Nowling JCCC Nihongo

 Not that anyone was, it was weeks ago when we discussed reasons that we got interested in Japan and learning Japanese.  But I did say that as a kid I was interested in mythology, including Japanese and Chinese myths, not just Graeco-Roman and Norse myths.  A kickstarter that I backed in late 2020 finally delivered my book - The Fox’s Wedding by Matthew Meyer. It’s a compendium of yokai and their tales (and tails too for some of them, like the kitsune and the poor, terrible, kodama nezumi). More about the stories and how to buy this and previous books is on  Yokai.com Kodama Nezumi

  For anyone who cannot follow all that Japanese, and doesn't want the terrifying bad google translation*, let me give you a summary. I work on weekdays - Monday to Friday. Since this is a representative day story, and there are 5 of them compared to two weekend days, you're going to hear about a workday. I get up at 6am, bathe and make and drink tea, and start work at 6:30am.  Luckily, I work from home, so no lengthy commute, and I can still be drinking my tea and gaining caffeine as work starts... and at many times throughout the day, sometimes with "assistance" from the cat... I'm not entirely sure what he did to my Azure Pipeline deployment on that pixelated screen, but it probably wasn't good! I'm a computer programmer, and I just went to fetch one thing, and the cat had decided to inspect things when I got back!  I now lock my pc every time I leave it, even in a house where I am the only human... I never eat breakfast, but I feed the dogs and cat the...

Whilst the last one I commented on was interesting from the cultural aspect, today’s one was interesting from a grammar and verb form aspect. They covered the Te form of the verb – Which I suspect we will jump into this coming week. So it was interesting to get a head-start but also one of the examples is something that sensei says frequently. Having learned the difference between る and う form verbs, these patterns actually make sense from their examples. Before doing this course I would not of had any idea what they were talking about. That's more fun is the fact that we get a regular example due to technical computer issues because sensei politely asks us to wait and says 「ちょっとまって」 a lot.

Which does not relate to the links to images to practice our hiragana alphabet skills, but the pieces of knowledge.  I’ve been studying Japanese, one way and another, since January.  According to the date on the screenshot I edited, it took me till June 18th to connect the bedtime polite wish that is effectively sleep  well/go to sleep, oyasumi, to the yasumi noun/yasumu verb for a holiday, short rest, to take a holiday or to take a short rest, that I had learned from drawing the kanji in the NLPT5 level in the Kanji app I have (which is why that bit is highlighted in the right of the Jisho page image).   And I always loved the kanji for this one - the left hand symbol is a person, and the right hand symbol is a tree - so to rest, we go into nature and rest and refresh.  It was beautiful and very appropriate, especially with more and more studies being done on the benefits of green space to health and mental wellbeing.

I found the videos on education interesting, especially the piece where the science teacher was talking about the children having to grab the learning for themselves so they learn how to think, instead of the learning and the knowledge being plopped down on them from outside. As a former science teacher, I know how hard it is to get children to think about experiment designs and hypotheses and alternative reasons for why they got those results and that not everything is as simple as they are told it is.  Of course, a lot of the time in the school system, teachers want you to swallow large amounts of information without question and be able to regurgitate it on command, rather than actually think about it, due to the sheer amount of material that you have to cover, whether it is history or geography, or even maths*, which the Greeks viewed as the very foundation of teaching and learning (it is the root of the word - there’s an old Greek saying “παθαματα μαθαματα” - pathamata mathama...

 I’ve been using Duolingo to practice Japanese for 149 days today… so sayeth the graphic they want you to share on social media to encourage other people to sign up… And I’ve done lots of lessons, including earlier lessons in the Position unit and the Activity unit… And until today when I paused during a lesson after entering a number counter and wanted to put the verb, but was frozen due to a lack of particle, I hadn’t realized that the location that で indicates that an event takes place in could be metaphorical rather than physical - and yet, I have gotten the answer write on previous lessons in the unit. And they have talked about eating alone or drinking alone or traveling alone lots of times. Both that they never, or always do it - even 時々！ I don’t know if they had given other particle choices before, or none, or if I wasn’t paying attention before, or if talking about に、へ、and で in class made me notice it more. Plus, I confess, I had googled on the difference between に and で a...

