Nowling JCCC Nihongo

 I have a weakness for puns (many people that dislike puns would go so far as to call it a character flaw), but I particularly like multi-lingual puns and multi-layered ones.  Before I started this course, I had already created one - when we got our kotatsu, the cat took it over regularly, making it an interesting experience to sit down and start to extend your legs under it, for fear of encountering “The Claw”… I started calling it both the ねこたつand the “catatsu”… multi-lingual puns for the win! During the course, I created another one - we were labeling items with the colours they had, and no one had yellow.  I was wearing a shirt with the colours of the nonbinary flag on the crescent moon on it, with a purple background and shared that it had yellow (and white and black and…).  After the class call ended, I looked down at my shirt & thought “It really is a colourful shirt, isn’t it?” And then my Brian instantly responded “Of course, it’s non binいろい!”  Mult...

I still remember when I was really new to reading things, and I knew maybe ~10 kanji at the time & was stunned when I visited a friend and we were watching a youtube video & she paused on a clip & said that she really wanted to know what manga that was from but they hadn't given a title & I was able t tell her that the two kanji were mountain & rice paddy, yama and ta or da, but that I didn't know any anime or manga with that in the title - and she was able to take my tiny start at reading and realise that it was Kase-san and Yamada :D. Without my initial forays into kanji, she might never have known.   The week before that, I had been impressed at recognising the kanji for shiro/shiroi on the wrapper for the soundtrack for Aquatope on White Sands... when I knew what the title was, but was still surprised to actually spot it/see it - and the symbol for small showed up in the symbol for sand, so I had to go to jisho and look up sand to see w...

 It’s oh-dark thirty and I’m at the airport about to board a flight to DC… and I have my elementary Japanese 1 written final tonight so I’m going to be studying all the way there… I may have misplaced my common sense!

 All of the following images are fair use/royalty free and come from Unsplash.  But there's several ways that a car could be bright - from the well polished seriously reflective chrome so beloved of 50s cars, so streamlined and with so many fins that they looked like land sharks with chrome teeth, to the ludicrously bright paints modern chemistry can produce, to the modern headlights that have even moved beyond halogen, and can probably dazzle aliens several light years away if you forget to dip them... particularly bad for those of us with cataracts - the star filter effect extends well beyond the car's physical presence, even on relatively dim lights. Look how bright that mint green is on that car!  The whole car is such a bright colour! Followed by a bright solid orange, with a seriously bright chrome logo on it.  Shiny and chrome, as they said in Mad Max. Then finally a car with teeth... of chrome, anyway.  Fierce and bright with reflective light. The corvet...

 My apologies for the scrunched nature of the first page, it was in great condition until I decided to take a photo of it and the cat decided to help… ありがとう、猫ちゃん…^ - ^ The reason for the mysterious lack of kanji in this kanji poster is quite simple… they were stolen by kitsune! never there, as this is a kanji reading poster… which still could be confusing, but it is rules for how to read/pronounce kanji, not a poster of kanji to read… I started it in chapter 4 and kept adding to it   I did it in pink (which I don’t like, sorry Lewis-san ;)), so it would stand out from my other notes to grab and add another rule  quickly if one came up.   Hands up anyone that took way too long to realize that kun yomi/ on yomi is from よむ?  Despite it literally being labeled as the “kun reading “ and the “on reading”, I hadn’t made the connection, probably because I knew the word in romaji before I knew the verb, so they lived in different places in my head. Which is a nice (...

  The hardest thing about this assignment was trying to think of sentences that used all of the grammar points that we had learned this past chapter - or tried to learn!  Some of them haven’t stuck* very well yet!  There was a lot to absorb.  The other problem was vocabulary - most of the things I do at the weekend are not covered in our course.  The volunteering is the non-paid, western kind :D. Not helped by the air conditioning unit at our house breaking down on Friday - boiled brains in extreme heat do not think as well!  Luckily, out got cooler and got fixed on Monday, but that wasn’t the weekend anymore.   I’m not sure if the Japanese culture considers Friday  evening to be part of the weekend like ours does, but I included it anyway, as it had some of the most activity of the weekend, and best chance for constructions and conjugations, while not going into fiction.   * unlike the te form which is sticky… ;)

 I tried a level 1 book this time - https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/4159/ -  かぼちゃん 日本 にほん の 秋 あき へ It was a little disturbing how many more words I seemed to not get - and quite a lot of the level 1 books seemed to not have any audio with them, which isn't helpful.  Several are books that we are familiar with in English, such as Peter Rabbit & Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter. I chose to do one that I wasn't familiar with, but which had audio.  I was lucky that I already knew the word for Autumn in Japanese, or I would have been lost at the outset (although I don't think I had realised that the kanji is tree fire/grain fire, because I had never seen it written that large before (two branch-tree radical, also called grain radical...) & it's amazingly appropriate, as the deciduous tree leaves turn all the colours of flame, and so many grain items turn an orangey brown colour too as they ripen, not to mention all the hips and haws and berries turning red throug...

