2008-04-29 Japanese Rocks

Today I had my first Japanese class and immediately fell in love with the language. For example:

- There's no distinction between m and n.
- Length is very important. Length of vowels, that is.
- Move your lips and tongue as little as possible.
- Don't count words, count characters.
- Skip unnecessary things such as singular/plural or genders for things.

It's exactly the challenge I've been waiting for. And I know I can master it!
As a kid, I despised learning languages. But that's okay, I guess, because I also didn't like beer, traveling and girls. And now look at me: I'm in New Zealand (which is as far away from Germany as you can get, just in case I haven't mentioned that yet), in less than two weeks my girlfriend comes over from the Philippines, and as for the beer... there's a free supply in the office.

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Speaking of alcohol. The other day I bought the only existing bottle of wine with a cork. Here in New Zealand, wine bottles usually come with a screw cap. Only this one doesn't. And I don't have a corkscrew. What would MacGyver do?