I'm going to Japan.

Last week I bought my plane tickets to Japan! I’m leaving June 18th, and returning July 5th. I’ll be there in time for the Japanese Ruby Conference. I submitted a talk proposal on RKelly, and hopefully that will get accepted. I know I’m going to be staying in Tokyo for a while, but I’m not sure where else I’ll travel. I’d like to go to Kyoto because it looks very interesting. I’m most excited about getting to visit Daisuke, and speaking Japanese. I’m trying hard to hone my language skillz before I go so that I can communicate!

One thing I’ve noticed about the Japanese language that differs from English and kind of annoys me is the timing of words in sentences. In English when I quote someone, the listener knows much sooner that it is a quote than in Japanese. For example:

Pam said “blah blah”.

In Japanese:

Pam は blah blah と言っていました。

You don’t know until the end of the sentence that “blah blah” is what Pam said. If you died or something before the end of that sentence, the listener wouldn’t know it was a quote! There might be ways to get around that, but I don’t know them yet……