American Gaijin
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Thinking in Japanese
Over the past week or two, I have found something happening, and I am not sure what to make of it. On multiple occasions, I have found myself nearly responding in Japanese to an English question – and I have to consciously correct myself. Sometimes that’s before it comes out of my mouth, and sometimes…
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Pronunciation
On a YouTube channel I watch, the person who made a video mispronounced the word “Hitachi”. He pronounced it “Hai-TA-chi”. I posted a helpful comment telling him the correct way to pronounce it. Someone “took me to task” for correcting his pronunciation, with the rationalization “we aren’t Japanese”. Of course, he devolved to calling me…
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Never Rely on Google Translate
My coworkers know that I’m learning Japanese, so today one got a bit cute and ran a phrase through Google translate: “I am ready whenever you are”. It translated to this: あなたがいるときはいつでも私は準備ができている。 It translates back to something very similar, and one would never know that anything was wrong with this phrase. And I don’t know…
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Progress
This morning was a very stormy day. In fact, it was so stormy, that parts of I-35 were shut down because of flooding. My Japanese lesson was scheduled for the morning. It got cancelled. But we rescheduled for the afternoon, so it was not necessarily a bad thing. Sensei told us yesterday that she only…
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My Gaijin Life
I have launched my new project. Well, “launched” is a pretty hefty word. Perhaps it would be better said, I have thrown my new project at the world, while holding out a faint hope that the world doesn’t throw it right back. It can be found at https://mygaijinlife.com. In the beginning, I fully expect I…
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It is time.
It is a stormy day in Round Rock, Texas today. My Japanese teacher has decided that she now only wants to speak to the small group of people I learn with, in Japanese. I don’t like this, but I think it may be necessary. I’ve been feeling a little stuck lately – and I have…
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Honesty
I’m struggling with what to write, to be honest. I think a part of it is that I’m far more depressed then I usually am, but that’s not all of it. I just feel like I’ve said everything interesting that I have to say, and everything else just seems to be a rehash of some…
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Kanji is easier than Hiragana
At my Japanese lesson today, the question was posed: ひらがなは漢字どちら方が一番やさしいですか (which is the easiest, kanji or hiragana) I responded 漢字は方が一番やさしいです (kanji is the easiest). I didn’t make this statement lightly or without thinking. And while it would have been fun to troll sensei, I wasn’t doing that either. I really do think that is the…
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Ignorance
I found a book at Half Price Books yesterday called “zakennayo”. It’s an introduction to slang in Japanese. It doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of early 90s Japanese teen culture, but maybe that’s just realistic. “Zakennayo” is an extremely rude word that means, essentially, “fuck off” in Japanese. It’s a word I’d actually rather…
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Loan Words
Many words in Japanese are borrowed from other languages. Many from Chinese, and quite a few from English and Portuguese. A smattering from other languages as well. The interesting thing about Japanese, though, as opposed to many other languages, is that the Japanese language doesn’t have the syllabic structure to migrate the loanwords over untouched. …