Ippoippo

Welcome back to Wales….
We’ve arrived, and I’ve managed to get hold of an internet connection for now… in the office

Just to keep my link back to Japan though, found some new blogs which I’ll be reading.
First up, we have JapanNewbie, which has some pretty interesting Japanese language tuition on Kansai-ben (the Kansai dialect of Japanese from the area around Osaka and Kyoto). There was a story of particular interest, titled “Skinny Girls”. When you come to Japan, you always notice (compared to the UK in my case), how most people are slim and in good shape (some you notice more than others, ahemm …. [ouch!!! virtual slap from Yuko there] ). There are of course a few chubbier people, and the school kids seem to have a higher proportion of chubby people (though, not usually obese). During my time here, it feels like already that the kids have been getting chubbier too. Too many damn McDonalds.
So, that story on skinny girls was quite a shock to me. Japan has a huge percentage of underweight girls compared to it’s GDP…. as the graph shows. That’s just crazy!

The other new site I’ve found is Gaijin on the Run. There was quite an interesting post on the actual count of kanji characters in Japanese, around about 50,000. Yet… to read a newspaper, to be considered literate, you only need to be able to read 2000 characters, 4%! Yep, it’s a strange concept indeed being considered literate when you can only read 4%. Anyway, the full post on that is here.

Anyway, we are now moved into the house we’ve got for about 6 months, before we sort out more long-term housing. We are living right on the northern edge of Cardiff, and we can see the country side about 10-15 minutes walk away…. our place is in the middle of a very green (well, green and brown given it’s winter) housing area. Yuko told her folks that we are living in the country. To her, these suburbs are very countryside-ish to her. She’s happy though… Sainsbury is only 10 minutes walk away!
Just got things to sort out now, switching electricity supplier, sorting out new mobile phone number etc etc. Joy!

We all know how languages change over time, and teenagers are quite often the ones who do it. There was quite an interesting article (considering it was sourced from one of the Japanese tabloids who normally go for titilating stories).
I love how they are making up all these new verbs.

Well, it’s over 30 degrees at the moment, even though we are half-way through September.
Weekend was a pretty chilled out afair. Got up late on Saturday, and did some cleaning. Exciting stuff ehh. Then we headed off for Asakusa. I did a bit of photography at Senso-ji, before we met up with two friends.
One of them (Akiko) will be around for our wedding in December, but the other (Mimi) is going back to the UK soon for further studies.

It was good to see them again, not seen Mimi since last year some time, and Akiko since March this year. We headed off to a rather old style Okonomikyaki house. Real proper ‘cook it yourself’ type place. Good fun.

Yesterday, we wondered if the second rainy season of the year had started. It well and truly pissed down, with quite an impressive thunderstorm above us as well. All thoughts of venturing into town were put on hold, and we duly vegged out in front of the TV.
Pizza was ordered from Pizza Hut, glass of wine was opened, and we finished off the last of the rather fancy chocolates we brought when we were in Bath.

We saw some interesting stuff on TV. There was a programme on BS Fuji (Fuji’s Digital TV channel) called “Rumor”. Basically, guests were told something and had to bet if it was fact or not. One I found quite interesting. The people who live in the Wakayama region of Japan (near Osaka and Kyoto) cannot pronounce any of the sounds on the ざ (za) line of the Japanese characters. Basically, the ‘z’ becomes a ‘d’. So, you have ざ(za) becoming だ (da). It was quite interesting to see people being shown a picture of an elephant and asked what it is. Their response… どう (dou), rather than the correct ぞう(zou). When they wrote it down, even though they knew they should write the hiragana as ぞう they still wrote it as どう. All I can say is thank goodness I don’t live their, otherwise I would be completely confused!

And now, as I type this, it’s back to the old slog in work (well, actually, it’s lunchtime, but you know what I mean).

I love those times in Japan when I get to speak to some random stranger.

Yesterday, when travelling home from Japanese class, I decided to go ahead and do some of my homework. So, out came my みんなの日本語 (Minna no Nihongo) book. The books are kinda scary looking at first, because everything is in Japanese. Not a whif of English.
Anyway, an old lady (guessing she was 60-something) sat down next to me on the train, and she then noticed the book. At one stage, I got stuck trying to remember some vocab, at which point she then told me the word I was trying to remember. Naturally, I thanked her, and then we had a brief chat before she got off the train. By no means was it a conversation about important, intellectual subjects, but I still enjoyed it.