Voluntary service II: "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

The problem is that I never had the chance to leave.
Today I have officially canceled my enrollment in the FSJ-Programm, as I could not ignore the current developments any longer. Going to Tokyo for an whole year would have been risky and even though I am very sad about the outcome, I did the final phone call.

The result is, that I am now without any gap-year placement and the typical application time frame is already over. So my only remaining option is to enter university, do my bachlor and maybe do something diffrent afterwards, before enrolling in an master course.

Of course this is not what I planned, and I am not happy at all about the devellopment, but still all my thoughts are with the people of Japan, especially with the population of shaken Tohoku and also the Tokyo metropolitan area, knowing that an evacuation of up to 40 mio. people is not possible by any means.

Avoiding flesh and The Esperanto Project

Saluton,

currently, I made to enhancements in my life. 2 Weeks ago, I decided to become a vegetarian. I do not have special reasons and had no extraordinary revelation. It's more like i was sympathetic with the idea for a longer time even though there is no reasoning like sympathising with animals or stuff. I just came up that meat is not that important to me and hence I could easily relinquish.


The second thing is kind of a project I started: around 1 week ago, I entered once more into Esperanto (Not to be confused with Español). For all who are not familiar with this name a (really) short introduction: 
Esperanto is a very regular and hence logical and easy to learn language, which was made up by a single person (Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof) in 1887. The main idea(l) behind it is the reasoning that it shall function as an language used for unbiased international and intercultural exchange, making it the language of everyone learning it, not only those whose mother tongue the language is. 
I really like the language, as it has some fun traits. Of course it is in some ways very logical and regular, as it should be (even though there are also some points which are irregular and so not coming up to the initial idea) and it's fun to have really every noun ending in -o (when not in plural or accusative case), every adjective ending in -a (the same) and every verb is regular in its flexion. Also its use of words is nice. Its vocabulary is mainly taken from spanish and other roman languages, but also some english word (guess what birdo means) and german words (knabo, deriving from Knabe, an oldstyle word for boy) are in use.


I am unsure whether I sould take part in an esperanto study summer course in beginning August in Slovakia. Probably it would be very nice and funny to go to such an event, but I am somewhat scared of going alone on the long trip to unknown country with unknown people. (Maybe someone want to come along :)

The Odyssee of Technics or How to get an portable player for your needs

Hey everyone!

It's been quite a while since I wrote a blogpost.

Like 2 weeks ago, I found my some day missing MP3 player again. It had an adventurous bath in our washing machine, probably making it pretty clean, but also pretty useless.

This disastrous events led myself onto an odyssee of Greek dimension. I want(ed) to find some kind of device, which apart from playing music can do some things, made possible by the newest developments on the technical market. This includes:

• Using Anki (An Spaced-Repetition-Software i use very often)
• Playing Videos (Maybe without big conversion issues, and with more than 1,5'' display)
• Playing some nice games (Especially retro gaming on it would be fun)

Referring to the Anki-Website, there are some versions for mobile devices: Of course the iPod and stuff, Android driven devices, Zaurus (I doubt there are still any devices of with this OS on the market anyways) and astonishingly the Nintendo DS.

I found this Archos 28 for 70 € at Amazon, and decided to buy it. After some inconveniences with the sending (the Hermes Cooperation does some bad service -.-) I received a player which is not able to boot properly. In 3 days of trying I was not able to revive it and I will probably send it back on Monday.

So I am at the same point again.
What device should I buy??

The iPod is extremely expensive: Paying over 200 bucks for something that started as simple portable player is massive! And it seems that you get nagged around by Apple all the time. In general I am suspicious towards Apple in general. I despise their attitude: It's Apple and only Apple. Everything we don't have you don't need.
Apart from that it may be (even though I heard different things too) a decent player which runs without problems (that was my old player too, but of course it had not all the nice features I would like to have). Also it should have a huge variety of stuff to run on it.

The Android players: I found only one deployer non-phones working with Android so far: Archos. Those players are pretty cheap, but I heard of much trouble with it (and I have an player with strange-non-working behaviour right next to me), so I am pretty unsure about these.

The Nintendo DS: Another device for unsureness. First problems: it does not even feature compability with MP3-data. You have to convert your music files always before you can use them. Also you need to buy an "module" for doing anything more advanced with it. And then your dealing with the homebrew community (so the least active from iPod to NDS) Also I would have to decide whether I want a DSi or a DSlite, the first one having native usage of music, but if I want to enter the homebrew market anyway, there are solutions for that issues for the DSlite too, and that boy can still use GBA cartridges. (man, I love retro gaming)

Oh god, I don't know what to do...

2011年東北地方太平洋沖地震 or Sendai earthquake and tsunami

At this point, all of you have probably already heard of the heavy earthquake off the shore before Sendai. Since this 11th March probably everyone of you heard enough news broadcasters and read plenty articles throughout the interwebs to be well informed.

I did not write anything about this so far, neither here, nor on twitter (apart from one or two retweets) or facebook, because I have great difficulties to gather my mind and express it. I sympathise with every single Japanese within the region shaken by the earthquake and ridden by the tsunami.

One of the first thoughts I had was, that fortunately Japan is very cognisant of the dangers and puts high efforts into actions to defend themselves against the strokes of nature. Thanks to that the number of victims is luckily still a magnitude lower than it was 2004 throughout the pacific ocean tsunami.

