This may be a controversial title but please allow me to explain myself.

There have been a couple of times when I’ve been talking to Americans, who in general are ever so lovely people, and they have complemented me on my “excellent Japanese pronunciation”. Any good feeling I have at this moment is instantly countered by the follow-up comment “British people usually have such terrible Japanese accents”.

My internal reaction is “Say that again?” with a surprised look. Americans, who can barely speak English properly let alone Japanese, telling me this sends me up the wall. If this had only been said by one person I would have shrugged it off but I’ve had it said to me on no less than 3 occasions.

As someone who grew up watching anime, I have seen a fair few English dubs in my time. Most of these were produced in America (a lovely place) and as long as they stuck to normal English words everything sounded fine. However, as soon as Japanese words, names or places were uttered, things turned really unnatural. The way I’ve heard words like sakura, Shikoku and Tomoe mangled still sends a shiver down my spine. Ever heard the American dub of Dragon Ball? They can’t even get kame-hame-ha right.

I remember one time I was walking around Harajuku with another American friend (lovely bloke whose Japanese is miles better than mine) and he pulled me up on my pronunciation of the word “kanji”.

“Kanji?! Kanji?!”, he was saying, “It’s pronounced ‘khaan-ji’”.

At this point a kept my mouth shut, bowing to his superior Japanese ability but what I should have said was “か is pronounced ’ka’, you fool, not ‘kar’. I’m talking about chinese letters not about driving and certainly not about Star Trek characters.”

I have always considered the notion that British English (well Estuary English really) and Japanese pronunciation of vowel sounds are fairly similar. Many times have I listened Japanese podcasts warning me about pronouncing the Japanese word tomato as “tomato” and not “tomayto” with a shrug. The Japanese pronunciation of that small red fruit sounds far more English to me than the American pronunciation.

And maybe this is the problem, American English sounds a bit odd to me but to the same extent I’m sure British English sounds strange to our American cousins. So when we speak Japanese with a British twang it may sound odd to American ears and vice versa. I’m also sure that when any native English learner of Japanese tries to speak to a Japanese person they find our accents pretty odd. This has been confirmed by the amount of times I’ve tried to order a hamburger (sorry, hanbaagaa) at McDonald’s only to be given a blank stare by the guy serving me.

Learn about some funky transforming kanji toys.

I mentioned how much fun I’m having with my Nintendo 3DS before. However after I bought another game and discovered that not all the boxes are super funky, my excitement wore off a bit. That was until I discovered Nintendo Swapnote.

Swapnote is a simple little program that allows you to swap notes. The clue is in the name, unless you got it in the UK, it’s known as Nintendo Letter Box there. Or Japan for that matter, where it’s called Itsuno Mani Koukan Nikki, a name which just rolls off the tongue.

The notes themselves are split into up to 4 pages and the program animates the note as it was written by the sender, it’s interesting to see how other people draw and how everyone has different writing styles. Sound and pictures taken with the 3DS’s camera can also be added. Little backgrounds (known as stationary) can also be used and add a little more animation to the piece. These all have their limitations though, you can’t manually edit the formatting of the pictures and can only add 5 second sound clips. The actual drawing is limited to black and white too, although you can write in 3D, which is fun to mess about with.

All in all this app doesn’t have very much reason for existing, other than the fact that it is fun to use. After I added a few like-minded people to my 3DS friends list it became a kind of ridiculous version of Twitter. A version of Twitter without all the news discussion, advice and useful internet links, it was all boiled down to some people writing some silly messages (in 3D). As an example, one morning I opened up my 3DS to see this message, the delightful silliness of it brightened up my day.

Being a resourceful chap, I wondered to myself whether I could somehow find some sort of proper use for Swapnote and I remembered my kanji study. I’d put my kanji study off for a while but found that coming up with silly ways to remember these things was really enjoyable.

What better way to express these ridiculous mnemonics than with a 3D note swapping program by Nintendo? Due to the note’s animation you can see the stoke order of the kanji and I can attempt to draw the picture living in my head. Said picture, the result of my odd imagination, helps me to remember the kanji.

So I bought a new kanji book, began the slow process of learning more kanji and started writing a few little swapnotes. Some of the ideas I used for them have already mentioned on this website but it is all good practice for me so it doesn’t matter. Simply because I can, I uploaded a few of the notes that I’ve done to YouTube so I can place them here. Obviously you can’t view them in 3D, you will simply have to miss out unless you get hold of a 3DS system. Which I, of course, recommend you do.

Without further ado. Let’s learn some kanji…

1 – 轢

2 – 桜

See this post for more.

3 – 象

See this post for more.

4 – 座

5 – 遊

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.

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