okayIn other news I am attempting to learn hiragana by the same brute force method I used to learn Braille. As the kana are much more complicated than Braille characters, so far I recognise unambiguously a mere 3 out of 46 (and don't even get me started on the combinations, like chuu). But this will improve, as my brute force approach does work surprisingly well for me. Still utterly aggravated that my plans to learn Japanese "properly" with a teacher & everything got screwed up by my gall bladder, but at least I can do SOMETHING by myself.
We won't mention the gall bladder. I woke up with it grumbling despite me having eaten no more than 5g of fat per day since Sunday, but I refused to give in and take painkillers, and it seems to have stopped. It had BETTER have stopped, or there'll be trouble.
Have also been to 2 of the 3 local health food shops and acquired more ingredients, including something which claims to be vegan dairy-free cheese-flavoured sauce with a mere 0.4% fat. Somehow I suspect that 1 of these 4 claims must be incorrect, but I will post a rebuttal if it turns out to be edible ;) Still boggling about cornmeal, though. I could find "cornflour", "maize flour" and "maize meal", but no "cornmeal". And cornflour and maize flour are very much not the same thing, because cornflour is off-white, cheap and easy to get in .uk (it's the main ingredient of custard, forgodsake), but maize flour is yellow, more expensive, and only in health food stores - it's quite a bright yellow, too. Unlike with oat flour and oatmeal, where the meal was very obviously coarser than the flour, there was no perceptible difference between maize flour and maize meal. I bought the one labelled "meal" just in case. But if any North Americans want to try to shed some light on this, I'd be grateful.
