Most bo liao post of the year coming up.

I’ve got 10 minutes to kill while waiting for the Goonfather to finish doing his stuff so we can go out to have dinner. So I decided to camwhore because I’m all dressed up to take photos tonight. (Need to take some photos for Star Blog entry.)

There are taken with my Blackberry because I’m too lazy to take my camera out of my bag, lol.

You’ll notice that I’m not looking directly at the camera because the Blackberry flash is horrible. Not only is it super blinding, it flahes at you for like three seconds. After one photo, you are literally half blind.

Here’s a spoilt photo to show you how terrible the flash is. Not sure why the photo turned out like this, though. I took it the same way I took all the others.

See.

Okay. That was before I was blinded and so was still looking at the camera.

My Yakult bottle looks empty because, well, it is empty. I finished drinking it while taking photos.

It doesn’t take very long to finish a bottle of Yakult.

Okay, I think that’s quite enough. My 10 minutes are up. Need to run!

I’ll have less bo liao posts next week. Just very busy this week cos I had so much work. In the meantime, enjoy your long weekend!

Happy National Day! :)

(Oh yeah, I should have worn red and white, huh?)

I’m really enjoying my manga drawing class in small part due to the exercises being rather fun and in large part because our teacher is so adorable!

(If you haven’t already, please read about my first class here!)

We still haven’t found out his name. I wanted to ask but was too shy. But I will do it this Sunday. Hopefully. Heh. So I’ll call him Manga Sensei until I find out his name.

LAST SUNDAY WE DREW NARUTO!!! =D

Well, okay, I feel a bit of a cheat to say I drew Naruto. We didn’t really draw him on our own strength. We merely added pencil strokes around a provided frame.

I wonder how long artists have to practise before they can draw stuff without using circles and lines. Even with the guidelines, I found it hard. It took me five minutes just to draw the hair to my grudging satisfaction.

Manga Sensei also drew Naruto. On the whiteboard. Without those circle and line things.

Oh, this time, he came to class more prepared. He had, I think, rather painstakingly gone through his dictionary to cobble together many sentences of English instructions.

He would write down the words on the board and then read them to us in a halting manner.

It wasn’t always clear what he meant to say, though.

The words shown above: “Paint the picture tips. See the entire balance. Finary draw A fine plase.”

And then he wrote “about” beside Naruto’s head. I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

I managed to speak more Japanese with him! It’s cool being able to practise with a native speaker. We had a bit of chat about our favourite manga and the music that he was playing in class.

He also showed us a very elaborate Gundam drawing he did which took him 13 hours just for the pencil sketch alone.

So, after Naruto, we received this worksheet which looked easy at first glance but ended up not being as easy.

There were given 16 faces with different facial expressions printed out in very faint lines and we were supposed to trace over them. Some of the lines, especially the hair, were so faint as to be hard to make out.

Here’s the result of my labour:

Now, don’t say I draw well, because I didn’t actually draw these on my own. I was tracing faint lines. And, in fact, my faces aren’t as handsome as the original ones, somehow! Sigh.

Our next exercise was different. We had to write a comic strip! Oh dear.

We were given a comic strip and told to fill in words to fit the drawing. This is really hard. I can never think of good jokes.

It didn’t help that the two examples we were given DID NOT MAKE SENSE AT ALL.

Like, totally HUH? right?

Anyway, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this (cos I’m always the slowest in completing all the exercises), so I did this lame excuse for a joke:

So engrossed was I in trying to figure out what the example strips meant that I totally didn’t notice the instructions telling us which speech bubble came first.

I mean, being a manga reader, I should have known that the Japanese read from left to right. But I just forgot about it at the moment and stuck to the English style of right to left.

Minou also. Haha.

When we were done with this, Manga Sensei walked over with a blank piece of paper and started saying something about “homework” and “his turn”. We eventually figured out that he meant that he was going to give himself homework!

He started copying down the words of our comic strips, saying that he was going to go home and look up the words in his dictionary.

We had to use a mix of Japanese, English and sign language to communicate, as usual.

Anyway, when he copied my comic, I noticed he was writing it in the wrong order, from left to right, instead of the way I meant it to be. And I wondered why… until he was copying my other friend’s work. SHE had it the correct way.

So, Minou and I had to number our speech bubbles to tell Manga Sensei that we had gotten our order wrong and for him to take note of that on his “homework” sheet.

Once we were done with that, he showed us what he wanted us to do next, via English writing on a piece of paper. But no matter how we tried, we couldn’t figure out what he meant!

I can’t remember his exact words but it was something like, “If you have time, please post … (something). Favourite picture.”

Totally incomprehensible. Heh.

He finally gave up and gave us another task, which was this following worksheet.

It’s the hardest of all! We had to draw bodies in all kinds of poses. Of course, we had faint drawings to trace, like the faces one, but this one was even more faint and in many cases indecipherable.

After tracing all the bodies, we had to pick four of our favourites and draw them in boxes below!

I only managed to draw three before class ended. This is VERY VERY difficult. My bodies suck.

The worksheets are getting scary, increasing in difficulty at a crazy breakneck pace!

I guess I will have to spend a lot of time at home practicising if I ever want to improve. But… how to find time? Japanese test next Monday and I’m still lost in some of the lessons!

Oh dear.

Today, I received an early birthday present. A $2,500 diamond necklace.

I also received in the mail my latest pay cheque from Nuffnang.

When I walked into my room, I saw a box of my favourite pineapple tarts from Malacca waiting for me.

Today should be a madly crazy happy day.

So why am I still feeling depressed over things that are beyond my control?

Why why why.

What is wrong with me! I feel like stabbing myself with a sword.

I should be grateful and happy.

