Schrödinger's Japanese…

Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash
For anyone thinking that I am saying that Schrödinger is Japanese, it could not be further from the truth. I'm referring to the state where two opposing or paradoxical things are true at once until they are examined... 

 In this case, I was at home, sitting on the couch, and I heard my wife approach the front door and start struggling with her keys to try to get the door open. So, I leapt to my feet, and called out 「ちょうとまってください！」as I dashed towards the door to help her. 

 I realised that I had been studying Japanese too much, because I had called out to wait a little please in Japanese without thinking about it, to someone who doesn't speak Japanese... It had the desired effect anyway, as my wife heard me call out and figured out that I was heading to help her. 

 It is Schrödinger's Japanese though because I also realised later that I had used ください, not くれませんか, which I should have used, as I was speaking to a peer... So I haven't been studying Japanese enough. Too much and too little at the same time* - Schrödinger's Japanese. 

 * I know that examination is supposed to condense the waveform into one of the two probabilities, and you no longer have both options viable. Here, examination set the state to "too much" initially, and then later examination set it to "too little" - but I think too much was still true too in this case. But certainly, examination and reflection was necessary to change the state.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hiragana Chart ひらがな

Image
  I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This...
Read more

What a Difference a Year Makes, Part 2...

 It was around this time last year that I was first considering learning Japanese... This year, I went to a ぼねんかい last week hosted by the Nijikaewa group, was cheerfully wishing people よいおとしを ＆あけましておめでとうございます( & 楽しいクリスマス・メリクリスマス a week earlier too), and yesterday, at a regular check up appointment at the doctor's office, was studying Kanji while I was waiting - which I assume is the reason that when they called my name, I automatically, loudly, called "はい!" in response - and why on my way hoping and trying to find the nearest branch, I typed "starba" into google maps, instead of "Starbucks"... 😵 Luckily, Google knew exactly what I meant (often, it suggests the right thing until you misspell it, then it disappears off the suggestions list.  That didn't happen this time, and when I automatically hit enter without thinking, Starbucks still popped up as the searched for item.  It is evidently used to people googling starba 😁).
Read more

Perfect…

Image
 I was playing a game on my tablet and I found that I already had the last of the five items I needed to level up… and when I saw it and as I dragged it across to merge it, my brain was going “あー、かんぺき！” And I thought “really brain?  That means perfect?  You’re just making things up now!” So I went and checked it in the dictionary and I owe my brain an apology 😳 I had a similar thing happen the other day with a crossword clue - I had just binged about 6 episodes of anime before deciding to do the crossword puzzle and the clue was “sufficient, nice, fine, pretty, quite” and my brain instantly said “けっこう” which I thought was highly implausible as I would have sworn we had never had it as a vocabulary word - despite all those hiragana (& more) being available in the answer candidate pool for the app.  But I entered it in anyway, and it was right…then realized that I had heard the word multiple times in the anime episodes that I had just binged and my brain must have...
Read more