My Day 私の一日 わたしのいちにち

 

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 their breakfasts, so he had no cause for complaint in that photo.

I continue to drink milk tea throughout the day (specifically, it's a black tea, with milk in it, Typhoo brand, imported from England).  It can even be drunk at the kotatsu during a brief lunchbreak, trying to accomplish too many things (art supplies and anime are both in play - I had to stop and take the photo when I realised the subject of that episode).  

That is one of the dogs in the background, trying to pretend that she is too exhausted to move at lunchtime from lack of food... but I have an afternoon of work ahead of me at this point, and homework before she will get fed.

So after more work, and more tea, and homework and studying for the Elementary Japanese 1 course, I grab some dinner quickly & feed the dogs and cat too...

Dinner can be an elaborate affair... :D  It counts as cooking, I added large quantities of "Slap Ya Mama!" to it to give it flavour when I heated it in the microwave... but since it needs to be squeezed into my schedule between homework and the start of the Japanese class at 6pm, there is going to be a lot of microwave meals and takeout in my recent past and future... and the other dog has now sneaked into a photograph, so fairness has been maintained.

After the JCCC Japanese class, I will do homework or more generic studying for the course, depending on what is due next, and I'll go to bed around midnight, and do it all over again the next day! 

Compare And Contrast

Think about the culture you grew up in and the culture around yourself now.   How might your day in the US be different from a typical day in Japan?  

I moved from the UK to the US, and since then, we've had a pandemic, so typical days have changed for a lot of people - working in the UK, in the late 90s, it was rare to work from home - I got one afternoon a fortnight because of a time sensitive task that needed a lot of focus to achieve.  Even with advances in technology it was still rare over here - I worked from home for a couple of years because the company was remodeling the office, but as soon as that was done, everyone had to go back in. 

About 60% of US people work from home, because of changes made from the Pandemic.  Only about 20% of Japanese people do, despite the pandemic.  In addition, the vast majority of people travel to work by train and/or bus, which I hadn't had to do since being at High School and is still less common in the US, where the car is the central mode of transport, and you are thought weird if you walk anywhere (other than exercising at the gym),,.

My day starts so early because of a global workforce - the 6:30am start is for a meeting with our Indian team, so they can sleep at a reasonable time.  Things like that weren't an option when I was growing up. People either worked for/at your company, or you hired another company to do it.  Outsourced staff were called contractors (or temps, depending on job title), and they worked at the company's premises, not far around the world. 

Another big difference in day is the cuisine - despite that fact that I used chopsticks for my spaghetti that day, meals are very different.  American and English breakfasts tend to be high carb, sugary affairs when people actually eat them (the British fry up only tends to happen at the weekend due to time constraints), compared to the rice and miso soup and vegetables that would start a Japanese day.

Think about word order, what do you notice?  

Word order in sentences is very different between the two languages - it will be easier to see when we are writing with kanji and can see the edges of words clearer, and the particles will stand out more, but many Japanese constructs are reversed from English (American or British English ;)).  It rather reminds me of Latin - the sentence could actually be in any order, because you could tell what was the direct object, or the subject by the verb conjugation/voice - and adjectives matched the declension of the noun they were paired with, so you knew where they belonged, regardless of location.  Likewise, there was a noun form (declension) for if something was a location, or being entered, or left, or for something being given to someone.  The Japanese particles remind me a bit of these declensions, but free floating as separate words, rather than attached to the nouns, like the grammar indicating ends of the nouns were in declensions. They are also like English prepositions and conjunctions, but placed in the exact opposite order to where they would go in English - always after the word they relate to, not before. And with the parts of speech/role indicators being separate from the nouns, verbs and so on, it is easy to see why you cannot have a fluid sentence structure like Latin or classical Greek, but need an agreed pattern to know which word is modified or tagged by each. In that, it is like English, because of how minimally our nouns decline (& some of them don't at all - like sheep). It just had a different rule agreed for where the modifiers live.  Like driving on the right or the left ** both perfectly valid choices, so long as you remember where you are and which you should be doing (& realise that it also reverses the direction of flow round roundabouts too, and other knock-on consequences) - and don't try to do both at the same time.

One thing that does remind me of English though is the past tense of the verbs when it becomes negative - you are basically adding 'でした' to the end of the negative verb form as one word for the polite form.  In English, we have helper verbs like 'did' or 'had' which can make a verb a past tense (or an even further past tense) without needing to change the form of the verb itself - like 'I did cross the street' or 'I had run for the bus, but I missed it'.  Those meant that we could avoid using 'crossed' and 'ran' for the verb forms, which is particularly useful if you have an irregular verb, or cannot remember the correct spelling or usage (shone versus shined, for instance, can be tricky in English).  Since 'でした' is the past tense of 'です', it is like a helper verb from English.

