• speaking / listening to japanese is getting easier, though i still don't feel like i'm learning all that many new words if i'm not actively studying new words. "daily life" actually uses the least amount of words (compared to reading / watching fiction tv etc) so it makes sense. school is dealing with entirely non-fiction texts and we're not ex. reading full books, we're just reading like one page of text then moving on to a completely separate one page of text for example. in the evening on saturday i suddenly realized i could say a lot of things fast and without thinking about them.

• job training on the 10th, first shift on the 19th i believe, but i might not end up getting many shifts because their management system is a HUGE mess

• even with all the random crap in them, convenience store onigiri is super healthy. neither me nor my wife (who ALWAYS has stomach problems) get any kind of problems if we basically only eat those (excluding the ones that have sugar / soy sauce in them). and at around 130 each (3 at most being a meal) they ARE really cheap, but it's just that you can still make them a lot cheaper yourself.

in general we're slowly learning how to live more cheaply... ex. at first we were buying these dried squid slices, now we realized that buying unsliced is like half the cost despite that you can only buy bigger packs of unsliced and thus it seems a lot more expensive.

and by now i've learnt it really DOESN'T matter if you make ANY kinds of mistakes in japan. stupid foreigner mistakes, speaking/understanding mistakes, so-called etiquette mistakes. if you make a mistake 99% of the time no one is going to give any kind of reaction, they'll just wait for you to figure out the right thing you want to say or the right amount of money you want to give them or whatever. and i mean this is from anyone, from the bored convenience store clerk to your teacher or friend or some random old guy selling his handmade stuff. the people who don't are so extremely few it's laughable basically.

the only problem is there's no real instructions for various stuff because "all the japanese people already know". so if you say, want to go somewhere new (bathhouse or something) and have no clue wtf you're doing, you HAVE to look up the instructions somewhere online because you can't be sure that you can get any clear help from staff members and things. they'll try to help you as best they can (they don't seem embarrassed at all about ex. using gestures and random english words, but they ARE embarrassed and start panicking a bit if you still don't understand after they try to explain, and also embarrassed about how bad their english is), but probably most of it will get lost because they don't know how to explain it or you don't have good enough japanese etc.

also, in the USA and sweden (though sweden less so) there's a kind of cultural feeling where if the person speaks your language badly they're "less than you", ex. you think of them like a kid or something just because they're speaking like a kid. in japan that's completely not the case, they're treating you as an adult even if you really can only speak 5 words of japanese, and they're really treating you like YOUR OWN PERSON. ex. i said i loved japan and wanted to live there, and the doctor looked at my wife (who can barely string a sentence together in japanese) and asked "how do you feel? is that okay with you??". in sweden no one EVER asked me if i had been okay moving to sweden for my wife's sake, for example!

anyway, this month i have a few new things i want to try: pachinko, karaoke, zoo, forgot the other stuff... maybe going to the fox village or something...