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...