed two extra days to complete the schedule I’d planned, but now everything is done: video lessons watched, book chapters read, all the vocabulary exercises done, all the writing repetition done (so many pages of graph paper almost totally filled with Katakana…). But I must confess that I am not feeling as confident as I felt when I finished the Hiragana week. If I was 9/10, now I’m feeling more like 7/10.

I can recognize the majority of the letters when I’m reading but when I try to write them in a blank paper… I just can’t. I just can’t remember a thing. I am very frustrated but not as much as I know I could be because in the readings I’ve done I've learnt that many people find Katakana way harder to memorize. With that being said, I am okay. I’ll move on and memorize along the other study steps to follow.

At the end of my last post I said I wasn’t sure about which grammar book I should use while the answer was right in front of me. Coincidentally, the 3 first posts I read comparing Minna No Nihongo and Genki treated them as equals, but they are not. The first is from head to toe written in Japanese. This may not sound like a problem once many language courses use textbooks fully written in the language that it intends to teach, and it isn’t a problem indeed if you have a teacher to redress your doubts, which is not my case. It has an extra material with questions and explanations translated to a lot of languages, but for someone who is coming from a total darkness to learn something that different with no guide, this is an unnecessary obstacle. And there comes Genki to help: it is basically more didactic to beginners, available in English in two volumes of textbooks and workbooks plus a key with answers to the exercises and audios to train listening. 

2025-01-18

Hello, welcome to Week 2! 👾

This is my third day at work, and I’m still feeling a lot of excitement and energy heading into my shifts—it hasn’t faded yet, which is a good thing. Today was the last day for the GAP students, and I got to work with my two favorites, Alice and Alyssa, again. I feel like I may have asked them too many questions, almost as if I were trying to soak up all their knowledge, but I’m really just trying to learn as much as I can.

I was assigned to SSBD today with Tiffany, and it was pretty hectic. There were a lot of passengers with overweight checked luggage and carry-ons, which took up some time as many of them had to rearrange their items to meet the standard allowance.

I also made two major mistakes with the baggage. While the conveyor belt was moving to send one piece of luggage, I forgot that it must stop completely before another bag is placed on it. Unfortunately, the passenger was too eager and put their luggage on the belt before I could stop them, causing the bag to go through without scanning the tag. Then, about 30 minutes later, the same thing happened again with a different passenger.

This really frustrated me, and I felt bad for messing up something so simple. One of the staff members at Cathay was also frustrated, which made me feel even worse. But at least I learned my lesson, and I don’t think I’ll be making this mistake again. On the bright side, I also learned more about Cathay’s baggage regulations, including the extra fees and free check-in allowances which isn't bad after all.