(no subject)
On Saturday, Jeff and I went to Osaka for the day, since I needed to go there anyway for my recording job that evening.
DenDen town is Osaka's equivalent to Akihabara: an area packed full of shops selling electronic equipment, cds, dvds, etc. There we both bought more things than we really needed to buy. Oh well. I figured I was going to be earning money later (more on that in a bit) so I wasn't terribly worried except that I found myself almost out of cash after dinner. Jeff actually spent more than I did anyway. He bought several dvds and a bunch of dirt cheap (like 25-75 yen apiece) old playstation games. I bought three cds and two video games. Oddly enough, all three of the cds were related to Two-Mix. Well, two were Two-Mix, but the third actually predated those because it was the solo cd that Takayama Minami, the voice and composer for Two-Mix, created before the group was formed. It's pretty rare since it's so old (I think it was released in 1992 or so, and nobody really cares about her solo work anyway because the later group work eclipsed it), so when I saw it for 700 yen I grabbed it. I've listened to it since and it's pretty good. I'm glad I got it.
My other find of the day was Lunar II for Saturn. The packaging said the discs had some scratches, but Jeff's told me that most places greatly overestimate damage to discs, so I thought it was most likely perfectly playable. The place had two copies and one of them was 900 yen or so, but the "scratched" one was only 450, so I grabbed that too. After I bought it, I had a look at the discs, and even if they didn't look new, they still didn't look particularly damaged. I'm sure I'll be able to play it just fine. So now I have both Lunar games: I can look forward to playing them when I get back to America and Jeff can give me a Saturn to play on. It's funny, the Saturn versions are always cheaper than the playstation versions, but I heard that the Saturn versions are supposed to be better. I think the games came out there first, and then they were ported and rereleased for playstation, so I guess a few features got changed or removed or something. It's just as well, since it's been easier on my wallet that way. ^_^ I've been looking for those two games for a while, but in America too, the playstation versions are still pretty expensive, even used. I'll just have to play them in Japanese. ^^
The place I had to go for the recording job was pretty close to Umeda station (the main hub of Osaka) so we thought it was pretty convenient. We ended up having a bit of a time finding the building though, because I'd been given a pretty sparse map. It was difficult to correlate the map to the physical streets and buildings, so we finally had to ask a shopkeeper (the equivalent of asking at a gas station in America, except this was just a little convenience store without any gas). He set us on the right track after we showed him the map we had though, thankfully. We'd left so much extra time for finding the building though that we were still quite early and had to wait a while. It ended up working in our favor though because I got to start about 4:30 instead of 4:45 when the recording tech came outside early to see if I was there yet. Since I was, we got started.
There were only two people that I saw there: the recording tech, who didn't really speak English, and a woman who actually seemed like a researcher for whatever the project was. She spoke quite good English and mostly acted as an interpreter - not that I needed it most of the time. It was helpful at the beginning, when the tech was giving instructions kinda fast, but after that, he didn't say all that much besides things like "let's do this one again" and "are you ready?" and "let's go" and "do you need a break?" all of which I understood perfectly well.
So basically what I had to do was read 460 sentences (many of which turned out to be single words or short phrases) with normal (for me) English pronounciation into a microphone. If I stumbled over a word, I had to rerecord the sentence, of course. Some of the sentences were pretty amusing, actually, but I tried to just concentrate on reading and not think of that. Jeff said later that he had to work hard to not laugh a few times, especially on one sentence that contained his name. One time they told him not even to move though because he was sitting in the recording area listening, and he must have shifted position or something. I had to be even more careful though because I was right by the microphone, of course. If I timed it just right, I could shift a little between sentences, since there was a countdown of two seconds before each one. Jeff couldn't see the countdown from where he was though.
