Lunar New Year's Day is Approaching

Most parts of the country may be in some celebratory mood as the lunar New Year's Day is approaching. I am taking no part in it.

I'm going slowly with The End of the Affair. One reason is that I started “マレー蘭印紀行” of Kaneko Mitsuharu (金子光晴) yesterday and the bigger reason is that I have been spending many hours almost everyday on my renewed attempt to learn Russian.

I feel the synapses in my head are activated. I even had a dream last night in which I was struggling with words and phrases. Woken up and unable to go back to sleep, I checked my dictionary. The dream was reflecting the reality faithfully. Oh so tough. I don’t care much about stuff like “asking for directions” or “at the hotel.” But those seemingly now irrelevant words and phrases may come handy one day… And this flash-card program does a superb job to make me feel that I should not move on unless I have learned the current topic. And the program collects things that I have not seen for a few days, and looking at the number of the “stale items,” clearly shown on the screen, raises the desire to conquer, an emotional effect, I guess, similar to that with computer, or any kind of competitive, games.

Language study involves, but of course is not restricted to, memorization work. As I sometimes get frustrated with my power of memorization and I do understand the importance of learning grammatical points, also yesterday I got a Russian grammar book, which I hope allows me to connect dots and transform them into lines and planes.