On the other hand side I am very worried about the things happening in the power plants. I am praying to any god, no matter that I do not believe that there are any. I hope thoroughly that all will turn out well. Any nuclear disaster will cause huge problems especially since there live 40 million people in that very area.

At this very point I can only wait and hope for nothing bad to come around the corner. I try to stay informed, but every second I notice my lack of knowledge of Japanese again and again when I try to read yomiuri and asahi (two biggest Japanese papers) online news and have hard to struggle and rely on web-tools to get the gist of their articles. Additionally those articles are, for understandable reasons, often based on very careful information policies, so that we probably will learn the whole extend not earlier than within a week.

With anxious thoughts, sincerely
me

Language acquisition sites

Today I want to introduce two web sites for language learning which I am totally fond of.

The first one is calles lang-8.com. It is a blogging system, in which you can post entries in a foreign language as you please. Everyone on the web site whose mother tongue is the given foreign language will correct and comment your entry. In exchange for that you should also correct entries from others, who wrote in your language, from time to time. It is a nice system, which is really worth your time.

The other one is somewhat similar. www.sharedtalk.com is a chat site dedicatet to language learning. There are chat room for single languages, where people meet to speek in that language. Another possibility is to look for people, who are speaker of the language you want to learn, and start a chat with them.(Of course you should also share your own knowledge too)
Also you can write kind of mails and use a VoIP system within the site, which is somewhat convenient, but normally people tend to move to skype or similar after finding a partner.

Thanks for reading, you could of course also share other pages you like in that context via comment.

for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning

I had to read the book "The Trial" from Franz Kafka for my German lessons. Here I want to present some of my thoughts concerning this work.

Kafka was a German speaking Jew in Prague, who has had a difficult relationship to women, and he did not get along with his father at all. His novels are really special, to that extent that he has his own literary term "Kafkaesque".

This book is a exemplar of this Kafkaesque writing style; centring on a person named simply K., it throws the reader into his bedroom, with two strangers disturbing his sleep and declare him arrested. Apart from this abrupt beginning, which may not be that special, the strangeness of all events combined with their inescapabillity and the characters natural reaction on those makes this writing style unique. E.g. the very first scene K. is very often changing his mind from insecurity over weariness and acceptance to protest against the intruders and asking for their permissions. Apart from the protagonist the characters are astonishingly set: while the employees of the court are convinced of their eligibility, other characters are just accepting the situation immediately while K. is still struggling and trying to understand.

So in general you could say: If you are looking for a book with an unique plot, definitely skip this book; it hasn't got any. But if you like alternative books, and are e.g. interested in the psychology of characters, it could be a nice book for you. But even if so I would only say "try to read it" instead of "I recommend it", because apart from the "Kafkaesque" part it is still quite special in its writing style. Simply said, Kafka tends to give an explanation to explanations which explain an relative unimportant observation or side effect. Another good tip is not to look for any sense in the novel. It could be said to be senseless, but it is not pointless in my opinion. Instead you should try to engage yourself with it.

When I'm considering everything I am not sure, whether or not it is really worth reading, but I'd tend to say that I like it.

Voluntary service I: explanation, application, first preparation

Hey y'all!

Yesterday I spoke of my occupation for the next year. Today I thoroughly want to explain, what that was all about:

I have been learning Japanese for three years already, and also got into a interesting programme last October, which brought me to Japan for two weeks. Over all this time and events I came to the decision to make a gap year over there.

In Germany (at least last until last year) every (male) one had to do military service, if they are not "incapable" for physical reasons. But of course many people are not willing to enter the military, so that they had the alternative to do kind of civil service. For that service you have also the possibility, to go to an foreign country, and that's just what I have chosen for myself (even though my because of some new policy I don't need to do something like this any more). The kind of service I chose is called FSJ (germ. Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr - voluntary social year) - I might use that abbreviation in the future.

 So I found this organisation called IJGD which offers in cooperation with   "Deutsch-Japanisches Friedensforum Berlin" (German-Japanese peace forum Berlin) such an international voluntary service in Japan. As their condition fit into my possibilities, I wrote an application in January and was accepted for an interview on the 12th February.

The Interview was was part of a so called "application day" which consisted of an presentation of IJGD and the voluntary service programme of them, followed by single interviews and language test (as Japanese abilities were an necessary requirement for the programme). There were 25 applicants, and therefore we had plenty of time to talk to each other. They also featured some Turkish/Persian cuisine, thus the local speciality (the interview site was located in Berlin Kreuzberg)

While my language test was a piece of cake, my interview had some nasty points in it, or better said: I gave some answers to questions, which I regretted afterwards for being unwise for an job interview.
Because of that fact, I was perfectly unsure whether or not I would get the programme place. There were striking arguments (the breeze-like language talk) on the one hand, and seemingly disqualifying ones on the other hand.  But I very badly wanted (and want) to do that gap year, and so I got more depressed with every single day without an confirmation.

But like I told you 2 days ago: I got the very confirmation on the 1st March. You cannot imagine how I felt and reacted. Ok, you can easily: It stared with an load outcry of happiness and good feeling for the whole evening (I just had to complete the day with a glass of whine)

I am allowed to work at the "Happiness Adachi" retirement home in Adachi-Ku, Tokyo. The next step is, that I have to apply at my future workplace to introduce my self in English or Japanese. I'm struggling to do that in Japanese, which is not so easy but I try hard.