There seemed to be four different sections of sentences. The first section was random, unrelated sentences, most of which seemed conversational. Some of them were really odd to say because they were things like "My name is ..." with a Japanese name, which obviously is completely untrue. The second, which seemed the most natural to read because it was like reading a book, contained sentences about things like chemistry or medicine or economics. Those sentences had some pretty challenging words, so even if I was more comfortable reading them, I found them more difficult. One or two were almost tongue-twisters, or so it seemed because I stumbled more than once over the same words. The third section contained a bunch of alphabetically-organized words and short phrases. Many of them were proper nouns like Japanese place names or hotel names. I'm not sure how useful I'll be as a test subject for those because I don't pronounce Japanese names the same way the average American would, since I know the correct way to pronounce them. Anyway, the last section contained some more conversational phrases.
After that, I had to give two three-minute speeches, with a theme of travel abroad. I didn't have to prepare anything; I just had to talk about some experience I had related to a trip abroad. That was pretty easy. I talked about traveling to Japan and my host family from three years ago for the first one, and then I talked about traveling to Japan this time and exploring Sannomiya the first day because people were late as a result of the typhoon. At two minutes into the second one, I needed something else to talk about after the plane delays and such, so that's why I started talking about Sannomiya. I managed to link it to what I'd said before, so it wasn't a random topic shift or anything.
The flier had said that the job would take about two hours, but I ended up only taking about an hour and a half, even after making some mistakes periodically on the sentences. Which means the per hour rate for that is pretty good. I don't know how much I'll actually get after taxes are deducted, but it said 8000 yen before taxes, which is pretty nice. I don't know who's sponsoring this or how they can afford to pay 300 test subjects that much, but hey, I'm not complaining.
Sunday was supposed to be the official Kobe Sightseeing Day, so I was thinking we might go somewhere, but apparently anything interesting that might be free that day and otherwise wouldn't be is free for us anyway with special cards that Konan recently gave us. So we didn't go sightseeing. Instead, I had the idea that I should look for a possible replacement TV for my room, because the one that's there is really old and doesn't have the necessary ports to support a playstation hookup. I'm going to make sure it's okay with my host mother before I actually do it, but I wanted to take a look at a recycle shop that Jeff found a while ago in Minatogawakouen to see what sort of deal I might be able to get on a used TV.
First, though, we looked around the interesting shopping area in Shin-Nagata. I'd shown Jeff the store I'd found, but we hadn't explored the area very much, so that's what we did first. (We had to go in that store and the 100 yen store while we were there too, of course.) I bought two 300 yen cds that I'd had my eye on the last time I was there (an access album and an Aikawa Nanase album). When lunchtime came around, we debated whether to go to the Domino's for pizza and finally decided that it was too expensive, but we still wanted pizza. So we went back to La Pausa in Sannomiya for lunch, which I think was a good choice. Then finally we went to Minatogawakouen, only to find that our recycle shop had suddenly begun the process of moving to a different spot and wouldn't reopen for another couple of weeks. So we were thwarted anyway, but we ended up exploring that area a bit and finding a whole section of the market that we hadn't seen before. It was pretty cool.
The last two days were pretty uneventful. Monday E class had its second chapter test, which pretty much sucked. Well, I'm not the worst in the class, that's all I can say. Heh. And they took the particle section off, which is silly because if the class is bad at particles, then we need more practice at them, right? And they'll be on the midterm... And I hate dictation, even in English, so it wasn't any fun to have to do it today. I don't think anyone liked it though, so it's not just me. The problem was that our teacher didn't give us enough time to write down what we'd heard before advancing the tape some more. And then she kept asking, "Did you use a lot of kanji?" even though most of us barely had time to scribble down the words in hiragana, let alone try to write anything in kanji.
This afternoon after class, my host mother and Yuka took Jeff and me to get our foreign registration cards from the city hall or whatever it is (kuyakusho in Japanese...). We were actually planning on watching a movie, but they decided that since he couldn't do it tomorrow (he's going to Osaka for his recording job) and I can't do it Thursday (since I'm going to a concert with my host mother), today was the best day to do it. Afterwards they took us to Seishin-chuo and bought us shakes and we got to see Shikkun be cute as always. It was fun times.
