The End, More or Less

As I've said in the past few posts, I'm back in the United States, which marks the end of my study abroad trip to Japan. It was fun, educational, expensive, and delicious, though if you were to ask me to put those in order, I don't think I could.

The best thing about going has to have been the people I was able to meet. I made a number of friends with whom I identified with in a surprising number of ways, and I was able to experience and relish in the rich variety of languages and accents, as well as getting to see little bits of the world from other people's points of view.

One of my goals while I was in Japan was to eat ramen. Sure, it sounds silly, but I'd only eaten instant ramen prior to coming to Japan, and I did so on a daily basis for upwards of eight years. So I wanted to eat lots of varieties of ramen. While I was able to try a number of shops' ramen - probably around 30 - I still couldn't tell you whether I like the miso-, soy-, or salt-based ramen best.

While tasty, my primary reason for coming to Japan was not to eat ramen, or gyuudon, or takoyaki, but to study Japanese, and my stay there was - of course! - invaluable to that end. I'm still very weak with kanji and my vocabulary is very small compared to a native speaker, but the difference between when I left and my current ability is no less than marked.

Writing on this blog was an experience all of its own, and I'm glad that I did. I'll be able to look back on this much like I might a journal.

For those of you that have been reading this whole time: your time and your comments are appreciated.

For who have supported me in other ways, be it in the form of money, cookies, a partner for Super Smash Brothers or DDR or that taiko game, or help defrosting my fridge because I forgot and was late to miss plane, I cannot thank you enough.you for your efforts and your friendship. I don't know how I would've survived this year without the help I received from others.

I hope that many others have the opportunity that I did, and I hope that maybe this log will help one or two of those people out at some point.

Good day and best wishes.
- William Lockwood

Work Notes

I'm at work, slacking off while they're working on the Chinese portion of the class. Yes, it's all completely over my head and no, I can't follow it even if I try. Yes, I have tried.

The first thing I do every day is work with two students individually on pronunciation. To practice this, they read a passage that either me or the teacher picks out. Here are my notes from that practice, 'cause I think they're interesting. They follow:

O idea - idear X
O area - arear X

the =
thuh/thee - X thah X


four
whore

OO originally synthesized tunes
XX originarry synsesized tyunes

「日本：その土地の2つだけのProngs」

So... machine translation.

I went through and corrected some errors I saw right off, but it seems in general much more lucid than the going from Japanese to English. I mean, there are plenty of errors, and I'm sure I'm just missing a lot of weirdness because I'm not a native speaker, but at least what it spews out makes grammatic sense more than half the time, which is more than I can say for most other languages to English.

If you don't have Japanese font support installed, you can still see what this page looks like in terrible, machine-translated Japanese.

English Accent

I went to a pub with a friend and one of the guys there was trying to help me find something nonalcoholic to drink. Well, he recommended the "Kodomono Cider".

I should take a moment to tell you that Japanese has tonal patterns in every word that help you to figure what the other person is saying, since they don't really believe in spaces in either writing or speech, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they have more homophones than some languages have discrete words. In writing, you have Chinese characters (kanji) to "assist" you in figuring out what's going on.
In speech, if someone says hashi, there are three possible meanings: "bridge", "chopsticks", and "edge". Now, this seems like it could be really confusing if you happened to be eating while walking over a bridge, but the Japanese have two ways of solving this:

1. Never eating while performing any kind of locomotion. Bad, bad, naughty.
2. Tone patterns!

Now, while the Japanese are nowhere near as draconian when it comes to tonal accentation as the Chinese are (I can't even count to ten in Chinese without saying that someone's mother is a donkey. Or something.), it does cause a little confusion if you completely fail them. If you've ever talked to someone who doesn't pause between the words he's saying, or read something that has no spaces, it's fairly similar. It'salittlehardertofigureoutwhat'sbeingsaid, I think. I mean, you can still get it, but it throws you for a second.

So, back to the cider I got. What it was was "child's beer", or こどものビール (kodomo no biiru). When the guy said this, though, he said kodomono, with a flat accent on the whole thing, which says to me a brand name or something. I think he also transposed two syllables at one point and said komodono, and I couldn't help picturing him trying to get massive lizards to drink for the rest of the night.

Now, that looks pretty confusing, and I wrote it, so to recap:

1. kodomo no - "child's"
2. kodomono - No meaning that I'm aware of, so I assumed it was a brand name. I don't really frequent bars, you know? Sounds like kudamono (fruit).
   
3. komodono - Either a large lizard, or someone respected named "Komo". This style isn't used anymore, so...

Now, I mentioned that Japanese has no spaces, so you may be thinking "What's the difference between kodomo no and kodomono if the space isn't it?"
Having the space there tells when written in roman characters will make you subconsciously pronounce it differently. Try reading it out loud and I think you'll see what I mean. What you should hear is that you, as an English speaker (presumably, anybody who's reading this also speaks English), naturally place the stress accent in a certain place. The Japanese language has something similar with tones - though I still have a pretty strong American-sounding stress accent.*

Okay, class dismissed!

*Americans are, from what I've heard, well-known for saying waTAshi or WAtashi instead of the volume-flat watashi, and killing other words in a similar manner. Now class is dismissed.

Things You Lie On...

Watching some anime today. Got it from a Portuguese friend of mine, so, naturally, it's subtitled in Portuguese.

Now, for me, it's really hard not to pay attention to subtitles if they're there. As it would turn out, Portuguese is not nearly hard enough to understand to kill off that habit.

It was pretty convenient, though, because they are different enough from English that I don't watch them as much, but they're similar enough that if there's something I don't get from the Japanese, I can figure out from the subs. I was surprised at that.
It took me 15 episodes to stop reading the subtitles constantly. I mean, this is nearly 10 years of conditioning I'm trying to fight here.

I'm watching a samurai drama, and I don't know if I'm a lot worse at understanding speech than I thought I was, or if it's the bucketloads of formal speech and antiquated words that are making it difficult. If it weren't for the subs, I would've never figured out that jabura is the same as samurai. It's not in my dictionary, that's for sure.

Speaking of my dictionary, I've got it set up to search through the antiquated words databases, and I found a great little gem of an expression. I don't know if it's actually antiquated, or what, but... Well, here you go:
女房と畳は新しいほうがいい
nyoubou to tatami wa atarashii hou ga ii
Wives and tatami are best when they're newI have to wonder if we have an expression like this in English.

Sonna...

So I've spent the last day and some change watching an anime, Hajime no Ippo ("the first step"). I'm on the last of two movies right now, and it just occrred to me that the single most common phrase in anime* is 「そんな。。。ばかな！」 (Sonna... baka na!) which is usually translated as "That's... impossible!"
In just this hour of anime, I think I've heard it nearly twenty times, but I haven't been counting, so maybe I'm just imagining it.
In any case, they bandy it about much like Vizzini bandies about "Inconceivable!"

I'm sure other people have noticed this, too, and I feel a little silly for being so slow to follow it through.

I probably missed a lot of Sonna... baka na!s because of the way I was watching Hajime no Ippo: by keeping my finger on the Skip-five-seconds-forward key combo through the last forty-five episodes. Whenever they got into an extended match of "AAARRRRGHHH!" and it looked like DBZ syndrome would set in, I'd skip forward, check to see if it was over, then continue. By this method, I was able to watch most of the twenty-minute episodes in about ten minutes each.

So that's my new strategy in the event that I want to watch a Shounen Jump-styled anime from now on.

*Probably in manga as well, but I don't read much manga, so I dunno.