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Japanese

Greetings

We Americans do not greet people the same way Japanese people do, and I think it says a lot about our culture. A typical greeting for Americans might be “Hi!  How are you?”  “I’m fine, and you?”  “Fine!”  “Nice to meet you”  “Nice to meet you too”  “See you later”. I’ve noticed Japanese courses would translate this to the following dialogue in Japanese, and actually teach it: “こんいちわ！お元気ですか？” ”元気です、あなたわお元気ですか？” ”元気です！” ”よろしくお願いします” ”よろしくお願いします” ”さようなら” These are phrases taken from actual beginner courses I took, through Rosetta stone and otherwise.  These are perfectly… Read More »Greetings

The Limits of Language

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” – Wittgenstein This is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about for the past couple of weeks – in fact, I’ve even wrote a couple of posts touching on this idea.  In general, language shapes our thinking and our perception of the world – if there is something that is unexpressible in language, we then try our hardest to find a way to express it in language, and more often than not, we will usually take… Read More »The Limits of Language

Sakura

Every year, around springtime, the cherry trees in Japan (sakura, or 桜) bloom. It’s only for a few days, and I’m to understand it is justifiably considered a national treasure.  People come from all over the world to see the beautiful blooming of the cherry trees, and there is much said in Japanese art and music about the cherry trees.  In fact, several AKB48 songs reference cherry trees, such as Sakura No Hanabiratchi, Sakura No Shiori, and maybe one of the more heartrending, Sakura no Ki Ni Narou: I will… Read More »Sakura

In the Beginning

While I am a little (okay, a LOT) burned out on it, I am a bit of a theology nerd.  This is not a theology blog and it will not become one.  But as in the post Kami, there are some interesting theological insights to be gained from seeing how western theology interacts with Japanese culture. The Bible has been translated into Japanese.  The very first sentence is this: まだ何もなかった時、神は天と地を造りました Note the character 神, which means Kami, or God. Here in the west, we have a very specific idea of who… Read More »In the Beginning

Discovery

One thing I love about learning a new language, is that once you get past the basics, there is always something to discover.  I’m still a beginner by all means, but I consider having learned hiragana and katakana, and getting to the point where I understand the language enough to actually discover things, to be “getting past the basics”. Even though arguably I have not. Yesterday, I encountered the word “大日本”, which means “greater Japan”.  I found that it was pronounced “dai-nihon”.  I knew the characters for “nihon” (日本), and I know… Read More »Discovery

A Post About Actually Learning Japanese

After all of the posts about Japanese culture I’ve been spewing forth, I thought I’d write one about actually learning Japanese. I finally found a tool that I actually like, and I finally feel like I’m actually learning things. Putting the effort into learning hiragana and katakana has been completely invaluable.  I say this because it underpins absolutely everything else, and I think that this is probably the first thing that needs to be done – before kanji, before pronunciation, before everything.  Because it makes everything past that so much… Read More »A Post About Actually Learning Japanese

Grass is Greener

There are two YouTube videos I watched recently that have caused me to think, and to rethink my approach to Japan. It is true that Japan has some frankly amazing things going for it, but it’s not all great.  One of the videos I watched were about “things that can get you arrested in Japan”.  It was sobering enough that many people in the comments posted that they had made plans to go to Japan and they cancelled them.  And the other video was about a young woman who made… Read More »Grass is Greener

Pranks

One thing that has singularly impressed me about Japanese culture is their utter dedication to pranks. Here in America, a prank is a pie in the face or pulling a chair out.  But the Japanese take it to an absolutely absurd level. One prank, however, has to take the cake. In this prank, they led the Japanese idol group to a concert hall in the middle of nowhere, built an entire building in the middle of the hall with collapsible walls, waited for them to go to sleep, bussed in 400… Read More »Pranks

Kami

Spiritual content ahead.  I won’t make it a habit, but I want to take this blog where my linguistic and cultural explorations take me, and I found this fascinating. A few days ago, while I was reading up on Shinto, I learned something very interesting. See, Japanese nouns have no concept of singular or plural.  It’s something that’s simply not encoded into the language.  I mean, you can use the “tachi” suffix to specify plurality, but in general, when a noun is specified, you don’t know whether it’s singular or… Read More »Kami

Foreign

The one thing that my semi-immersion into Japanese culture has taught me is that they are, truly, foreign to me. This is not a bad thing, but it’s solidifying my theory that in order to understand a language, one must first make an effort to understand the culture that the language belongs to. So I have not really been studying Japanese all that much – in the sense that I haven’t been intentionally learning new vocabulary or kanji.  Instead, I’ve been watching Japanese variety shows, etc., and just letting the language… Read More »Foreign