Marketing Exec 1: Guys, we’re going to launch a Teriyaki pizza.
ME2: A what?
ME1: Teriyaki, it’s Japanese isn’t it?
ME2: Sweet! Have you thought about the advertising?
ME1: Yes… we want a nice oriental feel…
ME3: Like sliding paper screens?
ME4: And some nice bamboo sillhouettes?
ME1: Yes, that sort of thing.
ME2: Sweet! And can we draw* a Japanese letter on it too?
ME1: Definitely! Who knows any Japanese?
ME2&4: *tilt heads and suck teeth* swswswswswwwwwww…
ME3: Well Feng Shui is Japanese, isn’t it? And that has Japanese picture letters.
ME4: Oh yeah! *shows laptop with google image search* Look…
ME2: Sweet! I think the one on the right looks best.
ME4: I prefer the one on the left.
ME1: ME3? What about you?
ME3: Left.
ME1: Left it is. Yeah… that looks great!

(*’draw’ is a good verb to use instead of ‘write’ if you really want to wind Japanese people up about their writing)

Result:

“Give your pizza some wind! (cry of last desperate military charge)”

Some great answers! To put you out of your misery, here are the correct ones…

As I have mentioned in the comments on the last post, you can see the shop right here, with Fuakin next door.

The other day, I exclaimed SPORTYSOFT at H, who chuckled because that was supposedly the name of a type of hat as sold by the Toraya Hat Shop in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. We couldn’t for the life of us remember the names of the other types of hats. “BASEBALL CAP”? No. “TOP HAT”? Hmm… maybe, but I don’t think so.

Below, I have pictured the shop’s sign with all four types of hat shown. If you can name the other three types of hat correctly, you will win fame and glory for yourself. Good luck!

Isn’t language complicated?

I was thinking of teaching Japanese some time in the next couple of years. My ideas are good, but my knowledge is still a little behind where I could consider myself an ‘authority’ on the language. I could currently manage a 30 minute talk for the ‘getting old disgracefully’ club or cub-scouts.

I am, however, taking GCSE Japanese in the summer and downloaded the teachers’ lesson plan list from Edexcel with the theory that if I create a complete GCSE Japanese course, then by the end I will have covered everything I need for the exam. And I’ll have a complete GCSE Japanese course saved on my computer should I wish to use it. (My current Japanese teacher has gone very unstructured which is a pretty bad thing since we only have 38 hours of teaching left before the exam, and some people came in with zero knowledge).

But anyway that started me thinking… what about English. How much knowledge do you need to have of English to be considered an authority? That led on, by some strange mental wranglings to the word “shopping”. The subtleties therein are amazing. We all use English, and know how to use it, but could we explain it? Probably not in some cases.

Shopping

There are two activities we can talk about:

“shoppping” is an activity where you go to shops and buy things.
“the shopping” is an activity where you go to shops and buy things.

However, you “go shopping”, while you “do the shopping”. And what of the implications?

“shopping” is a fun activity done for leisure.
“the shopping” is a chore done for survival.

Of course, “the shopping” is also the word for the bags of stuff you brought into the house which needs to be put into cupboards.

My Japanese is just coming to the stage where these sort of nuances are starting to matter. It’s a whole new can of worms world.

Anyway, enough of that… just thought I’d throw in a fun word seen today:

常電導磁気浮上式鉄道 or joudendoujikifujoushikitetsudou which is a non-superconducting maglev train. Who’d'a thought it?

Hot on the heels of How To Speak Fluent Japanese Without Saying a Word and How To Speak Fluent Japanese Without Hardly Saying a Word comes Ken Tanaka and Remi February’s latest lesson: How To Speak Fluent Japanese By Speaking English.

I have a personal experience of this when I was on Kyoto railway station in need of sustenance, and found a Tuna Sandwich, labelled as it would be “ツナサンドイチ”, or Tsuna Sandoichi. I asked (in fluent English-with-a-Japanese-accent) “Tsuna Sandoichi onegai shimasu” to which the lady behind the counter began praising my wonderful Japanese to my culturally required self-deprecating denial.

