Your Japanese word of the week is...

"kanshin suru" 感心する which means "to be impressed". This past week, I've been meeting with various language exchange people and it never ceases to interest me just how many varied walks of life there are. The path that people have travelled to end up having a coffee with me is really interesting and I really learn a lot......

One of the most impressive things that was shown to me was how to conjugate verbs.

Let's take, for example, "ugoku" 動く which is the verb "to move" .

Taking the last syllable ("ku"), you make a chart with all the characters in the "ku" family.

     ka | nai    - negative
     ki | masu   - present/future
ugo  ku | -      - perfect tense
     ke | ru     - possibility (ability to)
     ko | u      - "Let's"

While this wasn't technically "new" information, it was amazing to see it laid out in such a simple and easy to understand manner. In actuality, my friend told me she learned it from a Japanese teacher and that this isn't normally the way it's taught. There are, of course, variations of this chart depending on how a verb needs to be conjugated ("taberu" 食べる or "to eat") but this brings a bit of order to what I thought was just a jumble of grammar rules...

The other thing that's impressed me lately is my friend's new car........ he's also a car nut and we look for similar things in cars, so he ended up buying a pristine 2000 BMW M5. Not only it is fast, it's quite a rare car as well, which means it'll hold its value for longer. Of course, having not yet found my own sporty car to drive, I offered to take some pictures of his and my other friend's car (1974 Datsun 270Z) to celebrate the occasion. Enjoy! The last one is my favourite from the night.