Nowling JCCC Nihongo

 今日は、二千二十三年八月二十一日です。月曜日なので、来科目（かもく）がはじまります。JCCCの大学の中級１（ちゅうきゅう１）の授業　（じゅうぎょう）が六時半に始まりあます。 とてもおもしろいですが、ちょっとこわいのです。私の日本語の先学期は、去年の秋学期でした。長い時間です。たくさん単語（たんご）と文甫（ぶんぽ）を覚えていないでしょう*。 それから、先々週は、新しい仕事を始りました（はじめりました）。いいですが多いなことを覚えるのです。^ 大変むずかしいですよね。

A few weeks ago, we were learning the vocabulary for chapter 13 of Genki* . One of the vocabulary words, as you can probably guess from the title, was しあわせ.  The definition in the vocabulary was long-term happiness, lasting happiness.  It is a な adjective, so I naturally thought "well, there's a word I'm never going to need, they obviously included that so that we would have to practice な adjectives more and for some variety from たのしい..." But I learned it anyway (perhaps more from having had that internal dialogue about it ;)) & time moved on. This Sunday, I watched the last episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury.  A small group of us watch the shows simultaneously, the Japanese with subtitles version, then we talk about them together in voice chat on Discord.  On Sunday, there was just the core group of 3 - me, K & T.  K has studied a little Japanese ages ago and mostly forgotten it, T can mostly get by without the subtitles, and...

 1. You hear “yoho”/“youhou” in a song’s lyrics and instantly think “It’s either pirates or they’re doing the weather forecast…” 🤣 2.  You’re scrolling through your amazon account, and come across this past purchase and realise what they did with the character name (hint look at the series name ;))… 3. You might be wandering around your house muttering “stand over tree, then you can worry about the axe…” (I was trying to remember the stroke order for 新しい…). 4.  You just tried to enter “han” and “hon” in an English crossword… 5. You learn more about English - https://nowling-jccc.blogspot.com/2023/09/vocabulary-in-wild-again.html

 三日間は、空港に行きにアタランタに行きます。四日間は、ももこんが初めるのでアタランタに行って友達たちに会っておもしろくてたのしいです！ 三日は、長い時間デス！待つのは、とてもむざかしいです！

 猫は、悪くなりました。 同してと言いました。猫は、ニャンと言いました。食べ物が欲しいのと言いました。また猫は、ニャンと言いました。 猫に食べ物をあげました。猫は、早く食べはじました。お腹がぺこぺこになたんだと言いました。 もう、犬がいました。ポッピーちゃん、いつも、お腹が空いると言いました。また、猫は、ニャンと言いって出ました。ポッピーちゃんに食べ物をあげませんでした。犬は、悲しくなりました。

 今日の単語で文法でした。。。 「私のゆべは食べなくて下さい！」 へんなしゃむは、私のゆべを食べたいんでした！毎日、よくない猫です。 しゃむの、タイ For some reason, we never did learn the negative te form in class, even when we learned more uses for it than just sticking things together, only the positive… we’re great at asking people to read things, but not at asking them not to (when we find them reading our diary) - or to eat things, but not to eat, not so much ;)  Hooray for Japanese being an agglutinative language built up from building blocks and following patterns… the past plain form and the te form follow each other very closely…and in the negative too! :D

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… ...