A few notes on my notes

As I said in the last post, my creative drought has led to an upswing in dedication to study. I've been reading a lot and getting some good review done of my old notes.
An interesting thing occured to me as I was making a list of words I find difficult to remember: Almost all these words were negative and, more worryingly, violent. For example, I have a mental block about the Japanese translations of 'attack', 'strike against', 'abandon', 'fight', 'make a disturbance', 'plot', 'hunt' & 'violate'.
Now I know we humans love to find patterns where none should exist. And I know it probably all means nothing. But psychologically doesn't it seem just a little interesting. Does it mean I am an incredibly positive person who focuses only on remembering the good? Am I someone who refuses to allow thoughts of darkness into my life? Or am I just a troubled soul living in fear of violation and abandonment, who seeks to deny the existence of the dangers and threats around him? Your thoughts please on a postacrd to....
On a less navel-gazing theme, I have attached a picture above of my new baby - the gorgeous dictionary I spent a fortune on, which is winging its way to me as I type.
It can do everything short of launch a small rocket, but will totally be worth it when I pass my end-of-year exams with flying colours (hah!).
In any case, my old dicitonary was getting so banjaxed that for the frequently-used letter keys, I had to bang my fingers down hard to the point of repetitive stress injury.
One last language-scholar-snoozeathon observation.
A few days ago I was preparing a lesson about pronunciation. Specifically I wanted to teache my students some of the differences between standard 'received' British-English and what I found out we call Hiberno-English.
'T' definitely seemed to be one of the key points of difference.
The archetypal example was, of course, the whole 'tirty-tree and a tird' thing. I found that a bit boring and prejudiced.
More interesting was the way that when 't' isn't at the start of a word it is said almost as an 'sh' sound... think of 'water' or 'mute'. This is unique to the English speaking world.
Rich too is the double t 'tt' sound in little or battle or kettle.... Or butter or better, which are a little different again...Or gotten and rotten... need I go on. In boring old standard English they're all only the one sound.
My students actually really got the lesson and seemed to enjoy it. I think I'll hold off a bit before I try to teach them
gawayaauradachyabigeejitcha