Forming habits

The duck and I had to sleep a bit before we continued our thoughts from last week. But now that we’re somewhat awake (being fully awake is never a state the duck and I find ourselves in, no matter how long we sleep), it’s time to think about New Year’s resolutions some more. See, we actually do believe in the saying that 30 days of doing something forms a habit. That has proven true for us in a few instances. Nowhere do they tell you, though, that it takes just a few hours to break a new habit completely. I don’t even know how many times the duck and I have told ourselves that we should eat healthier (meaning: not snacking on pretzels and chocolate all the time) and exercise a bit more. We have gotten close to meeting this 30 day threshold quite a few times (well, we actually don’t believe that it takes 30 days per se. For us something along the lines of ‘a while’ works). But then a stressful moment came and we just had to buy this bag of pretzels and 15 chocolate bars to go with it. And, weirdly, whenever we get rather serious about exercise we get pretty sick (the last time the duck and I went to the gym on a regular basis for about two weeks I ended up having a 2 months-long cold). This is why our resolutions for this year are so *ahem* easy.

However, there is one (rather useless) habit the duck and I have kept up for far more than 30 days: studying a language every day (we are rather proud of our 1338 day streak on Duolingo that we started on one of those days we were home sick after going to the gym). This is what brought you such gems as: My dog sells hats. I’ll include the video (again) at the end of this post, just because our dog’s story is so inspirational that it needs to be shared, especially in the beginning of the year:

My dog sells hats 2.0

We finally did it, you guys! The duck and I finally finished the second dog story that we may have mentioned waaay back when we first stumbled across our favorite Duolingo sentence (to this day): 私の犬は帽子を売ります。My dog sells hats. After months of lazing around drawing furiously, we finally gave up on finished the visual representation of the story about our hat-selling dog. Enjoy!

Actually, it took the duck and me so long to work on this that we are not even sure that this gem of a sentence even still exists on Duolingo. But we sure hope so, as within it lies a great potential to save lives (or at least to brighten up someone’s day)!
That shall be it for our 99th post. We’ll sleep for at least 99 days now!

Duck, dog and me – OUT!

My dog sells hats in Shibuya

Right.
In Japanese, this sentence looks a little bit like this: 私の犬は渋谷で帽子を売ります。”Why on earth would anyone need this sentence?”, you may ask yourself. Well, Duolingo says that this is a very important sentence to know. Apparently, the subject of hat-selling dogs is pretty common in Japan – according to the duck, at least; if ducks are adventurous travelers (well, the past few weeks did not look very adventurous, duck, just sayin’) why should dogs not be talented hat salesmen dogs?

Why not? Let’s just roll with it and dedicate this little post to the art of Japanese language learning, or rather, the hardships I face when I try to speak Japanese because I am definitely not an artist when it comes to attempting to learn this beautiful language. In order to illustrate my bumpy journey right out of Hobbiton – because that’s how far I’ve come on my quest to destroy my inability to have conversations in Japanese – let me tell you one of two stories: