To make your Notes private (Personal entry)

I am not fond of writing in the 20th-century way as much as I used to　be. Writing with pencil, whether wooden or mechanical, takes too much time. Therefore, I never gained a habit of writing journals the old fashioned way.

It is easier to type journals, and I want to submit them online because if my laptop ever gets stolen, my personal memoirs will still be retrievable, whereas the memoirs on my PC's Microsoft Word file will be just as hard to retrieve as the laptop itself.

On some online journaling programs, there is an option to make your journal private so only you (the author) can view them. Unfortunately, THERE IS NO SUCH OPTION HERE.

Therefore, I have resorted to a new plan that will let me write private journals in public spaces such as Facebook Notes. The plan is to use Katakana (カタカナ), the Japanese transliteratory script meant for foreign words. The script's characters form together to make the closest approximation to the words attempting to be transliterated. Tennis, for example, is テニス (tenisu).

Because most Japanese characters end in vowels, the pronounciation isn't perfect but it is as close as it can be.

Therefore, through this plan, I plan to write personal entries I am not willing to show to just anyone, in the Katakana script.

An example sentence that I do not want revealed in English is: イン　二千七、アイ　ワス　ビトゥレイド　バイ　ジェッシ　リンデル　アンド　ヘル　フィアンセイ　スコット　マクスパッデン。　アイ　ネヴァ　サ　ティス　ビトゥレイアル　カミング。　

Whether a private message revealed in English will potentially hurt or help relationships when read by others, if I simply don't feel comfortable making it public, I must keep the message in Katakana, unreadable by anyone who cannot read Japanese. Anyone who can read Japanese will probably not know who or what I am talking about.

Yes, someone might wonder why I don't type it in regular Japanese, instead of using a special script to convey English pronunciation approximations. I have only taken 1 1/2 years of Japanese, so I still have a long way to go to speaking and typing sentences fluently.

I am hoping to go Study Abroad in Nagasaki starting shortly after Spring Break. It all depends on whether or not I get the acceptance letter, and whether I will bring up enough cash to take care of the rest. I read someplace that BEING in Japan for just 4 days will absorb into you one semester's worth of learning Japanese at K-State. That sounds optimistic but let's hope that's right, because I want to type real Japanese by the time I get back.

(Image caption: Katakana characters, without some of the obsolete or new characters added.)