夏の残り日々 The Remaining Days of Summer

     Well here I am yet again writing another blog during another 終わらない季節 (Never ending season). I had two things to write about today, both of great importance. The first one involves an update about Bice. Three weeks ago Bice, a great composer that I'm a fan of, passed away quite unfortunately due to a heart attack. I wrote a blog post about her influence on my life shortly after I heard the news. Quite miraculously, the relatively obscure artist managed to compose as song called ご飯はおかず or (The side dishes are meals).

     This song was recently featured in the famous anime K-On!! as an insert song. Having watched the first season and pretty impressed with it, I was waiting to view the second season, but now that I found out about Bice's insert song, I am more excited than ever. The style of the song really fits the theme of the show, and reflects Bice's ever-carefree style of simplicity that she uses in her music.

     I'll post the insert song below, as well as a link to one of her last blog updates concerning the completion of this song.

Bice's blog post. I'll translate it: http://bice.jp/?p=352

That famous anime:

My apologies for not having written in a while. I've been feeling down because of the weather, but I take it you're all doing well? Recently I finished composing a song for a rather famous anime. The release is unknown as of now, but it's a really fun song. By the way, my iPad is still missing, and I'm feeling down because of that. It's scary--. But can it do Skype??? Maybe… the other day I stopped at Fukuoka city in a cafe off on the side for the first time in a while. It's possible I left my iPad there accidentally. Considering that time, I was in a bit of hurry and that could be the reason. Aw, I guess I really am such a careless person after all <3

Log 2: Japanese Dictionaries

Hey guys, I'm not going to try trans-scribing all 10 minutes of these videos, but I will certainly post them. A couple months ago I purchased my electronic dictionary, and I've found it overwhelmingly useful and a great investment. I thought I'd compare the various media that can assist you in learning Japanese. So without further adeau, I present a crash course on Japanese dictionaries part 1 and 2!

PS: let me point out that although the total of these videos was under the 11 minute mark, the size was over 1 gb and I didn't feel like compressing the videos to a low quality. So I cut them into 5 minute blocks and left them like that.

Log 1: Introduction

Hey everyone, hey world, hey youtube. My name is Jon, and I'm 20 years old now. I'm going to be studying abroad in Japan for one year in two months. Currently it is the beginning of August right now, and I  will be leaving about mid September. So about two months.

The reason I'm creating this is because for about six months now, about January I started doing text-blogging. It was just for fun, and it was going well. I talked to a friend, and he suggested that I make videos. I thought I'd try making one, this is the first one.

A brief introduction about me, I've been studying Japanese for about four years now. Two years at a university, and about two years by myself. For the first two years, I learned about one or two hundred kanji. I picked up a few simple sentences, but it wasn't that impressive. I will be studying in Tokyo, the capital. I expect most of my viewers to be friends, family, or anyone inteseted in Japan.

If anything I can get a few views from friends, and maybe in a few years look back and enjoy myself. Anyone interested though, I'd like to give my input and point of view. Hopefully that would help educate you. I myself am pretty excited about doing this. I hope to make more videos if I get a good turnout and a decent response. That's about all, I've been talkign for about two minutes now, that's good.

I know there are 100 video bloggers like me out there. I don't have HD video cameras or anything. So I won't have awesome video all the time, but I'll try to make things as interesting as possible. Anyway, I'll link some interesting things below, and you can check them out. Check out my blog for sure, and this is Jon saying "Bye!"

New Banner

Alright,

So I started checking out a few other blogs, and the thing I realized is that all the good ones have nice banners. So I tossed this together using an online site. I think it looks god-awful right now, so I'm asking a friend if he can help me make something a little more professional. I hope to have that up in about a week or two, but I definitely trust the guy- he makes really professional looking banners for other people. That's just about all there is to say. Feel free to leave a comment or something on your thoughts about the new banner. Good? Bad? It's going away in a week or two anyway. Thanks!