Japanese with anime voice: episode87
Hello, I’m Sachi.
Yesterday, I mentioned that this year is already half over, and to my surprise, today, July 2, is the turn of the year. A year is 365 days, right? If you cut it in half in terms of the number of days, today is the middle of the year. As I said yesterday, this year will be over in half a year.
Time flies so fast that I can’t tell when things happened in the past. You think you met a friend just the other day, but in fact, more than half a year has already passed since then. When I think about it, the last time I saw my friend was a year ago or two years ago. Or you may think that only three months have passed since an event happened last year. It’s hard to know when it happened.
Last year, an American friend and her husband came to Japan and stayed with us for one night in May. I am friends with the wife of the couple, and we met in 2021, I think. I don’t know, I think it was 2022. I don’t even remember when we met. In 2022, she told me that she was going to visit Japan next May. We kept saying that we would see each other soon until just before she came to Japan. Now that I think about it, it was only last year that I met them.
And now for this year’s story. I’m talking about an American friend of mine whom I met and became friends with about 5 years ago. Having said that, at this point, I can’t believe it’s been five years since I’ve known her. She told me last year that she was going to Japan next year. That means she will come to Japan this year. Around the end of last year, she asked me if I could find a used Switch for her at a reasonable price in Japan, since she wanted to buy it but it was too expensive in the US. I said I would look for it. She told me to take my time because I still have more than 6 months before I go to Japan. I said yes, and we laughed. Then, the day my friend came to visit me was already last month.
I loved my friend and vowed to improve my English even more by the time she came to Japan. But I never improved, so every time I got impatient, I told myself that there was still some time left and that it would be all right. But then, in the blink of an eye, it was 2024, and in the blink of an eye, I was one month away from meeting my friend, and in the blink of an eye, she had gone back to the US. Isn’t time flying by too fast? Seriously. And as you can imagine, my English hadn’t improved at all by the time I met my friend. I was still speaking in broken English. But I am grateful to my friends who tried their best to understand me.
Everything that we say we will do in six months or a year is quickly becoming a thing of the past. It’s already been three years since I quit my job. My goal was to improve my language skills with the extra time I had after quitting my corporate job. Why is it that the improvement of language is not in proportion to the passage of time?
To begin with, 24 hours a day is not enough. Sometimes I wish the day was 48 hours long. But we still work 8 hours a day. The hours of sleep also remain 8 hours. Then, we use the rest of our time for various things. That way, we can do a lot of things we want to do in a day!
Come to think of it, the 8-hour workday is the basic rule in Japan, but what about overseas? For my part, I agree with the 8-hour workday if the day is 48 hours long. But in reality, there are only 24 hours. In such a situation, I would not be in favor of an 8-hour workday. Because in addition to being tied up in the office for eight hours, there is the commute to work. For some people, the commute can take as long as two hours. This means that every waking hour is work time. Furthermore, they need to wake up early to get to work. Then, they have to get dressed and eat breakfast. When they return home, they eat dinner to recharge their energy, and then take a bath for 5 or 10 minutes to further relieve the fatigue of work. Why do we have to spend so much time doing things that we don’t even enjoy? That’s why I think that an eight-hour workday is too long. Six hours is enough. I really think it’s too long. Then everyone will have a little more time to spare. And then we will have more time in our hearts, too.
