しあわせ
A few weeks ago, we were learning the vocabulary for chapter 13 of Genki* . One of the vocabulary words, as you can probably guess from the title, was しあわせ. The definition in the vocabulary was long-term happiness, lasting happiness. It is a な adjective, so I naturally thought "well, there's a word I'm never going to need, they obviously included that so that we would have to practice な adjectives more and for some variety from たのしい..." But I learned it anyway (perhaps more from having had that internal dialogue about it ;)) & time moved on. This Sunday, I watched the last episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury. A small group of us watch the shows simultaneously, the Japanese with subtitles version, then we talk about them together in voice chat on Discord. On Sunday, there was just the core group of 3 - me, K & T. K has studied a little Japanese ages ago and mostly forgotten it, T can mostly get by without the subtitles, and...