General update on the status of Japan: Hot.
I heard on the evening news that it got to 38C in Nagoya the other day. Poor souls, as if having to live in Nagoya wasn't bad enough already*... Apparently someone there left a spray-can in their car and it exploded, blasting a fair amount of their car interior to bits**.
* The position Nagoya holds in Japanese culture was once explained to me as follows: "Think of Birmingham of 15 years ago (I.E. Before they built all the stuff that makes it vaguely nice these days), with the population replaced with that of Essex."
** Yes, the top story of the national 9pm news was an exploding spray-can. Welcome to a country with approximately zero crime and zero interest in the outside world.
So, rather sadly I've reached the end of my classes at Kobe university, just got the Classical Mechanics exam left :-( (Incidentally, the textbook we use has a bad case of the Japanese strain of what I call "Ray Jones syndrome". Why write F=mv when you can write F=md2x/d2t?)
Off to Tokushima next week, which will be the first time I`ve actually been off Honshu Island... looking forward to it :-)
Oh, and I`ve been watching this Korean TV series lately (Iris. More or less a Korean version of 24/Mission Impossible. They showed it on Japanese TV back in April.). Weird side-effect of this is that last night I had a dream mostly in Japanese but with random people talking in what I`d have to call "Subconsciously-made-up-Korean"...
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Sunday, 18 July 2010
アルバイト Arubaito
German (Probably Danish as well...) speakers (I.E. Elena and Helen (and Sean)) will probably figure out what the title means, for the rest of you, it's the word the Japanese borrowed off them to mean "Part-time Job" (Note to the German speakers: Yes, they borrowed the wrong word... Or rather, not enough of it...).
See, it's not just English they borrow from... Portuguese pops up as well sometimes (パン- pan: bread). Incidentally 天ぷら(Tempura) is actually Latin...
Etymology lesson over. Anyway...
So, Kobe University has been hosting an international "Linguistic Pragmatics" conference this weekend which I've been helping out at as a receptionist/guide/etc. Been pretty fun and best of all I got loads of free food :-) (Most notably those massive Costco muffins you get. I didn't even know they had Costco in Japan...)
Incidentally: Japanese assumption that "Asian= Speaks Japanese/Non-Asian= Doesn't" becomes quite amusing when you have loads of Korean, Chinese and Thai visitors around... (Especially since about 70% of them were American anyway...). Special mention goes out to the Kobe University shop assistant I was talking to who ignored the "Kobe University STAFF" written on my T-shirt in big letters and explained everything I asked her about to the Taiwanese-American woman I was helping who didn't understand a word she was saying...
Oh, and celebratory declaration: Introduction to Earth and Planetary Science has no exam!!!! woo hoo
I've still got 2 months Tuesday left before I leave, but most people are leaving in 3 or 4 weeks and all this talk of going back home is kinda hanging over everything I do... weird feeling...
See, it's not just English they borrow from... Portuguese pops up as well sometimes (パン- pan: bread). Incidentally 天ぷら(Tempura) is actually Latin...
Etymology lesson over. Anyway...
So, Kobe University has been hosting an international "Linguistic Pragmatics" conference this weekend which I've been helping out at as a receptionist/guide/etc. Been pretty fun and best of all I got loads of free food :-) (Most notably those massive Costco muffins you get. I didn't even know they had Costco in Japan...)
Incidentally: Japanese assumption that "Asian= Speaks Japanese/Non-Asian= Doesn't" becomes quite amusing when you have loads of Korean, Chinese and Thai visitors around... (Especially since about 70% of them were American anyway...). Special mention goes out to the Kobe University shop assistant I was talking to who ignored the "Kobe University STAFF" written on my T-shirt in big letters and explained everything I asked her about to the Taiwanese-American woman I was helping who didn't understand a word she was saying...
Oh, and celebratory declaration: Introduction to Earth and Planetary Science has no exam!!!! woo hoo
I've still got 2 months Tuesday left before I leave, but most people are leaving in 3 or 4 weeks and all this talk of going back home is kinda hanging over everything I do... weird feeling...
Friday, 16 July 2010
Sumiyoshi Zoo
I don`t think I`ve ever actually mentioned much about my halls...
