Ethnography: Are Wa Nani? あれはなに？

 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 window, until it leaves the window and heads downstairs, stairs that are bigger than it is.  It wanders the corridors of the house until it meets a really large cat, and they converse* and go back to the window together.  The big cat tells the kitten about birds.  The kitten talks to the bird outside the window and the big cat curls up and goes to sleep, as mine has decided to do, having failed to stop me from studying.  The kitten still watches the birds and the big cat still sleeps, because that is what cats do.

On the second read through, with the sound, we have the same story, but the kitten makes an interested noise on first seeing something outside and plaintively asks, over and over, what it is.  When it heads down the stairs, it is yelling for its older brother and where he is.  When he finds the older brother, it impatiently asks him come, something interesting!!  A bored-sounding older brother asks the same questions as the kitten has - what and where.  Back at the window, the kitten asks the older brother what that is over there.  They are patiently told that it is a bird.  The kitten repeats the word for the interesting thing, either out of excitement or checking they got the new word right, or both.  The older brother expands - it is a bird, with a dad and mom (appropriate for a book that I am reading on American Father's Day).  The kitten calls hello to the bird(s) most politely.  The elder brother decides that this definitely is not interesting, says good night to the world and goes to sleep.  The younger sister watches the bird every day, alert and interested by the window.  The older brother still sleeps... And we learn the names of the cats playing the parts in the book - Tiger, who is seven years old and Naito, who is one year old, but looks a lot younger.  Maybe ages in Japan start at one, rather than zero, or perhaps it is like horses - a horse is a yearling on the January 1st after it was born, whether it was born on December 31st and is a day old, or last January 1st and is a whole year old.

On a third read through, the story is the same, except I know all the way through that the kitten is a baby girl cat, and curiosity about the Naito in katakana tells me that they are called Knight... what I find hardest is working out what word the katakana are making up even when I know every symbol.  Although learning about the devoiced vowels did help with that, because I know when I run letters together for the sounds.

But the kitten is asking what "is that over there?" and since they are stuck inside, they are using the furthest away form of the これ‐それ‐あれ question words. Then they run looking for their older brother calling repeatedly for them, because they are never around when you need them, and always are when you don't want them.  There's a new form of the verb きる、きて when they are telling them to come with them. On the page with the word for bird being introduced**, they have the kanji for it and have drawn a bird on a branch next to it, both to make it obvious what they are talking about, and perhaps to help people remember the shape of the kanji, although it still looks to me as if they expect birds to have four legs, which would help at Christmas and thanksgiving...  

The older brother says good night because they are going to sleep, so that can be said in the middle of the day, rather than just at night, so long as you are sleeping.  And the kitten wants to play with the bird, and can't, which is probably best for both of them. And older brother sleeps today too... I did notice the use of の and も in the text.

It's a very simple book, but good for teaching question words, and some simple family words - and I'm sure I was at least that irritating as a child to relatives when I wanted to know something!

* This post would be easier to make if my cat hadn't come by and sat on my wrists as I was typing and trying to work...

** bird is the word...