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。

「 猫の歯は、悪いです」 妻の「ブフ？」* 「The cat’s teeth are bad」I translated. “Why?” She asked. “Because they are in my wrist!” I replied… She looked up at the cat, lying on the back of the couch, and my arm reaching up to fuss him. And then jerked because she could see that his teeth were embedded in my wrist. After we disentangled his teeth from my wrist, my wife told me that when I first calmly said in Japanese, and then translated “the cat’s teeth are bad”, she thought that I had seen some tartar on his teeth or something, not that he would have his teeth embedded in my wrist.  I guess, I misspoke - the cat’s teeth were not bad, they were very good, very sharp teeth.  Just in the wrong place.  It was the cat that was bad… 猫は、悪かったんですよ！ * I confess, I really wanted to say “huh?” rather than “buh”, but huh came out as fufu in katakana and I knew that wasn’t right… thanks to anime and manga, I knew it would come out as onomatopoeia & that fufu was way off in meaning.  Of course, ...

This one won’t be as pretty as my original one, but I’m posting it to share the gaps in my memory - I’m not sure if it’s due to lack of sleep, or to reading them more often than writing them, but when I first tried to produce the chart, I got 34/46 characters only.  Trying to remember all the katakana from scratch after ages since writing them - ku is wrong, and 4 are still missing. Since, I’m trying to remember the rest myself, I suppose some of the 34 could be misshapen, as I haven’t checked them yet. Not sure how well the colours come across on the photo/computer screen, but the ones in dark green were the first crop of 34 (although wa took me a second - I remembered the unused wo before it, which is ridiculous!).  The light blue ones are the ones that I had to slowly cudgel out of my memory. I tracked those at the bottom so I know which ones to drill on most. When I finally give up and add the last few, I will use a third colour to mark the ones I most need to study… ...

 I just accidentally discovered the root of the expression すみません and that makes me so happy :).  I have been meaning to look up both finish and close because I finally have start and open firmly lodged in my brain, and both were in last semester’s vocabulary (both はじまる&はじめる were and also あける like to open a window) and after new year, あける is finally thoroughly lodged - something that I couldn’t have honestly said during the semester. And I went to jisho, like I usually do*, and had meant to type shut or close and typed finish instead… and I was scrolling down the results in jisho trying to see which pinged my brain as the word that had been used there (like class finished or to finish something) and the fifth one was すむ and it’s fourth meaning said “4. to feel unease or guilt for troubling someone; to be sorry​; in the negative” and my brain said “got you!!!” And then actually bothered to fill me in on what it had meant by that, since that wasn’t the word I had been looking...

 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 😁).

  As I walked upstairs, I remembered that it is also someone’s birthday today, the person that the Nijikaewa group will be visiting later, for a combination house warming and “friendsgiving”.  I tried to remember the phrase in Japanese for “happy birthday” and got as far as たんじょうびおめでとう. I had a feeling that I was probably missing a particle or a helper verb to make it polite, so I thought “I’ll look it up in google translate, after all, even google translate can’t get something that simple wrong…”. I guess the title should have come with a spoiler warning, because it did.   I typed “happy birthday” and it translated it as just たんじょうび (admittedly with the correct kanji for it and with romaji for the kanji)), but that’s just birthday.  To force it to translate happy birthday correctly, I had to change it to “happy birthday to you” when it finally coughed forth “お誕生日おめでとう”. I had missed an honourable お. Given its poor performance on the translation of happy birthday, I’...

 猫は、私の手があるので、しゅくだいとべんきょうは、むずかしいんです。。。 とてもかわいい、ですね。

今日の天気は、午前六時に、晴れで、気温が23Fぐらいで、 体感温度(たい かん おん ど) 16Fで、 とても寒かったので 、今朝、家の隣の公園で散歩（さんぽ）しなかったんです。 先月、たくさん日は、早く寒かったんですが、今月、たくさん日は、遅く暖かかったんです。今日は、晩秋の寒そう、ですね。   What's that quote about climate is what you expect and weather is what you get?