Welcome to the May 2011 Japanese Blog Matsuri.

This month we are going to learn that kanji can be fun, interesting, insightful, beautiful and most importantly necessary to communicate in Japanese.

Having fallen in love with kanji myself I was looking forward to reading what others had to say about it and their experiences learning it. I have noticed, not only through the submitted blogs themselves but also from those commenting, that people who have taken the time to learn kanji have great fondness for it and seem to want to encourage other Japanese language learners to start learning asap.

Enjoy…

Why study kanji at all? Here we are given a compelling reason for picking up the textbooks.

One man’s story about how he came to the conclusion that studying kanji was for the best and also how it improved his live in Japan and other aspects of his Japanese learning. A experience that no doubt many people can relate to.

Interested by the mention of kanji radicals in the previous post and want to know more? JLPT Boot Camp has the answers you are looking for.

Some say a picture tells a thousand words and the picture here tells us so much. Not only does it remind us of the beauty of Japanese script but also the beginning of a fairy story. I love this.

What does the way countries were once written in Japan tell us about the Japanese view of the rest of the world? Find out in this blog.

And there you have it. A short and wonderfully sweet masturi. Unfortunately there is no host for next month matsuri listed currently. Perhaps you could put your name down for it. Find out how at the mastsuri faq page.

The best thing to do if you are learning Japanese is go to Japan. This may seem obvious but sometimes I seem to forget. There is Japanese all around me and I just spend my time out and about with headphones on, not really paying attention to anyone or to all of the signs hanging up other than to look at the picture or lazily read the English.

So in an effort to be more proactive I’m going to start reporting the interesting looking Japanese sentences I see out and about.

Case in point, I saw this ad for K-pop band Big Bang in the middle of Shibuya.

Looking at the picture of the boys, all I could think of was that one of them looked completely out of place. When I pointed this out to my friend he told me the meaning of the letters down the side. After he told me, I wondered why I didn’t just try to translate it myself rather than simply looking at the picture and sniggering. Upon actually reading the Japanese I realised it was indeed a very simple sentence and that the only part I didn’t know was one small word.

One check of my dictionary later I can break it down for you.

BIG BANGの
Big Bang no
of Big Bang

ニセモノに
nisemono ni
for impostor

ご注意
gochui
be careful

ください
kudasai
please

So that poster says “Please be careful about the impostors of Big Bang“. Or in more natural English, “Please watch out for Big Bang’s impostors.”

I guess that bloke in the middle isn’t part of the band then. That’s a shame, he was the coolest looking one of the lot of them.

One of the first things that British Japanese language learners go through is working out how to say and write their own country of origin. Is it イギリス(igirisu) or 英国(eikoku)? Which is best? Does one mean England and the other United Kingdom? Is their actually a difference?

Due to the fact that most people not from the British Isles (and many from within it too) do not understand the make up of the countries in it, everyone just thinks of the UK as ‘England’. The Japanese people are no different and the two words I wrote at the top of this article basically mean England but is used to refer to anywhere in the UK. The only difference between them is that one uses katakana and the other uses kanji when written down.

In Japanese katakana is generally used for words of foreign origin and kanji is used for words which came from Japan or China. Not only does each kanji have a phonetic value but also meaning. These days most countries are simply written phonetically in katakana. However a long time ago, probably around the time our grandfathers were born, kanji was used. Because many kanji have the same reading this lead to the situation where you had loads of different spellings for each country. I guess that is why this practice was discontinued.

So all of the countries of the world have various spellings in kanji and because each kanji has meaning, I was wondering if the kanji showed up and stereotypes of that country. Does the kanji for England mean ‘Nation of tea drinkers’, is Greece the ‘Land of plate smashers’?

Lets find out.

England: イギリス(igirisu)

The kanji used for England is 英国 (eikoku). This means ‘Superior Country’. That’ll do me.
It’s also worth pointing out another spelling 大不列頓 which was once used to refer to Great Britain (ooburehitan???) means ‘Nothing but big bad lines’. As a member of the nation that invented a whole new verb just for queuing I must protest.

Colombia: コロンビア(coronbia)

Colombia’s kanji is 哥倫比亜 (coronbia??), that could mean ‘big brother ethics ratio next rank’. Also possible is 考老比亜 (coronbia??) which I guess is ‘aged thinking ethics ratio next rank’. Both are impossible to put in coherent sentences so I’m not sure what they were trying to tell us but there must be a lot of wise old people there.

USA: アメリカ(america)

米国 (beikoku) is America’s kanji, it means ‘Rice Country’. Is there a lot of rice in America? Surely Japan has more right to be called this. Another version is 弥利堅(america), the kanji means ‘Increasingly advantage armour’, is that a reference to America’s large military presence around the world?