DenDen town is Osaka's equivalent to Akihabara: an area packed full of shops selling electronic equipment, cds, dvds, etc. There we both bought more things than we really needed to buy. Oh well. I figured I was going to be earning money later (more on that in a bit) so I wasn't terribly worried except that I found myself almost out of cash after dinner. Jeff actually spent more than I did anyway. He bought several dvds and a bunch of dirt cheap (like 25-75 yen apiece) old playstation games. I bought three cds and two video games. Oddly enough, all three of the cds were related to Two-Mix. Well, two were Two-Mix, but the third actually predated those because it was the solo cd that Takayama Minami, the voice and composer for Two-Mix, created before the group was formed. It's pretty rare since it's so old (I think it was released in 1992 or so, and nobody really cares about her solo work anyway because the later group work eclipsed it), so when I saw it for 700 yen I grabbed it. I've listened to it since and it's pretty good. I'm glad I got it.
My other find of the day was Lunar II for Saturn. The packaging said the discs had some scratches, but Jeff's told me that most places greatly overestimate damage to discs, so I thought it was most likely perfectly playable. The place had two copies and one of them was 900 yen or so, but the "scratched" one was only 450, so I grabbed that too. After I bought it, I had a look at the discs, and even if they didn't look new, they still didn't look particularly damaged. I'm sure I'll be able to play it just fine. So now I have both Lunar games: I can look forward to playing them when I get back to America and Jeff can give me a Saturn to play on. It's funny, the Saturn versions are always cheaper than the playstation versions, but I heard that the Saturn versions are supposed to be better. I think the games came out there first, and then they were ported and rereleased for playstation, so I guess a few features got changed or removed or something. It's just as well, since it's been easier on my wallet that way. ^_^ I've been looking for those two games for a while, but in America too, the playstation versions are still pretty expensive, even used. I'll just have to play them in Japanese. ^^
The place I had to go for the recording job was pretty close to Umeda station (the main hub of Osaka) so we thought it was pretty convenient. We ended up having a bit of a time finding the building though, because I'd been given a pretty sparse map. It was difficult to correlate the map to the physical streets and buildings, so we finally had to ask a shopkeeper (the equivalent of asking at a gas station in America, except this was just a little convenience store without any gas). He set us on the right track after we showed him the map we had though, thankfully. We'd left so much extra time for finding the building though that we were still quite early and had to wait a while. It ended up working in our favor though because I got to start about 4:30 instead of 4:45 when the recording tech came outside early to see if I was there yet. Since I was, we got started.
There were only two people that I saw there: the recording tech, who didn't really speak English, and a woman who actually seemed like a researcher for whatever the project was. She spoke quite good English and mostly acted as an interpreter - not that I needed it most of the time. It was helpful at the beginning, when the tech was giving instructions kinda fast, but after that, he didn't say all that much besides things like "let's do this one again" and "are you ready?" and "let's go" and "do you need a break?" all of which I understood perfectly well.
So basically what I had to do was read 460 sentences (many of which turned out to be single words or short phrases) with normal (for me) English pronounciation into a microphone. If I stumbled over a word, I had to rerecord the sentence, of course. Some of the sentences were pretty amusing, actually, but I tried to just concentrate on reading and not think of that. Jeff said later that he had to work hard to not laugh a few times, especially on one sentence that contained his name. One time they told him not even to move though because he was sitting in the recording area listening, and he must have shifted position or something. I had to be even more careful though because I was right by the microphone, of course. If I timed it just right, I could shift a little between sentences, since there was a countdown of two seconds before each one. Jeff couldn't see the countdown from where he was though.
