If you've ever sat in a coffee shop next to someone really noisy and had trouble tuning out the details of their personal life, you can understand where I'm coming from with this. I'll be the first to admit that my Japanese skill pretty much blows and that I have to pay attention to what is being said to understand. It's not the sort of thing which effortlessly enters my consciousness, but
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Japanese language. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Japanese language. Afficher tous les articles
mercredi 16 novembre 2011
Will Miss #387 - tuning out incidental conversations
Posted on 08:00 by Unknown
If you've ever sat in a coffee shop next to someone really noisy and had trouble tuning out the details of their personal life, you can understand where I'm coming from with this. I'll be the first to admit that my Japanese skill pretty much blows and that I have to pay attention to what is being said to understand. It's not the sort of thing which effortlessly enters my consciousness, but
mercredi 26 octobre 2011
Won't Miss #380 - the "gaijin" vs. "gaikokujin" argument
Posted on 08:00 by Unknown
Offense at a word is in the eye of the beholder. Racially insensitive product name or really bad katakana translation of "mommy"?
One of the longest running debates in the world of foreigners is whether or not being called a "gaijin" (outsider/foreigner) is offensive. The term "gaijkokujin" is generally viewed as being more polite. Frankly, I think this is a trivial issue which masks the real
lundi 29 août 2011
Won't Miss #358 - handwritten Japanese
Posted on 08:15 by Unknown
Mostly, it's the stuff on the left near the bottom that trips me up.
When I teach, I use a white board to write notes or words for students and I always print. I have quite good handwriting, but if some letters are not nearly perfectly formed (especially "r", which without a prominent hook will be seen as an oddly squashed "v" for some reason), my students frown and look confused at what has
mercredi 15 juin 2011
Won't Miss #331 - foreigners speaking Japanese to me
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
Occasionally, I have foreign friends over to my apartment for dinner or socializing. Though such friends are native speakers of English, they sometimes do something which is one of my pet peeves, and that is tossing in random Japanese words for things which are absolutely unrelated to Japan or Japanese things. I'm not talking about using the word "sushi" or even "chikatetsu" (subway) or
lundi 2 mai 2011
Won't Miss #315 - JLPT score preoccupation
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
Most foreigners who come to Japan spend some time studying Japanese and taking useless tests to prove how well they can speak, read or write it. OK, perhaps the tests aren't entirely useless if you need to achieve a specific score for a particular job, but it often seems that the main point of these tests is to boast about your Japanese level by pointing to what level of JLPT (Japanese Language
jeudi 27 janvier 2011
Will Miss #281 - cooking terms without pretense
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
I like to cook, and I follow several cooking blogs and a few forums. There is something that drives me crazy and that is people who use Japanese words instead of perfectly reasonable English equivalents because they're trying to sound like they know something other people don't. They're the types who like to toss around words like "umami" when they could say "savory" or "meaty" or who say even
Posted in cooking, Japanese language, language, pretentiousness, psychology, will miss
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lundi 27 décembre 2010
Won't Miss #270 - eyes open, ears closed
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
"Speak, Hear, and See No Evil" statues at a local stone-working shop. The Japanese believe they invented this concept, incidentally.
My brother-in-law likes to tell a classic anecdote from his early days in Japan which beautifully illustrates the mental wall that goes up between a Japanese person and a foreigner the minute the former lays eyes on the latter. He speaks Japanese well, particularly
My brother-in-law likes to tell a classic anecdote from his early days in Japan which beautifully illustrates the mental wall that goes up between a Japanese person and a foreigner the minute the former lays eyes on the latter. He speaks Japanese well, particularly
Posted in attitudes, Japanese language, Japanese people, language, public life, won't miss
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mercredi 10 novembre 2010
Won't Miss #253 - Japanese slapped over English
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
Before I whine about this particular thing, I would ask my gentle readers to keep in mind that I get to complain about things which are decidedly reasonable and fair ways for things to happen because they just so happen to inconvenience me personally. It is absolutely proper for the Japanese importers to plaster Japanese product information over the English on imported products, but it still
mercredi 3 novembre 2010
Will Miss #250 - Japanese onomatopoeia
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
A "fuwa fuwa" (fluffy) marshmallow cake.
The Japanese language has a lot of onomatopoeia. For those who are unfamiliar, those are words that sound like or suggest the concept they are meant to convey. I've never counted how many we have in English, but I'm pretty sure the Japanese have many more. I encounter a lot of them while snack blogging. For instance, "saku saku" is crispy and "fuwa fuwa"
The Japanese language has a lot of onomatopoeia. For those who are unfamiliar, those are words that sound like or suggest the concept they are meant to convey. I've never counted how many we have in English, but I'm pretty sure the Japanese have many more. I encounter a lot of them while snack blogging. For instance, "saku saku" is crispy and "fuwa fuwa"
mardi 21 septembre 2010
Won't Miss #235 - "do you speak Japanese?"
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
Some questions when asked have nothing but bad intentions behind them, and this is one of them. Note that there are only two types of people who ask me this question. One is students in language lessons who are supposed to only deal with me in English and my Japanese language ability has nothing to do with them (as I'm not going to speak Japanese to them regardless). The others are
vendredi 20 août 2010
Will Miss #220 - finding a communication key
Posted on 00:15 by Unknown
One of the things that invariably happens when you live in a country where you do not speak the native language is that some things come up which you don't know the proper word for. This happens because some language is specialized, and you don't tend to learn it, or you learned it once, rarely used it, and simply forgot it. When this happens, you have to puzzle out a non-language-based way to
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