Heavy...

I'm studying the adjectives from the JLPT 4 list that I'm not solid on yet. One of them is 重い (omoi) which means "heavy." It's kind of similar to 遅い (osoi) which means "slow" and 面白い (omoshiroi) which means "interesting." There are a lot of adjectives in this list like short, weak, thin, light, etc., and almost all of them end in "~い", which makes them easily confused.

In order to study for the JLPT 3, I've started going through and making sure I understand everything on JLPT 4 (which is included - the lower the number, the higher the level). I found a list of the vocabulary for the test online and I used TextWrangler to strip out the HTML and replace table cell tags with pipes | so I could then import the whole thing into Excel as a spreadsheet. Basically, I created a very simple database. Within Excel, it's pretty easy to sort by column (I have hiragana, kanji, English, part of speech, and number in the list).

I added a column and then spent about an hour or 2 going through and marking all the words I already know from the list. Out of the 728 words on the list, I feel confident about 500 of them, so now I'm going through the remaining 228 words. I made flashcards for about 35 of them today, and I'll continue like this through the rest of the month. I hope to have all the vocab and kanji for JLPT 4 down, cold, by the end of July.

I added 4 more columns to my list of words I don't know. These columns are examples using the word in Japanese and the corresponding English in the next column. I included 2 examples (for the total 4 columns) for each of the words I was struggling to memorize. This has been really helpful for grammar and context, but also just for memorization.

Which brings me back to "heavy." I found a great way to say "He's lazy" in Japanese. Usually, I'd just say "彼は怠け者です。" - He is a lazy person. But this is much more interesting:

彼の尻が重い。

"His ass is heavy."

Sometimes I really love Japanese.