Thursday 20 August 2009

Your Japanese word of the week is...

"sagasu" 捜す which means "to look for" or "search". There's also "mitsukeru" 見つける which means "to find" or "to locate". It seems then, the easiest way to think about them is that "mitsukeru" is more for items to be found whereas "sagasu" is more for larger things, some perhaps intangible.

The thing I've been looking for lately is a language exchange mainly because it's not easy to keep up a language in a city that doesn't speak it on a regular basis. So I put up an ad looking for a language exchange and while I expected 2 or 3 emails, I ended up with surprising 10 (thus far...). I haven't met any of them yet and nor did I really do any formal "language exchanges" in Japan, but we'll see how it works out heh....

In other news, I'm mostly just cruising through the last few weeks before school starts. I'm still doing the whole MWF karate thing and it's really helping me refine how to teach karate. At times, it's easy to get caught up in the details (for me, anyway) and turn it into a science. But what I've found is that I've brought back a lot of timing or "feel" knowledge that can help others build the same foundation by narrowing the range of how each move "feels".

As I've said before, a lot of it is intangible and often times, it takes countless hours of self-aware practice to stumble upon the once or twice when the move just "feels" right. But having done that and then move towards doing it more consistently, it's also important to consider how to explain the feel. From there, the students can watch and try with a much more focussed target on how things should be. It's like being asked to guess a number from 1 to 10, and then being told that the number falls between 2 and 6. It's just that bit easier.....

Other than that, I haven't really been doing anything substantial aside from just hanging out with friends. However, it looks like I'll be headed up to Whistler for a day this weekend, so I'll be sure to bring my camera and grab some pics......

Cuz, y'know, reading pages and pages probably isn't as interesting heh..........

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