Wow, wow wow youth, there are so many types. When two or three get together, it’s noisy, noisy Morning Musume, Joshi kashimashi monogatari These past couple of weeks have been a time of deep reflection for me. As the time of my youth slips away, I’m forced to look back
As I have said previously, there are many things to admire about Japanese culture, and quite a few things not to admire as well. I have always strove, in this blog and elsewhere, to look at Japan with an unflinching lack of bias – acknowledging the good, acknowledging the cultural
I’m sure, by now, if you pay attention to anything Japanese or related, you’ve found that a major US pop star with lots of beauty and very little talent has decided to get a tattoo with Japanese kanji. It is supposed to say “seven rings”, which I assume is the
So the final grades are in. I got a 91%. I would have gotten higher but sensei dinged me on participation. I’m not sure why, but the difference between 91 and 98 percent is really just ego, to be honest. So I’ve let it go. Japanese is an interesting language
Last night I tool the final exam for the Japanese class I’ve been taking for three months. I learned a lot. I’m pretty sure I passed with an A (or at the very worst a B). I feel like I have a better foundation than I did when starting the
I imagine that when most people think of Japan they think of the media that Japan produces, and it’s really incredible. There’s anime, manga, variety shows… and there is so much more for Japan to offer. It’s completely understandable that people from other countries might latch on to the otherness of
So I’ve learned something very interesting about Japanese culture. Every day at around 6 AM, they put exercise music on the radio, and have a prescribed set of exercises everyone in the country does. Sensei told us that children, even in the summer, go to the park and do the
There are about a hundred syllables in Japanese, give or take. I looked up today how many syllables there are in English, and the answer, apparently, is 15,381. I think this gets to one of the roots of why Japanese is a difficult language to master for English speakers, and
I have been thinking a bit about why Japanese is so seemingly difficult to English-speakers such as myself. I’ve made a few other posts on this topic, but I think they were all skirting around a more fundamental issue. English is a very difficult language, from what I hear. Of
I have purchased the books required to attend the CC Japanese class, and have paid the tuition. Looks like I’m doing this. The book is “Yookoso 3”, which is horrendously expensive (I got it for about $99 and that’s half the price the bookstore was selling it at), the workbook