I'm glad we had extra readings (& the internet), because the Nakama pages raised a lot of questions - such as "what exactly constitutes a culture club* (ie is it traditional Japanese culture only, like calligraphy, flower arranging, etc, or does it include other arts and activities?). I also wondered if the students at university that cited a benefit was "more free time" were comparing it to their last year at high school or to their lives if they had gone straight into the labour force (& as an avid reader (when I have time), it should be noted that the last category in the chart, "more reading time", & "more free time" are synonymous ;)). I also wondered if those part time jobs were a bit like many college students in the US looking for internships & if they would help them with finding a place in the workforce when they are finishing college, or if they are solely for extra finances - or perhaps a combination, not ...

 I was halfway through the url before I realised that I was still in hiragana & that there was a simultaneous translation to the correct roman characters hovering over it as I typed.  Since it was coping with it, I just kept typing, figuring that it would go to the right site... Which it did, but it had decided to be clever about it and set the language to jp, but the location still where it had detected it from my IP address.  I took a screenshot of the page I got from it, you can see JCCC rendered as ジョンソン・コミュニティ大学、amongst many other things :D.  It could be a good way to practice reading your hiragana and pronunciations for them, to stop getting rusty between courses and not just have the same countries over and over again on Duolingo... You'll see from the search entry a possible reason why my brain hadn't reset from needing hiragana - I'm going to a Japanese restaurant, SamaZama, in Westport. However, do not do that search in hiragana & hit enter - it bou...

I knew a bunch of these already, but despite knowing them, I had no clue what the image on p243 of Nakama 1 was supposed to be for earth… so I went to my old friend wiktionary (after using Jisho to grab the kanji from for copy and paste) & found that it was supposed to be a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel… Not entirely sure how a round lump on a flat line go es to  土 - even a square box over a line would be closer to a sphere of clay than that, but that wasn’t my biggest worry. I looked at it and thought “Hang on?  When was Oracle Bone Script used again?  And when was the Potter’s Wheel* invented?”  I mean, I’m not talking discovering that if you burn earth it becomes hard & can be used for things, but working clay on a potter’s wheel before burning that earth… So, a quick google reveals that Oracle Bone Script (often tortoiseshell, not bone, and we will here remember that tortoise’s shells are made out of their ribs, and they cannot moult them like crabs...

So, in character 6 of the ever wonderful Nakama 1 textbook, we’re battling with conjugating adjectives, new uses of old particles (に & と especially), including double particles, and rearranging sentences so they stick together or to describe things better (I went to x in order to do y), the correct type of please to use depending on the status of listener and speaker, and then they throw the て form at you on top of all that… (or maybe a little of it is spilling over from chapter 5 & I am misremembering, but there’s a lot in there).  I am also making an assumption in the title - that after working with the て form for a while and learning the rules and patterns, and using it for a while, it will click.  I am nowhere near there yet, can’t even see it with a telescope!  That said, while I was looking something else up, I decided to go back through the vocab list to get a list of all the ru verbs and the u verbs in one place, and of all the i and na adjectives in one p...

あかるい-ほしとつき、午前五時です。あついです。

 Also known as “well, this was a horrible grammar construction to meet out of the blue, thanks Duolingo!” Duolingo does have a nasty habit of throwing new grammar points at you totally without any explanation as to why you got something wrong or what the correct form is instead. The classic one bring when they wanted us to translate “upper right” to Japanese … 「右上」is the correct answer, which is reversed from the order that seems natural in English.   This wasn’t in any of the tips, they just marked upper right wrong with no explanation.  You can learn from your mistakes, but only if you know what those mistakes are… (I could sidebar here about the vocab test but I won’t.  Other than to say that given the verb to take a bath has に rather than を , I think it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to decide that swimming in a pool would be に too!  And that putting grammar on a vocab test is unreasonable…). That was a very long non-sidebar 😉 but today’s point is a ne...

 I need to upload my poster still because I had a migraine and then a doctors’ appointment and didn’t have the photo on my phone like I thought I did so this will be less pretty than usual… I find these kanji interesting - partly themselves and their etymology, but partly the choice of order to teacher them. They taught root before tree which seems to backwards!!  They didn’t point out that oo or dai is a prefix not a whole word and they didn’t point out that school is a suffix not a whole word. There  are such strange little gaps. And they only explained about pictograms and ideograms in the second chunk of kanji, making it seem like the original tips were mnemonic devices rather than how the kanji originated. It’s a weird way to choose to teach it. And they don’t give all the actual pronunciations  - 小さい - 小 can be ご、お、さ too   And I can check out of the doctor’s and head to class now!!! Forgot to upload the poster till quite late…

