Ok so my previous attempts at learning the hiragana table has been a bit, hm, futile. Sure I learned a few, but sitting there writing them to no end kinda got me nowhere.

The other day my friend introduced me to something new (I swear, he's the one that throws all the good stuff at me!) -- a book called Remembering the Kana: Hiragana and Katakana by James W. Heisig. There's six or so lessons that skip back and forth through the book (menaing you don't learn them "in order").The first lesson starts of smoothly with 9 syllables.

I started practicing today, and I've nailed the 9 so far. (Yeah it's not all that hard yet). Apparently you can go through the course in ~3 hours and pick up all of the hiragana table, but I decided against moving too fast now that I found a method that actually does work really well.

And here's the beautiful part: With the help of Mnemosyne (also suggested by the same friend - I love you man, haha!) I can test myself and see what syllables I know and which I need to practice further; the program remembers your answers and asks for the ones you don't know very well more often than the ones you do know. Very nifty program indeed!

Finally getting somewhere. :)

The last few weeks I've been playing Far Cry 2 with my friends at work, and we mostly play the multiplayer-mode called Capture the Diamond.

At first I thought the control was dodgy, I've never been able to play FPS's on a console with any successful aiming and so I've always thought it was pretty lame. But after a few hours of playing (and countless more hours of whining) I'm starting to get the hang of it, and it's now a lot of fun.

Me and my friends have teamed up under the name 'Quiet Apes'. Dunno where the name came from really, one of the guys just blurted it out and we agreed it was an ok name to use. My suggestion was 'Farting Solids'... Dunno which is better. xD

If you meet someone called 'II qa II Mangek', that's me. Wave and I'll give you a cookie. Or laugh at my still rather poor aim. :)

Edit: I'm now called 'qa oOo mangek', in case you were looking..