Anyway… on to Ken and Remi’s lesson… note that you may need some of the information from the earlier lessons to completely understand the example dialogues.

Genki Japan do some really catchy little songs to help you learn Japanese. I’ve been singing this to myself all day.

So, my essay I wrote yesterday was passed by a non-native speaker as pretty good.

I posted it on a forum for correction by Japanese speakers and the following came to light, which is just the sort of thing a Japanese learner is faced with…

Where I said “Yeah! That’s good!” to the idea of going to visit my brother, the Japanese speaker suggests that’s the perfect answer if I didn’t want to go and see him. I should have said “Yeah! That’s good isn’t it?” if I did want to go and see him.

GAH! Any hope of fluency just flew out of the mado.

Maybe my teacher meant that it wasn’t good when he said it was pretty good. He would have said it’s pretty good isn’t it? if that’s what he had meant.

I hope it’s the google translation rather than my Japanese that is flaky.

The Japanese…

The Translation…

My Saturday

Saturday Okimashita are slow to very busy week. 10:09 Samerimashita five minutes. I like reading a book until 10:10 and then five minutes, along with her talking I was drinking this tea.

10:10 we will every five minutes, we went to the bathroom. What you see out of the bathroom until the morning of every day I see my beautiful garden. We look to the garden of the Japanese garden. There is a large stone in the garden so far. There is a small tree beside the stone. I want raccoon on top of the stone. I think it is cute.

Was studying Japanese 12:10 minutes from half-past 10. Difficult and very interesting. She also studied Japanese to me. She can see the kanji from around 40 it is a good one? She has five minutes to 10:10 “Now the Japanese are tired of fun,” he said. “Let your brother-mon to better this afternoon.” I said, “Yeah [<-Good Translation, Google!] ~! Is good!” He said. Then my brother’s phone.

My brother lives in York. I love the city’s study from the University of York. Had to travel by car to eat breakfast. Travel is tender. Minutes before catching the 10:02 York. From there to the north of England there is a little cold. We went into the city, I struggle to the death mother wears Gitotebukurowo. My nose is too cold and windy but dry wore lots of clothes. My nose is still a little bit red!

I went to the pub to drink beer with her brother and me together. We could hear the music from a very loud talk or dance, and had a lot of rainbow. Was fun.

I’m thinking!

I have a 300-word essay to write. In Japanese for crying out loud!

Back soon!

So after a weekend of zooming around Kent (chiefly to visit a most lovely wedding venue where I’ll be doing a spot of wedding photography next summer) we returned to it being our turn to entertain on our usual Monday night let’s not do the pub quiz and go round each others’ houses for dinner and games night. A lovely evening as always.

Tuesday gave me just a little moment to catch my breath (while dealing with the enquiries that had come in over the weekend and processing photos for a couple of clients) before I headed off to the BIPP for a talk by Marko Dutka (the link goes to one of his better galleries – he said his website is in the middle of an overhaul which is good because it really doesn’t do justice to the amazing stuff I saw on Tuesday). So anyway, back home for 11:30pm to bed and up again in the morning for a Financial Planning course. That was one of those experiences where everything they tell you is absolutely obvious – but only once they’ve pointed it out. So that was numbers between 10:30am and 4pm.

Then, having had my wrist slapped (literally not figuratively) in the course, I moseyed on down to the bank to open a business account. I’d always been advised that a business account cost you money for every transaction while not giving any benefits. This is incorrect and there are lots of benefits. So that’s now open.

And so back home in time to go out for my Japanese class where I am still expected to be Japanese. As I arrived there was a bag out in the corridor, so on entering (first there, only teach present), I explained “Anata no kaban wa doa no soto ni aru to omoimasu”. We then had about 15 minutes of teaching including the complicated “So that X doesn’t happen, please do Y” before the class even started.

At least Merlin, recorded from Saturday, wasn’t particularly complicated.

So now my brain is full and it is time to breathe again. One good thing from the Financial Planning workshop was the time-management section. It is, apparantly, perfectly reasonable to write unscheduled time into your diary so that when you’re not being a Leicestershire Photographer you don’t burst. I’ll be doing that, I think!