https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/6469/ I did promise myself that I would go back to a cute cat book and this one has a cat looking for friends, looking to find anyone who is like him.  For some reason, the cat seems to think that the best place to do that is at one of the many famous temples and shrines in Japan.  Perhaps he is hoping to settle down and become a temple cat.  The first place he finds has a guardian dog statue outside, the second has a fox as a guardian, which seems like an odd choice to English people - foxes are so often what you are trying to guard against. The next temple has a mouse guardian at or beyond the torii gate, and again, not a good fit with a cat…  Finally, the cat reaches a temple of maneki neko cats, and they all chime back that they are like him and he finds his friends.  It’s a very good book for introducing animal names to new readers, whether small kids or adult learners. It also has actual photos of temple shrines and famous ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1CM3TXtDjE&t=24s We had several links and resources provided to us to investigate this topic, including the current section in our Nakama textbook.  でも、前　映画を離します。先生says that we should practice more and “fail gloriously” - at least one of those two things just happened… ;).   Hopefully I just said “however, I/we are going to talk about the prior film”… not sure about the particle that I used there because if you were talking about something it’s an object but it is also the topic and I believe it would be a direct object and get wo, but it could be indirect or not even that and get a topic marker… I am certainly not going to talk to the film I only do that in the privacy of my own home to the television ;).  But back to our actual topic… I wanted to talk about this one because I had a few thoughts come up during it and I didn’t want to lose them. One of the first things that I thought was that there is a lot more space in this mo...

A Japanese Compass Rose, with the directions labeled in hiragana and kanji. Source: japanesewithanime.com (CC BY-SA 4.0)   I wrote a ridiculous amount about Overland Park, mostly because I had taken photos in preparation for the assignment and wanted to use them. And despite doing a lot of proof reading, I was still finding typos at the last minute (even in the title of the second slide!). It was a little weird doing this presentation about Overland Park - although it has been my home for the last twenty years, most people mean the place you were born and grew up in for your hometown.  I haven't visited Birmingham in over a decade, so I couldn't do a good presentation on there.  I could talk about the fact there used to be an awesome Scandinavian sandwich shop there, but it's a MacDonald's now, but I don't think that would be interesting to anyone... I confess, I wrote this direct in PowerPoint by typing it up, not by handwriting it first.  My main issue was in per...

Multiple reports that he was shot twice from behind, during a campaign speech supporting candidates in this Sunday's elections, with a homemade weapon like a shotgun, and afterwards, that he was bleeding from the chest, and suffered a cardiac arrest.  He was conscious at the start of the helicopter flight to hospital and was unresponsive by the time he arrived. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/shinzo-abe-former-japan-prime-minister-shot-during-speech-reports https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/status/1545247944562974721 - has a link to asahi shinbun with details.   The alleged shooter did not try to get away and is in custody.

  This is another of the books from the Tadoku site - https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/7347/   I had intended to look at level 1 or to go back and do another cute cat one, but the picture on the cover reminded me of an Aesop's Fable, and for a very good reason... I will say that right out of the bag, even if it does nothing else for me, this book may help me with glottal stops - I don't think I had ever realised that there is a natural glottal stop in the name when we say Aesop's Fables in English too. I also got to see a place as hot as Kansas is at the moment - とてもあついです! And I got to revisit a phrase I heard a while ago in Japanese Pod - where to say that you are thirsty, you have to say that your throat (node) has become dry/parched －のでがかわきました だめだ was an interesting new word, and I did love the feel that the reader gave it.  It was really interesting seeing the Japanese flavour put onto a story that I knew well - the despair croaks of the crow were not something I...

I found this topic very interesting and timely, because when we were researching the Japanese education system, and I had been looking up the school year dates/terms/patterns, I had got interested in the fact that the summer break was very similar in timing and length to the UK one, and I wondered what their relative latitudes where.  I had heard decades ago that the origin of the school summer holiday being so long is from schooling starting when we were very much still an agrarian society and people would not let their kids go to school if they needed them for harvesting.  The UK has a temperate maritime climate, as opposed to much of Europe and the US which has a temperate continental climate (I question the use of the word temperate since it was still 96 degrees heat index last night at fireworks time, but...).   So, the summer break in the US is earlier because the harvest is ready sooner and the kids were historically needed to help.  The UK ...

Yes, it probably shouldn’t be 大学の先生down the side, but it reminded me of acrostics and that we had almost made another phrase there, so I stuck the ‘no’ in and joined them together.   I also changed designs in mid-poster and went back to make the ‘big’ kanji fit the new design… and it is a lot harder to squeeze furigana in than it looks when you see them in print.  I had to move one of my kanji example sets over. At the time that I started my blog post, I hadn’t read the details for the kanji poster discussion (which is why this lived in draft form on my blog for about a week under the title “Placeholder for Kanji” so I could work on it and add bits as I went along instead of doing everything at the last minute.  However, if you look at the submission dates/times for items due on July 6th, pretty sure that’s where they will be ;)), but the "practice drawing kanji in SAM" assignment# had this phrase in it & I suspect it is important: ‘Before you jump in to practicing, l...