went to karaoke for the 2nd time in my life, this time with the guys we're teaching english to - it was a "study trip" as a replacement for our usual daily 2-3 hour lesson, so we spoke entirely (well, almost) in english and sang entirely english songs. they couldn't understand almost anything at all in the songs except for a few words here and there, but they did instantly and happily recognize a lot of words we've taught them recently:

oops, ain't, gonna, wanna, disappear

it's interesting that the one whose english was almost entirely at 0 when we started, consistently has better pronunciation than the one whose english was already higher-level (because she did a study-abroad one time).

despite being half an hour away from sendai by subway, it cost around 3,000 yen for 4 people + tea/soda bar access, which is about the same as it cost in sendai i think. the same place has a manga café and something else i forgot, there's only like 3 actual karaoke rooms, and it even had a special indoor smoking room (with a cigarette vending machine).

the karaoke was pretty weird in that none of the music videos were official, some of the beats/song speeds were wrong compared to the real versions and someone had obviously hired a set of actors to act out "genre-general music videos" so ex. one song had a girl in a sun hat sitting in the grass and then the next song... had the same girl in slightly different clothes walking in the city. also, despite being 4 people we only got 1 song-chooser screen, unlike sendai where we had 2.

it was also almost impossible for me to do because i couldn't freaking remember any english songs since i've been almost entirely listening to "anime music" since i was like 13 (after that i switched to "icelandic music"...). the songs i could remember weren't in the system. so i did a lot of "oh i think i maybe remember the chorus to this brittainy spears song, someone help me out!" singing.

it feels like my japanese will soon be better than my swedish. i mean, i think it'll probably take another year for it to really get to that point, especially in speaking, but because i'm reading novels, manga etc in japanese every day - unlike swedish which i only read when absolutely necessary - it's moving pretty fast. i mean, from reading manga you learn weird words like "overbite" (=a word i learned today from BL) or "to hold something in the mouth" (=running late with toast) which you don't hear in daily speech, and i ONLY know "daily speech swedish".