Think about using essay writing paper.   How is it different from learning to write an essay in English?  

I already had some writing paper like this before the course - I had bought a block of squared A4 letter sized paper for practice when I started learning Japanese, but quickly bought a few books of the kanji squared paper for easier practice - one with a sensible brown cover, and two with different covers that are a cross between high-tech city photography and anime art. One reason that I did that, other than the cool covers ;) :p, is that I have always had terrible handwriting and some hand-eye coordination issues, and with forms as complex as kanji I knew it was going to take repeated practice to get good and to get and stay legible (although I have been looking at people's handwriting on works they share on Twitter, trying to read as much as possible, and sometimes, it reminds me of when screens would "Greek" the font, to make it look like there was high-tech script there without having to fill it - "That's not a letter!  Is that one upside down?  OK, which sound is the batman symbol again, because I swear that's what they wrote here..." So, experiences like that have reassured me about my own handwriting, but I still want this paper type and to use the guidelines/easy proportion guides as long as possible.

The structure of this was not really like an essay - it was more like a report, or a creative writing assignment "what I did in my summer break".  I already knew that my Japanese vocabulary is rudimentary, but it was easy to see from the flexibility and depth that I could add so easily in the English paraphrase for the readers how much that lake of vocabulary and grammar knowledge hurt and straitjacket the structure of the sentences, the way that it is possible to express yourself.

And clever question phrasing too - when you say paraphrase, everyone tends to think that they will do a shorter one, less work to not do a full translation, and then you suggest adding photos, and that instantly makes people write more, to cover the photos and make them relevant.  Without that carefully chosen question prompt, we would have just translated it back into English and it would have been as poor and stiff as our Japanese has been forced to be by our knowledge level and we probably would not have thought about it or realised it.

When writing an ethnography, use rich narration - the more details the better.  (Comparing cultures will help us grasp new intercultural communication skills faster)

I'm fairly sure that I'm good at including extra details - it's taking details out so that it doesn't become War and Peace that is the problem.  

Finally, look at how Japanese and English (or your 1st language) are different or similar for writing essays.    (Comparing languages will help us grasp the new language faster)

I'm still not sure that this was an essay, as I already said, it's more like a report or (rather un-)creative writing than an essay.  It would be interesting to look at some essays and see if they follow the same structure as is encouraged for essays written in English (which is often, but not always: introduction, build argument, counter argument/other considerations, conclusion), and with my first love having been science, I would love to see experiment write ups and designs, particularly having commented in the Education post on the difficulty of teaching students to think critically on how to test things and alternate reasons for results.

I think any similarities or differences are hidden behind our lack of vocabulary at this point int time.  It is difficult to control and direct narrative flow when you only know a few words to stich sequences of action together, or bald time statements.  Even on the report or creative writing side, I couldn't do anything fancy like zeugma, if Japanese even allows for that sort of construction.***

* Seriously, there used to be a game of roundtripping things through google translate, translating something in English into another language, then taking that output and translating it back to English, and see who could come up with the wildest version.  So, of course I tried that with my essay, just from Japanese to English...  If you want to see it for yourself, feel free to copy & paste the original text of my post before I transcribed it and made sure it was all hiragana... the kanji should have made it easier for the translator.  

平日はしごとをします、そして げつようびからきんようびまでごぜんろくじにおきます。いつも、おふろにはいります。そのあと、ミルクティーをのみます。ぜんぜん、あさごはんはたべません。でも、いぬとねこいつもあさごはんをたべます。

そして、午前六時半にうちではたらきます。コンピュータプログラマーです。よく、ミルクティーをのみます。ぜんぜんコーヒーをのみません。

午前十一時ごろにひるごはんをたべます。そのあと、しごとをします。そして、しゅくだいをします。午後五時半、ばんごはんをたべます。いぬもねこもばんごはんをたべます。そのあと、げつようびからもくようびまで、ごごろくじににほんごのじゅぎょうがあります。そして、しゅくだいをします。午前零時ごろねます。

** So Japan and England obviously made the better choice ;) except for one poor benighted island driving on the right while under American rule, and switching back as soon as it returned to Japan in 1978. References for anyone who wants details - https://www.tofugu.com/japan/japan-drive-left-side-road/  https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/why-does-japan-drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road/ The tofugu one is the better article as it was the first place where I saw the switch to the right hand side explained, when the sword driven left hand side rule makes sense, and there seems no reason to change it for cars - it had already changed because of the Teamsters Union ;).  

*** Last footnote I promise for this blog post - for zeugma, my favourite example comes from a Flanders & Swann song "He put out his cigar, the cat, the wine, and the light"