Some thoughts...

Oh the horror! I forgot to mention this last time (and to be honest that post was long enough already; sorry about that), but I found out that Japanese kids DON'T WATCH DISNEY MOVIES!!!!! Back when Yoo and I were over in Kyoto station for some reason they were playing "A whole New World" (In Japanese, which was really weird... they changed the words as well), and Yoo didn't have a clue what it was :-O. He'd never seen Aladdin or any of the others :-(

Somebody recently said to me that my knowing English, German (somewhat shaky these days...) and Japanese was impressive. This was told to me by a non-native English speaker, who also speaks Japanese. Similar stuff has been mentioned to me by a couple of other Non-native English speakers, all of whom were themselves upwards of tri-lingual. Maybe I'm just being overly-sensitive, but every time I hear this I keep thinking "You mean, impressive for a native-English speaker"....

If you'll forgive the jump into linguistics, someone pointed out to me recently that the English language actually uses a writing system (I.e, the Roman letters you're currently reading) which comes form a different language family from the language it's self. Explains some of our more "creative" spellings... I wonder why nobody though that squeezing a writing system which didn't actually match the target language's phonology wouldn't have a few problems...

On the other hand, Japanese phonology and writing system match perfectly. Every sound in the Japanese language has a symbol to represent it. Unfortunately, Japanese phonology is itself at the same time strictly defined and somewhat limited, which I guess explains the problems native-Japanese speakers have when they learn other languages.

Off to the Philippines on Wednesday, so I'm going to go find a Japanese-y present for my cousins. Unfortunately, since they're about 40 I don't think they'll be that interested in a giant Hello Kitty or Rirakkuma... shame...