Right?

So, I recently attended a class where the teacher was unable to communicate with the students.

*cue baffled look*

But I enjoyed the class, even if it didn’t seem like a class so much as it appeared to be a babysitting service.

*cue bewildered look*

It was my first manga class at Inoue School of Language and Arts. It was a very small class, just me and three friends. I think the manga classes aren’t as popular as the language classes.

Our teacher is a Japanese manga artist. We don’t even know his name. He can say about five words of English, none of which gives him the ability to introduce himself.

Logically, I should be peeved that I paid good money ($289 for 8 sessions + $20 registration fee) for a teacher who can’t instruct us effectively. But I appreciate the chance to practise my Japanese, even if my Japanese is only slightly better than his English.

But what really sold me was the fact that our teacher is rather adorable.

I mean, he’s not good-looking in the eye-candy sort of way. He’s like one of those funny Japanese stereotypes you see in Japanese shows. Excessively polite, nervous, bumbling, executing little Japanese half-bows at the slightest provocation.

I find the little quirks of the Japanese quite endearing and delightful, so I felt entertained in class.

The first order of the day was equipment distribution.

Teacher started digging out used pencils from various containers. He then sharpened them one by one. Next, he dug around for used erasers. We each received a sharpened pencil and a cheap battered eraser that must have seen better days.

Next order of business:

We received this sheet of paper with blank little rectangles in which we were supposed to draw.

(The second and third rows were originally empty.)

Using a few words of English and many gestures of sign language, our teacher indicated to us that we should populate all the blank spaces by copying the first row.

He then tried to give us some complicated instruction about doing something differently for the third row but we didn’t understand his sign language.

So I said to him in Japanese: “Speak Japanese!” hoping I would be able to understand his Japanese better than his English.

He looked at me in surpise and said, “Ah! Good!”

He continued trying to speak in English.

In retrospect, I realise what I might have unintentionally said to him was, “I am speaking Japanese,” rather than the imperative “Speak Japanese.”

I should have phrased it differently. But I know what to say the next time!

Anyway, it took us about an hour to complete our assignment. I had the chance to practise more Japanese by asking the teacher a question in Japanese, to which he replied in mostly sign language and some kooky English.

For most of the two hours of class, he mainly sat in the front anxiously flipping through the pages of a large dictionary.

Twenty minutes into the class, he presented to us the fruits of his labour.

He had written these four English words on a piece of paper, which he showed to us:

“Go hear difficult me.”

It was very illuminating, indeed. We immediately felt wiser by his instruction.

After a doubtful conference amongst ourselves, Minou finally said to him, “Do you mean that if we have any difficulty, we should come to you?”

Our teacher looked at her with a polite smile and bow-nodded, but his eyes were stressed and worried. We couldn’t tell whether we had interpreted his words correctly.

Well, we completed our first assignment anyway. He collected our work and gave us another task. This time, we had to draw a giant face. This is A3 size:

(Circles and guidelines were provided in the bottom space. The rest are drawn in by me. Just noticed I forgot to shade in below the chin.)

“Copy,” he said, bowing nervously as he did.

As for our first submissions, he looked at them very briefly and placed them reverently on the tables in front of us.

No, I didn’t misuse the word “reverently”. He really did that. Everything he did was polite and respectful to a fault.

When we finished the second assignment (he didn’t collect those) we received a third one.

I only managed to draw the eyebrows and two circles for the eyes before our two hours were up. (My friends managed to finish theirs, though.)

Our shy teacher then showed me a piece of paper on which he had scribbled several English words and phrases. He pointed to the one that said “Next week”, then pointed at my unfinished drawing.

Then he handed us back our first assignment, saying, “Present for you.”

With that, class ended.

So, in our first lesson, we basically learnt how to copy faces.

There are seven more sessions to go. What will transpire? Will our teacher be able to say more English words? Will there be actual instructions or will we be doodling on worksheet after worksheet for the rest of the course?

Stay tuned for more updates!

Can’t make my guy look the same every time!!

You know how sometimes funny incidents happen when you’re with friends and you’re, like, doubling over in laughter and gasping for breath because it’s so damned funny?

But when you try to retell it to other friends, it’s not so funny because the spontaneity is gone, plus the need to explain a lot of background info kills the joke?

I wanted to tell about Japanese class on Thursday because so many funny things happened we were basically laughing from start till end. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t open my eyes. (A bit like how it’s impossible to keep your eyes open at the moment of a sneeze. Try it some time.)

I actually tried typing it out but then realised too many things have to be explained, so it’s really not funny anymore. You’ll probably get tired of reading before you even get to the joke. LOL.

I guess Thursday will just have to remain a happy memory in my mind.

Manga class starts today! I hope it’ll be fun.

I need to get my mind off yesterday’s stressful interview. I was asked to be interviewed for Channel 8 news regarding my ambassadorship for POCC (Power Over Cervical Cancer) and the interview was held in Mandarin.

While preparing for the interview, I realised that I’m losing Chinese vocab at an alarming rate every day. I’m even losing grammar. I can’t have a conversation in Chinese anymore without adding 30%-50% English into the mix.

I think I should go to China more often to get some practice. Yes, I can practise in Singapore but there’s the tendency to use lots of English words because you know whoever’s listening can understand it. So it’s not very effective.

I’ll talk more about the interview when I get the pictures.

Time flies!

I don’t know what I was thinking signing up for so many classes. Eek! Shall have to start giving up some. That is, finish the beginner course but not continue to take advanced lessons. I think the dances might be the first to go. Not very impressed with Jitterbugs.

Gotta go! Hope to see you at SHINE Youth Festival later! I’ll be going at 6:30 pm after manga class!