Precisely one thing makes up for any inconvenience about them. My entire rent for 1 year has been less than ¥60,000. That`s about $450 (I mean pounds. Japanese keyboards...). In other words, about 1.7 months in Birmingham...
The wildlife certainly makes it interesting... Wild boars, foxes, monkeys, raccoons, MASSIVE spiders, even bigger hornets, Bats, massive butterflys and then what I can only describe as massive butterfly/bat hybrid things....
Oh, and it`s on top of a mountain! 20 minutes up a really steep hill from the nearest train station :-)
And best of all is the random people singing at all hours of the night. Really really badly. Last night I had the delights of the same 3 bars of "Eye of the Tiger" over and over and over again. At 1am. When I had to get up at 5am...
And who said Japan was wierd?
Gotta love the place...
Precisely one thing makes up for any inconvenience about them. My entire rent for 1 year has been less than ¥60,000. That`s about $450 (I mean pounds. Japanese keyboards...). In other words, about 1.7 months in Birmingham...
The wildlife certainly makes it interesting... Wild boars, foxes, monkeys, raccoons, MASSIVE spiders, even bigger hornets, Bats, massive butterflys and then what I can only describe as massive butterfly/bat hybrid things....
Oh, and it`s on top of a mountain! 20 minutes up a really steep hill from the nearest train station :-)
And best of all is the random people singing at all hours of the night. Really really badly. Last night I had the delights of the same 3 bars of "Eye of the Tiger" over and over and over again. At 1am. When I had to get up at 5am...
And who said Japan was wierd?
Gotta love the place...
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Randomness
I bumped into Tanaka-Sensei (Supervisor/last term's 2nd Language Acquisition lecturer) today.
Apparently she's a fan of Korean Hip-hop/pop. She rather out-of-the-blue suggested I go listen to G-Dragon (From BIGBANG)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOXEVd-Z7NE
There's a youtube link.
So, while she doesn't buy me beer like Ogasawara-Sensei used to...
I'm sort of lost on what to do now that Sophie's gone (for another 3 weeks traveling around China...) and the JLPT test's over. Studying was pretty much my life for a month and a half... I don't really know what to do anymore. That said, my Kanji reading has gotten so much better now I'm kinda just carrying on... The day after the exam I went out and bought a new textbook...
I've kinda come to realise that in terms of learning a language, it really is more or less just the number of hours of study that count... the more you have the better you are...
Apparently she's a fan of Korean Hip-hop/pop. She rather out-of-the-blue suggested I go listen to G-Dragon (From BIGBANG)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOXEVd-Z7NE
There's a youtube link.
So, while she doesn't buy me beer like Ogasawara-Sensei used to...
I'm sort of lost on what to do now that Sophie's gone (for another 3 weeks traveling around China...) and the JLPT test's over. Studying was pretty much my life for a month and a half... I don't really know what to do anymore. That said, my Kanji reading has gotten so much better now I'm kinda just carrying on... The day after the exam I went out and bought a new textbook...
I've kinda come to realise that in terms of learning a language, it really is more or less just the number of hours of study that count... the more you have the better you are...
JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test)
So, it finally came around... rather unfortunately for me it wasn`t a week earlier, in which case I could have got it over and done with and freely enjoyed Sophie's visit.
It was harder than I expected to be honest, somewhat worried that I may have failed on account of the vocabulary section...
Me and about 5-6 other Kobe University students took it over in Nishinomiya at Kwansei Gakuin University (Which a) has a really nice campus, and b) can't spell its name properly in ANY language, the Japanese name is 関西学院大学, which should really be read as "Kansai" but they call it Kansei for some reason). Incidentally, the people doing level 1 (I did level 2) got to do it in good old Kobe University... Anyway...
Having never actually been to Nishinomiya before we were a bit worried about finding the place... the enormous line of people speaking Chinese and Korean kinda helped...
They all stared at us :-( I will not print Marc's (hilariously non-PC) retort...
This years test was different from before. By that I mean harder. One change was they separated the marking into 3 sections (Vocabulary/ Kanji/ Grammar, Reading and Listening), which you have to pass minimum scores separately as well as an overall score (Stops deaf Chinese people cheating). On the other hand, I read somewhere (I'm not entirely sure if this is right) that the scores were 50/60 for Vocab/ Kanji etc, 30/60 for reading and 40/60 for listening...
