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Japanese Food and Stores in Austin, part 2

Japanese Food and Stores in Austin, part 2

I have been continuing my search of Austin, and found a couple of interesting places of note that I thought I’d review. The first is Asahi Japanese Store on Burnet just north of Koenig.  It is a store that carries only Japanese groceries and gifts, and is manned (womaned?) by Japanese speakers.  It is a small, out of the way place, but it has a lot of unique Japanese treats you will not find anywhere else.  I found some berry and mikan daifuku, and while I couldn’t eat the whole… Read More »Japanese Food and Stores in Austin, part 2

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

Akimoto Yasushi – Good or Evil?

      A few days ago, I stumbled upon this interview with Akimoto Yasushi, the mastermind of AKB48 and all of its different sister groups. I listened. I was thoughtful.  And then I lost a little respect for him. I have posted previously about AKB48.  My feelings about them have been conflicted ever since watching “Heavy Rotation” – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a music video with more sexualized connotations since “Anaconda” (though in fairness I don’t watch many at all).  These are girls of various ages wearing… Read More »Akimoto Yasushi – Good or Evil?

Japanese Food and Stores in Austin

I have a serious post in the works, but this one is fun, I hope. Today I went around my current town of Austin, Texas, looking for interesting Japanese things.  I found a store called FIT Japanese Store over on Lamar, in the ChinaTown shopping center.  It had a pretty decent selection of interesting and cutesy stuff, including toys, housewares, plushes, etc.  I was a little disappointed at how small their selection was (I would have hoped there were more plushes and other cute things) but all told, it was… Read More »Japanese Food and Stores in Austin

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

A Tale of two Idols

Ever since I started learning Japanese, I’ve made it a personal goal to try to understand idol culture, because I feel that in doing so maybe I can understand a little more about what makes the larger Japanese culture tick. I want to discuss two idols:  Kusumi Koharu and Minegishi Minami.  Because in looking at their individual cases, I think it becomes a little clearer what it’s all about. In 2013, Minegishi-san was caught spending the night with a man.  She faced expulsion from the group she was an idol… Read More »A Tale of two Idols

Should Japanese Change?

When learning a new language, one of the first things that almost everyone does is one of two things: Compare it to your native language Suggest improvements Now is Japanese a very efficient language?  Not really.  The kanji are elegant, but obviously it is a steep barrier to entry.  And I think it’s obvious that if one were starting over with a new language, Japanese is probably one of the last languages that one would come up with intentionally. But it’s what we have.  And while there’s nothing wrong with suggesting… Read More »Should Japanese Change?

Parallels Between Language and Computer Science

Ogawa Makoto is a former Morning Musume idol, who took a couple of years off of performing to go to New Zealand to learn English.  She recounted her experience in words similar to this (and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember them entirely): I went to New Zealand to learn English, but in doing so, I found that I didn’t understand Japanese.  So I had to learn Japanese first. As I’ve been thinking about how best for me to learn Japanese, I’ve been thinking deeply about the underpinnings of language,… Read More »Parallels Between Language and Computer Science

Bootstrapping a language

In computer science, there is a concept called bootstrapping.  It applies primarily at two points:  The first is when you start a computer up, and the second is when you write a new language.  It refers to “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps”. When you begin writing another language, you have to write it in another language.  The earliest were written in machine code, meaning hexadecimal values that the processor interprets into instructions.  But as the craft advanced, the languages became even more abstract, until you have today’s monstrosities… Read More »Bootstrapping a language

Alphabet

Perhaps one of the most challenging things about learning Japanese is that it does not have an alphabet – but it appears to have an alphabet.  So we, as English speakers, try to overlay what we know about alphabets onto Japanese, and then it simply doesn’t work. Japanese, instead, has syllabaries – which are very different animals.  They are more like a grid than anything else.  There is no set order – in fact, any order that we put them into when we learn Japanese is based upon the romaji order – a… Read More »Alphabet