最初に！自己紹介！

初めまして！今、僕は函館、北海度にいます！先週日HIFの本語の授業が始まりました。そして、毎日僕はたくさん勉強することになりました。【これは新しい文法です、ね。かこいいです、ね）HIFでたくさん友達になりました。あたまがいい人がたくさんいるので、授業がいいと思います。でも、初めて週にたくさん復習をしたので、習いにくなかった。実は、毎日、授業の後で、おもしろいことをしてから、世界が楽しい。たくさん日本の料理を食べるので、おはしがよくできるようになりました。お母さんは『日本人みたい』と言いましたけど、僕はまだよく話せないので、まだまだと思います。

月曜日の夜にルシアの大学生といしょうに飲みほだいにいて、カラオケをしました。たのしすぎたと思います。土曜日の午後に、わがしの授業にいて、おみやげを使いました。そして、友達と、おすしを食べに行って、カラオケもう一度をしました。

Translation taken with liberty and thereupon extrapolated:

Word up!!
Right now, I`m in Hakodate, Hokkaido, the northern Island of Japan. Last week, HIF`s Japanese classes began. I`m going to study a lot everyday, so I can skip into third year Japanese when I get back to Stanford. I`ve already made a plethora of friends, most of which come from Yale, because they have a disproportionately generous scholarship fund ($7,000!) for their Asian language study program. As you`d imagine, everyone is rather smart and rather ambitious, having chosen to spend their summer in an intensive language immersion setting. Classes are fine so far, mostly review, but we do fun cultural things every day after class, such as pottery making and Wagashi instruction (traditional Japanese confectionery making), and we start Judo classes this year. So far, HIF`s program is impressive, extensive, and challenging.

I`ve become a chopsticks wielding crazy man, as required by the huge quantities of tasty Japanese food my host mother cooks. She says I`m practically Japanese, but I must disagree, given the impoverished state of my language skills.

Friday night, the Russian College language students (Japanese students who come to study Russian) took a bunch of the HIF students to a wonderful thing called Nomihodai. $20 gets you all you can drink draft beer and all you can eat, Onigiri, sashimi, and yakitori for two hours. There were about 30 HIF/Russian Daigaku students and 4 off duty police offers who told us they were Judo sensei stuffed into a tiny hole-in-the-wall shack down an alley in downtown Goryokaku. We drank and sang and Kampai`d with the 4 nihonjin cops until about 9, then went to sing Karaoke for an hour down the street. It was glorious.

I ate substantial quantities of sushi for the rest of the weekend, interspersed with reading Their Eyes Were Watching God and a bit of grammar renshyuu (study).　

For regular English updates, please see Into the Amazon, which should be linked somewhere on the sidebar. I`ll reserve this blog for Nihongo updates from now own.