Nowling JCCC Nihongo

Dammit, tankas are addicting!  I already wrote one about a squirrel in my garden this morning, while I was pouring my tea.  For anyone counting & keeping score, in England, squirrel is two syllables - squi and rel.  I have had problems with people in the US understanding the word, because they say it “squirl” in their local accent and couldn’t understand the two syllable version to be the same word.  Since syllable count is important for tankas, I just wanted to point that out, lest somebody nitpicks syllable count. For anybody that doesn’t know, a tanka is a form of Japanese poetry & it is blank verse - it doesn’t have to rhyme.  It doesn’t even (in English) need to have a particular meter, no battling with iambic, or dactyl or trochee or any of the other patterns that we had to do for English homework back in the day - although I do still remember some phrases from when we were being taught linguistic tricks for emphasising your language, like allitera...

 だんぼうは、だめです。昨日、へやの仕事は、暖かかったです、そして、午後、冷たかったです。 先年、猫は、だんぼうをけしました*。。。だんぼうを見に行ったが猫は良かったです。だんぼうは、こわれていたんでした。昨日の夜、気温は、かし24度で寒かったです！ うちのコタツが大好きです！ 今朝、雪が降り始めました。よくないです。