Just to emphasise that, you are allowed to get HALF the reading section wrong but only make 10 mistakes in the first section...
I'm not entirely sure that it's accurate, though on the other hand given that "Can you read a page of text and understand what it means" is a much more practical, useful ability to have than "Do you know what 風俗 means", I would fully expect any average person employed in Japanese-language education to value the latter more hightly...
Anyway, I get the results in September...
It was harder than I expected to be honest, somewhat worried that I may have failed on account of the vocabulary section...
Me and about 5-6 other Kobe University students took it over in Nishinomiya at Kwansei Gakuin University (Which a) has a really nice campus, and b) can't spell its name properly in ANY language, the Japanese name is 関西学院大学, which should really be read as "Kansai" but they call it Kansei for some reason). Incidentally, the people doing level 1 (I did level 2) got to do it in good old Kobe University... Anyway...
Having never actually been to Nishinomiya before we were a bit worried about finding the place... the enormous line of people speaking Chinese and Korean kinda helped...
They all stared at us :-( I will not print Marc's (hilariously non-PC) retort...
This years test was different from before. By that I mean harder. One change was they separated the marking into 3 sections (Vocabulary/ Kanji/ Grammar, Reading and Listening), which you have to pass minimum scores separately as well as an overall score (Stops deaf Chinese people cheating). On the other hand, I read somewhere (I'm not entirely sure if this is right) that the scores were 50/60 for Vocab/ Kanji etc, 30/60 for reading and 40/60 for listening...
Just to emphasise that, you are allowed to get HALF the reading section wrong but only make 10 mistakes in the first section...
I'm not entirely sure that it's accurate, though on the other hand given that "Can you read a page of text and understand what it means" is a much more practical, useful ability to have than "Do you know what 風俗 means", I would fully expect any average person employed in Japanese-language education to value the latter more hightly...
Anyway, I get the results in September...
Saturday, 3 July 2010
Does not Compute
For some reason this has happened a couple of times lately...
Basically, I'm sitting somewhere (Starbucks, Kansai Airport (again)) minding my own business, reading something in Japanese (Usually Death-Note. On time it was A PLANETARY SCIENCE TEXTBOOK. Which said EARTH AND PLANETARY SCIENCE in really big kanji on the front cover.), when the Japanese people next to me start talking about me...
Usually it's just stuff like "Wow... he knows Japanese. I wonder what country he's from...", but still, do they honestly think there is even the slightest possibility that I learned to read a language to that level but not understand considerably simpler stuff when it's spoken 50cm in front of me? Dear dear...
I have occasionally called people up on this... I particularly bizarre one happened when the two 40-something women who were doing this started saying stuff like "Hmm, that's odd... your pronounciation is a bit foreigner-ish...".
I put this down to the (somewhat justified) belief most Japanese people have about foreigners not possibly being able to speak Japanese...Even in spite of the blatantly obvious they still sometimes can't get over it...
I did have a thought about a slightly odd double standard. It's sort of expected for Japanese (and pretty much every other non-native-English speaking person) to learn English if they are in the UK/US etc and no-one bats a eyelid when they do, but when we learn Japanese/whatever it's kind of "wow!"... not terribly fair...
Mayuko was saying that compared to 10 years ago there are many more Japanese-speaking foreigners, and maybe in another 10 years it will be considered perfectly normal... is there a fast-forward button on life?
Speaking of fast-forward... JLPT tomorrow afternoon. Back to work....
Oh, and incidentally, Prince Charles can now join David Beckham, Nick from the Backstreet boys, President Obama and Wentz Eiji in that most exclusive/infamous club...
Basically, I'm sitting somewhere (Starbucks, Kansai Airport (again)) minding my own business, reading something in Japanese (Usually Death-Note. On time it was A PLANETARY SCIENCE TEXTBOOK. Which said EARTH AND PLANETARY SCIENCE in really big kanji on the front cover.), when the Japanese people next to me start talking about me...
Usually it's just stuff like "Wow... he knows Japanese. I wonder what country he's from...", but still, do they honestly think there is even the slightest possibility that I learned to read a language to that level but not understand considerably simpler stuff when it's spoken 50cm in front of me? Dear dear...