ぎょうは、もくようびです。今日、午前四時半たおきました。ぜんぜん午前四時半たおきませんでした！いつも午前六時たおきます、でもあついです。カンサスは、なつきましたそして、あついです🥵。 へいじつ、いつも午前六時半にしごとします。そして、午前六時におきます。「なつじかん」、いちじまえにおきます。なつじかんは、きらいです！さした、冬、午前五時におきます。なつ六時＝ふゆ五時。 でも、いつも六時半にしごとします。じかんがありましたから、さんさくをしました。 さんさくは、すきです。たいひだ！なつは、あついとじかんがありました。。。そして、今日、午前四時半におきましたから、さんさくをしました。 If you always do something, should that be the present* tense (because it’s something you have done repeatedly in the past and it continues into the present and extends to the future), or should it be the past tense because you’ve been doing it repeatedly in the past and the future is this fuzzy thing that hasn’t happened? Or could it be either and you just go with what you feel like at the time? If both are ok, is one a more natural way of speaking in Japanese? And ditto but with the negative for “I never do x…” - or is the rule different for that because it is negative, like the way that the direct object particle changes for negative (eg たまご を たべます。。。オランジ は たべません。). You could say it couldn’t e...

Subtitle: あか、あお、といろい*  I really should save this for the third book blog… でも… [Having spent far too much time on this post, I am making this my third book blog - 3.5 if you count musings on red too…. I had intended to go back and do the other cute cat book, because cute cats… Some other time, apparently. ] About the first word that you learn in Japan when you learn hiragana as a foreign learner is the word あお. There’s a really good reason for that - you can make the whole word out of vowels and in any dictionary order learning of the hiragana, you will do those first. They’re also the sounds that underpin all of the other hiragana, so it makes sense.  And whichever program you are using will tell you that あお (ao - sounds like ow!! in English) means blue  and you will tuck this information away and go merrily along your way, and learn other words made with vowels like いえ and いいえ, and hopefully someone will tell you about long vowels so that you can say them right, or at le...

My impression of business cards when I was younger, growing up in the UK, is that only really important people at companies had them, or salespeople, and no one in between. They seem to have been divided almost equally between a status symbol, or people that the company would want you to be able to reach easily, so obviously, salespeople, not the complaints department...  It also greatly varied depending on your industry.  When I started teaching, no one had business cards, probably because we didn't want anyone to be able to get hold of us - angry parents calling the school that their precious child couldn't possibly have changed the computer login screen to say "It is now safe to **** the computer" (despite eyewitnesses & being the only person using the computer) because he didn't know how to swear was quite sufficient, without being directly reachable... When I started working in IT, all of the contractors at the company had business cards, and none of the ...

 I grew up in & around Birmingham, England*, not the one in Alabama, nor the crater on the moon, although growing up, it sometimes seemed like either would have had more culture!  Birmingham seriously reinvented itself when I was in my teens and that changed a lot then. As a child, with Birmingham being the second largest city in the UK, and being very multicultural, I was exposed to a lot of different cuisines, the most prevalent being Indian food.  My mother still tells people about taking me to eat at an Indian restaurant for the first time when I was three, and the waitstaff lining up along the wall and exchanging bets about whether I would eat the food.  Apparently, I had been eating Indian food at home since about the time that I was weaned, so my mother would have liked to get in on that betting pool! I had several friends at school from quite an early age who were from different cultures, including one when I was about eight, whose family had moved to the...

 https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/5372/#bd-look-inside   from a free resource of stories by reading level, in Japanese, and for anyone wishing to follow the subject of this blog post.  This is a story set at level 0 for difficulty/skill, with lots of detailed large pictures. For this assignment, we could choose our own book to read, whatever looked interesting to us.  After much deliberation, I decided to choose one of the ones with cute cats... There may be a sequel to this later with a different one with cute cats ;).  Learning more about the language is important, but so are cute cats (which is why there are cat cafes and a cat island in Japan). From the pictures alone, we can tell there are cute cats involved... The cover has an adorable kitten on it, which is instantly interested in and stalking something it can see outside the window, watching cat tv in Japan, just as cats do in the US & UK.  It looks ever more interested in what is outside the wi...

  I’d assumed that I would talk about business cards, because that was the topic that I knew the least about, and I still read a lot about that and bookmarked things, took screenshots of the useful phrases associated with it, but I did learn from the cultural atlas the terms in Japanese for family name and given name and I recognized them from the kanji practice I have been doing - for family name, you can use 上の名前 - ‘ue’ (上) means over or above, so I loved seeing it in this context and that the ‘above’ can be metaphorical/social/hierarchical too.   The given name takes the corresponding opposite direction, 下の名前 - ‘shita’ (下) means below or under, and this evidently extends to hierarchies and social position too.  In fact, jisho.org (which I love and highly recommend to anyone who isn’t using that for their Japanese word look ups), listed both superior and elder in the additional meaning of 上, and vice versa for 下.   The reason that this is so interesting t...