Germany: ドイツ(doitsu)

独逸 (doitsu) is the order of the day here. That means ‘Single Idleness’. I personally thought the Germans were a proactive group of people. Also used is 独乙 (doitsu) according to my dictionary that means ‘Single Witty’, I’d wager that whoever thought that one up had never met a German person.

Spain: スペイン(supein)

The Spanish kanji is 西班牙(supein). That means ‘West group tusk’, which has absolutely nothing to do with sleeping in the middle of the day.

As a result of this little experiment I can safely say that there is no correlation between the kanji used in the names and the countries, which is a shame. I should also point out that while I said that the kanji is no longer used, it is often used in abbreviations. For example 英 is used for Britain, 米 for USA, 西 for Spain, etc.

This post has been a submission to the May 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri hosted by Me.

Source: wikipeadia

I am impressed by very strange things. The things that impress me seem to be very different from that which impresses other people. I can’t say I’ve ever really followed fashion, I find that people who do, seem to look like fools. Case in point, a recent trend here is to wear glasses frames without any lenses. I wonder if the people who do this are trying to look more intelligent, they are failing spectacularly if that is the case.

I’ve never been more impressed by what someone was wearing as when, probably around the time I’d finished university, my dad came home from work sporting a Gengar tie. For those who don’t know, Gengar is on of the many critters created for Pokemon, the video game by Nintendo where you have to try to collect as many made up animals as possible.

The main reason I was so impressed by the tie was that it was obviously being worn by someone who didn’t care what other people thought. He wasn’t wearing it to be stylish, he wasn’t wearing it to be down with the kids, if he was he would have worn a tie with a better known Pokemon. He wasn’t trying to be ‘kooky’, if he was he would have worn a Simpsons or South Park tie to show how ‘mad’ he was. No, he just wanted to wear a tie with a strange purple blob about which he knew nothing about just because he could. For that he gets my respect.

I sometimes need to wear a tie at work and this has become a problem. It seems like it is very difficult to find a half decent tie in Japan. Almost all the patterns available use the most drab colours imaginable, browns, greys and muddy greens are the order of the day here. I actually begin to feel depressed when I approach the tie rack in shops these days. For the ties that aren’t dull they are often made of the most horrible looking material. I often see businessmen on the train with ties that look more like they have some sort of long woollen sock around their necks.

When you find a half decent tie you have to grab that opportunity with both hands. I have found approximately two ties that I have ever thought were any good in this country. One of them, bought for me by my aforementioned style guru father, was found in Kyoto and is a rather tasteful little number with a couple of pieces of bamboo pictured on it.

I have never had so many complements over anything before. As an unremarkable man who is unused to getting such things, this has come as quite a shock.

Almost everyone who has seen me wear it has commented about how nice it is. Students and co-workers, young and old, children and adults have all regarded it with envious eyes and complemented it. However all these people have been Japanese, I genuinely can’t remember another foreigner even looking at it twice.

Maybe it is because a good tie is so hard to find here but if you want to get ahead and make a good first impression in Japan you could do a lot worse than finding a nice tie.

Preferably one with some pictures of bamboo embossed on it.

It is my pleasure to announce the theme for the May 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri. Before I do though, please have a look at the previous month’s over at NihongoUp. Thank you to Philip Seyfi for hosting it.

Without further ado allow to tell you that this month’s theme is “I Can-ji”.

What does that mean? Well, since I have come to Japan I have fallen in love with kanji and although my level is still pretty low I am always amazed how it adds so much to the language. Kanji has this reputation of being some kind of impossible thing and whilst I agree it does take a lot of work, it is so rewarding to learn. So I want to hear your kanji stories to show people that kanji can be fun, interesting and as a friend of mine once said, ‘Really, really sexy’.

For this month could you please write your kanji stories. It could be about anything relating of the writing of Japanese. How do you study kanji? Do you have any tips and tricks to remember things? Do you simply ignore it? Has your kanji knowledge (or lack of it) landed you in hot water or resulted in you finding interesting places? What’s your favourite kanji? Is there a kanji you loathe? Have you seen kanji used incorrectly in western things? The sky (or should that be ‘the 空’) is the limit.

Rules

The official rules for the matsuri are here. Also please add at least 1 picture to your post and and link back here.

Submission

Anyone can submit a post, you don’t have to be in Japan or even have a blog about Japan, just stick to the theme. To submit either write the link in a comment under this post or use the Blog Carnival Widget.

The deadline of submissions is 22th May and remember,

YOU can-ji!