I have occasionally called people up on this... I particularly bizarre one happened when the two 40-something women who were doing this started saying stuff like "Hmm, that's odd... your pronounciation is a bit foreigner-ish...".
I put this down to the (somewhat justified) belief most Japanese people have about foreigners not possibly being able to speak Japanese...Even in spite of the blatantly obvious they still sometimes can't get over it...
I did have a thought about a slightly odd double standard. It's sort of expected for Japanese (and pretty much every other non-native-English speaking person) to learn English if they are in the UK/US etc and no-one bats a eyelid when they do, but when we learn Japanese/whatever it's kind of "wow!"... not terribly fair...
Mayuko was saying that compared to 10 years ago there are many more Japanese-speaking foreigners, and maybe in another 10 years it will be considered perfectly normal... is there a fast-forward button on life?
Speaking of fast-forward... JLPT tomorrow afternoon. Back to work....
Oh, and incidentally, Prince Charles can now join David Beckham, Nick from the Backstreet boys, President Obama and Wentz Eiji in that most exclusive/infamous club...
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Sophie`s Visit!
So after a crazy month long-cram for the JLPT test (This Sunday, i.e. 2 days!) off I went again to Kansai Airport to pick up Sophie! (Friend from Edinbugh)...
*I have to admit to having realises THE MORNING SHE ARRIVED that her follow on ticket to Shanghai hadn`t been payed for on time and had thus been cancelled... all was well in the end but I more or less flew to the airport on a cloud of panic... "Shit! I`ve stranded my friend in Japan!!!!"... all was well in the end...
**Incidentally, while on the phone with the sales assistant to re-book the flights she asked me how to spell Sophie`s name... When she got to "E as in England" literally all I could think of was "I`m sure イングランド (Ingurando) begins with an I..."
So, been having a great time showing her around Osaka, Kobe etc. We also hopped on the Shinkansen to Okayama, and Hiroshima/Miyajima for the weekend, which I`d always wanted to go to... For the record, I agree with Yume`s assessment of Miyajima. Although we could have done without the rain.
Hiroshima is an interesting place. As a tourist it`s sort of limited, but it looked like a pretty cool place to live. Felt a bit more like Tokyo than Osaka really...
The 原爆ドーム(Genbaku Doumu- the A-Bomb dome) is pretty horrific but the Peace Park is sad but at the same time kinda hopeful.
Sophie`s been laughing at my occasionally messed up English as well... :-( lol. "Lets go to Shinsaibashi, there`s various food...stuffs there..."
Speaking of Sophie herself, she`s bravely off to Tokyo on her own for a few days while I prepare for the exam... think I`ll be ok... as long as I stop writing this and get back to work...
*I have to admit to having realises THE MORNING SHE ARRIVED that her follow on ticket to Shanghai hadn`t been payed for on time and had thus been cancelled... all was well in the end but I more or less flew to the airport on a cloud of panic... "Shit! I`ve stranded my friend in Japan!!!!"... all was well in the end...
**Incidentally, while on the phone with the sales assistant to re-book the flights she asked me how to spell Sophie`s name... When she got to "E as in England" literally all I could think of was "I`m sure イングランド (Ingurando) begins with an I..."
So, been having a great time showing her around Osaka, Kobe etc. We also hopped on the Shinkansen to Okayama, and Hiroshima/Miyajima for the weekend, which I`d always wanted to go to... For the record, I agree with Yume`s assessment of Miyajima. Although we could have done without the rain.
Hiroshima is an interesting place. As a tourist it`s sort of limited, but it looked like a pretty cool place to live. Felt a bit more like Tokyo than Osaka really...
The 原爆ドーム(Genbaku Doumu- the A-Bomb dome) is pretty horrific but the Peace Park is sad but at the same time kinda hopeful.
Sophie`s been laughing at my occasionally messed up English as well... :-( lol. "Lets go to Shinsaibashi, there`s various food...stuffs there..."
Speaking of Sophie herself, she`s bravely off to Tokyo on her own for a few days while I prepare for the exam... think I`ll be ok... as long as I stop writing this and get back to work...
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