I've moved to Japan

In case you've been wondering where I've been for the past three months, I've moved to Japan! If you've never done it before, moving to pretty much the other side of the world can be something of a complicated process, so I ran out of blogging time with all the things on the to-do list. I'm still neck-deep in a to-do list of unpacking and whatnot, but one way or another it'll be finished pretty soon, so hopefully I can get back to plenty of language-learning goodness.

I arrived here on May 31 and I'm working at Nagashima Ohno and Tsunematsu, one of Japan's "Big 4" law firms. While I was hired of course to work primarily in English, everything around me is in Japanese and I get lots of exposure to it, which is creating a great language-learning environment (which, unsurprisingly, is heavy in legalese). I'm also living with my in-laws, so the percentage of time that I'm only using Japanese is pretty high, although I'm not quite at complete immersion because of the legal work I need to do in English and the English I speak with my kids.

I've set myself a little goal for the next year: I want to get my Japanese to sound indistinguishable from a native speaker almost all the time. We'll see how that goes.

I've also got a whole bunch of half-baked posts from the past few months, including a lot more on my Getting to Grammar series, that I hope to push out the door over the next several weeks. So keep your eyes open! Although I'm not quite out of the woods yet in terms of things that are keeping me from blogging, the posts'll be here soon!