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Sudoku

I’ve been recently learning how to do sudoku puzzles, and it turns out that I’m really good at it with the right hints, and really bad at the harder ones otherwise.  But I can’t help but to find some similarities between sudoku and the Japanese language. Both of them – particularly the harder sudoku – are incredibly intimidating when you first look at them.  Sudoku has only a few numbers filled in, and you’re thinking “I’m supposed to deduce a solution from this?  But then, you start to learn, and as the… Read More »Sudoku

Japanese is Not a Straightforward Language

Every now and then I’ll hear someone say that Japanese is pretty straightforward.  I’ve said that a couple of times, and in limited contexts, it’s true.  The rules are pretty clear, and most of the time if you follow them you’ll do okay. See the catch in that sentence?  “Most of the time.” Let me enumerate the ways in which Japanese is NOT straightforward. Rendaku.  It’s so complicated that a guy made Lyman made a law about it.  That only mostly applies. Yomikata.  Kanji readings are for the most part… Read More »Japanese is Not a Straightforward Language

The Japanese Devil is in the Details

One of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Japanese is that it is a very precise language.  For example, the word for “husband” and the word for “prisoner” only varies by the length of one vowel.  It is a metered language, it does not have stresses like in English.  The hard part about Japanese is not the vocabulary, though that is hard.  It’s not the grammar, though that is hard.  The hard part is training yourself to pronounce the words correctly. I have found, anecdotally, that Japanese people are… Read More »The Japanese Devil is in the Details

Two Years In

I don’t remember the exact day that I decided to study Japanese, but I think I’m approaching the two year anniversary at some point in the next couple of months.  It’s been a lot of ups and a lot of downs, a lot of “I don’t know if I can do this” and a lot of “hey, this is starting to make a little sense now”.  To be frank, I’m not entirely sure where I am at the moment.  I think I could probably pass the JLPT N5 if I… Read More »Two Years In

Three Months Later…

Posts like these are hard to write, because I never quite now how they’re quite going to turn out, and I never quite know how much of my soul I’m going to bare in the process. About three months or so ago, I had a medical crisis that caused me to pretty much drop off the grid for two months.  Thankfully, I have good insurance and am in decent financial shape after having to take two months off of work, but many things in my life had to take a… Read More »Three Months Later…

Thinking in Japanese

Over the past week or two, I have found something happening, and I am not sure what to make of it.  On multiple occasions, I have found myself nearly responding in Japanese to an English question – and I have to consciously correct myself.  Sometimes that’s before it comes out of my mouth, and sometimes it’s not. Yesterday, I was at a Sushi restaurant, and the waitress came up to ask what I wanted to drink.  I replied “Mi-er, I mean, Water, please”.  I very nearly said “Mizu kudasai”. I’m… Read More »Thinking in Japanese

My Gaijin Life

I have launched my new project.  Well, “launched” is a pretty hefty word.  Perhaps it would be better said, I have thrown my new project at the world, while holding out a faint hope that the world doesn’t throw it right back. It can be found at https://mygaijinlife.com. In the beginning, I fully expect I will be making liberal use of Google Translate and jisho.org.  I will not be using Google Translate to translate English phrases to Japanese, as that would be cheating and contrary to the purpose of the… Read More »My Gaijin Life

Loan Words

Many words in Japanese are borrowed from other languages.  Many from Chinese, and quite a few from English and Portuguese.  A smattering from other languages as well. The interesting thing about Japanese, though, as opposed to many other languages, is that the Japanese language doesn’t have the syllabic structure to migrate the loanwords over untouched.  So when they migrate a word into their language, even though it’s somewhat recognizable as the word they borrowed, it’s not the same word anymore. For example, “Starbucks”.  In Japanese, it’s “sutaabukkusu”, or スターブックス.  For… Read More »Loan Words

The Shallowness of Exported Japanese Culture

A recurring theme of this site is my continued wonder at why I’m bothering to learn Japanese at all.  I mean, it is an interesting language, it’s difficult, it’s a challenge.  All these things are true.  But at the end of the day, as a gaikokujin, I find that my reasons for learning the language are really, at the end of the day, somewhat puzzling. What I mean is this:  after learning Japanese, I’ll have the following abilities:  I’ll be able to read manga in its native language (yay!).  I’ll be… Read More »The Shallowness of Exported Japanese Culture

How Would I Have Done It?

Let me preface this by saying: this is only a thought experiment. I have no illusions that this will ever happen. I’m not even seriously proposing it. But I do like to think about these kinds of things. So, that said, how would I redo Japanese if I were God? Well, my first thought is, expand the syllabary. Add a couple of vowels and a couple of consonants. Then, redo the syllabary to something that is logical, something like the korean hangul. Make the rules regular and predictable – this… Read More »How Would I Have Done It?