Ah, wonderful. Its like a daze. Like a quixotic blend of the insane and the beautiful dancing on the shores of Rimini in a perfect setting. I awoke this morning at Darlington train station to be greeted with glorious sunshine that would dip in and out amongst the clouds in schizophrenic fashion. It would have been nice to admire, had I not been;

a) hungover from Stevie’s birthday
b) shattered beyond belief
c) recovering from a stomach bug, in which I had made a Jackson Pollock over the ceramic bowl of life not being able to sleep at all during the journey – despite my tiredness

Crazy feelings.

Things are still dull right now and I opine for Sheffield. I would take Arai-sensei’s kanji class at 9am, some midsemester tests and a listening dictation all back to back rather than be stuck here with nothing to do and no-one to see. 8 weeks to go and I’m chomping at the bit to have some form of sanity again. Although Sheffield is far from sane.

I have managed to type up the 50 or so Japanese onomatopoeia – my favourite so far, being ピンピン – something I’ve not felt recently due to a lack of any physical movement or time management. Along with some adverbs, I hope to have all my new words done and dusted by the end of the week, so I can relax and just skim learn the stuff I need to know. Right now it’s a case of having my study aides in place, so I can focus more on my true weakness. My listening skills.

Because I will be doing 20 credits next year in Japanese, but presumably the same intensive workload – I’ll have to forge ahead and start reading ahead for Lexicology. The wonderful thing about this is, is that I am reading for the sake of reading and using the time to get a good overview of what I’ll be doing. Anything to combat this boredom.

This module is very strange. There are two to three lectures a week, no workshop exercises and I am assessed on a 2hr exam and 3,000 word essay in which I’ll have to write about the development of the English lexicon. So basically we look at slang, neologisms, foreign loanwords and slang/dialect.

Given my last essay result, I feel a bit hesitant about my essay writing skills. I normally can write about the most absurd things and make them seem plausible – however I have a habit of trailing off and missing the point. This year I am going to bother the head of the module incessantly with help!

Perhaps I should just write about increasing my Japanese lexicon!

Actually this is something I genuinely do find interesting and is probably one of the few linguistics modules I’ll look forward to taking at Sheffield. Last year despite my illness and utter contempt for the Varieties of English module, I enjoyed Professor Beal’s discussion on the background of dialect words and phrases. Cockney rhyming slang developing as criminal code in London’s backstreets for example.

Let’s hope Amazon can deliver them soon. Incidentally my mammoth green book of Sociolinguistics is gathering dust now. Although, I’ll probably use it in the fourth year when my module choices become more taxing and I’ll need to remember the stuff I forgot in the first year.

A sad fact of the matter, is that for duals like myself Linguistics is very much a side order to the main dish of Japanese. Sadly I’m competing alongside people who do this subject as a major and therefore are used to the teaching methods, assessment and above all practical knowledge of the subject. I really disliked most of the linguistics last year and I spent zero effort on it. This year, now that those modules count towards my degree classification I am going to have work my ass off.

Before I left this morning, I logged into Mole, which is the most annoying slowest thing we have at the university (aside from me of course.) I still have all my first year module choices listed, which is kind of annoying considering I just want to banish them to dustbin. I want to see the second year stuff, to show that I’ve truly made it and survived the horrors of fresherdom.

Also recently I seem to have taken a bizarre fancy towards Konno Asami of former J-pop Morning Musume fame.

Curious. Not that I should be creeped out by that of course. She is extremely cute and intelligent and reminds me of a girl I used to date, or maybe it was a girl I want to date but got scared away due to my insufferable bowl movements and kanji fetish. Also internet girlfriends are a waste of space. Looking at you Yukari! Right, off to the gym to think about me being ムラムラ towards Miss Konno and 101 reasons why she will never go out with a loser like me.

じゃね☆