Random bit of fluff...

Found my electronic dictionary today, after a week of not being able to find it -- it was in my car. It's fairly old, now, and the newer ones have a lot more features -- a touch-screen interface, so you can draw kanji rather than look it up by radical and number of strokes (difficulty: writing it in correct stroke order), an English-to-English dictionary, etc. But I don't really need all that. (Maybe the Eng.<->Eng. dictionary...but since it's a learner's dictionary, probably not.)

An old college friend once mentioned to me how amazing it felt to live in a foreign country and suddenly not have to tote around your dictionary any more. It's true, it's a rush when you realize that you can actually communicate (albeit at a very elementary level) without technological crutches.

My latest milestone passed in the quest to understand Japanese was noticing that whoever did the official English translation for the manga "Nodame Cantabile" was not at all versed in Japanese culture, and in some spots showed a very tenuous grasp of the language...