There seemed to be four different sections of sentences. The first section was random, unrelated sentences, most of which seemed conversational. Some of them were really odd to say because they were things like "My name is ..." with a Japanese name, which obviously is completely untrue. The second, which seemed the most natural to read because it was like reading a book, contained sentences about things like chemistry or medicine or economics. Those sentences had some pretty challenging words, so even if I was more comfortable reading them, I found them more difficult. One or two were almost tongue-twisters, or so it seemed because I stumbled more than once over the same words. The third section contained a bunch of alphabetically-organized words and short phrases. Many of them were proper nouns like Japanese place names or hotel names. I'm not sure how useful I'll be as a test subject for those because I don't pronounce Japanese names the same way the average American would, since I know the correct way to pronounce them. Anyway, the last section contained some more conversational phrases.
After that, I had to give two three-minute speeches, with a theme of travel abroad. I didn't have to prepare anything; I just had to talk about some experience I had related to a trip abroad. That was pretty easy. I talked about traveling to Japan and my host family from three years ago for the first one, and then I talked about traveling to Japan this time and exploring Sannomiya the first day because people were late as a result of the typhoon. At two minutes into the second one, I needed something else to talk about after the plane delays and such, so that's why I started talking about Sannomiya. I managed to link it to what I'd said before, so it wasn't a random topic shift or anything.
The flier had said that the job would take about two hours, but I ended up only taking about an hour and a half, even after making some mistakes periodically on the sentences. Which means the per hour rate for that is pretty good. I don't know how much I'll actually get after taxes are deducted, but it said 8000 yen before taxes, which is pretty nice. I don't know who's sponsoring this or how they can afford to pay 300 test subjects that much, but hey, I'm not complaining.
Sunday was supposed to be the official Kobe Sightseeing Day, so I was thinking we might go somewhere, but apparently anything interesting that might be free that day and otherwise wouldn't be is free for us anyway with special cards that Konan recently gave us. So we didn't go sightseeing. Instead, I had the idea that I should look for a possible replacement TV for my room, because the one that's there is really old and doesn't have the necessary ports to support a playstation hookup. I'm going to make sure it's okay with my host mother before I actually do it, but I wanted to take a look at a recycle shop that Jeff found a while ago in Minatogawakouen to see what sort of deal I might be able to get on a used TV.
First, though, we looked around the interesting shopping area in Shin-Nagata. I'd shown Jeff the store I'd found, but we hadn't explored the area very much, so that's what we did first. (We had to go in that store and the 100 yen store while we were there too, of course.) I bought two 300 yen cds that I'd had my eye on the last time I was there (an access album and an Aikawa Nanase album). When lunchtime came around, we debated whether to go to the Domino's for pizza and finally decided that it was too expensive, but we still wanted pizza. So we went back to La Pausa in Sannomiya for lunch, which I think was a good choice. Then finally we went to Minatogawakouen, only to find that our recycle shop had suddenly begun the process of moving to a different spot and wouldn't reopen for another couple of weeks. So we were thwarted anyway, but we ended up exploring that area a bit and finding a whole section of the market that we hadn't seen before. It was pretty cool.
The last two days were pretty uneventful. Monday E class had its second chapter test, which pretty much sucked. Well, I'm not the worst in the class, that's all I can say. Heh. And they took the particle section off, which is silly because if the class is bad at particles, then we need more practice at them, right? And they'll be on the midterm... And I hate dictation, even in English, so it wasn't any fun to have to do it today. I don't think anyone liked it though, so it's not just me. The problem was that our teacher didn't give us enough time to write down what we'd heard before advancing the tape some more. And then she kept asking, "Did you use a lot of kanji?" even though most of us barely had time to scribble down the words in hiragana, let alone try to write anything in kanji.
This afternoon after class, my host mother and Yuka took Jeff and me to get our foreign registration cards from the city hall or whatever it is (kuyakusho in Japanese...). We were actually planning on watching a movie, but they decided that since he couldn't do it tomorrow (he's going to Osaka for his recording job) and I can't do it Thursday (since I'm going to a concert with my host mother), today was the best day to do it. Afterwards they took us to Seishin-chuo and bought us shakes and we got to see Shikkun be cute as always. It was fun times.