The School and the Course

The School

The school is called the ARC Academy and I am very happy there. It is a short walk from Yokohama station and in and bright, modern building. The class are very motivated and full of fun and the 3 1/2 hours each day passes very quickly. We have a Kanji test every Monday morning and a general language and grammar test every Friday. After two weeks I've made quite a bit of progress but am nowhere near speaking and writing fluently.

Above is a bit of last week's white board.

 Below is part of a page from the text book.

2)
この 料理は 少し お酒を （ 入れる ）と、おいしく なります。
りょう り すこ さけ い
3)
聖徳太子
しょう とく たい し
8.
聖徳太子は 574年に 奈良で 生まれました。子どもの とき、
しょう とく たい し ねん な ら う こ
勉強が 好きで、馬の 乗り方も 上手で、友達が たくさん いました。
べん きょう す うま の かたじょう ず とも だち
一度に 10人の 人の 話を 聞く ことが できました。
いち ど にん ひとはなし き
20歳に なった とき、国の 政治の 仕事を 始めました。そして
さい くに せい じ し ごと はじ
お寺を 造ったり、日本人を 中国に 送ったり しました。
てら つく に ほん じんちゅう ごく おく

The Language.

 The spoken language is quite pleasing to the Western ear. Being polysyllabic and containing a lot of vowels and few hard consonants. It looks when written in Roman script a bit like Italian, with all the a's , i's and e's.


The good things about the grammar etc are:

-There are only three irregular verbs.
-There are two past and two present tenses but no future.
-No plural nouns, adjectives or adverbs and no male/female ones, unlike French.
-There are very few exceptions to the rules and the rules are pretty easy to understand.

The bad things are:

-Many words have exactly the same sound, think of two- to -too in English and multiply by about 5 for each sound. 
-The word order is almost exactly backwards to English.
-There are many levels of politeness that affects the choice of vocab and the verb endings.

The Writing

This is the really tough bit. The Japanese writing system is widely acknowledged as being the most complex in the world. In any one sentence you can have five distinct things going on:


-There is a phonetic alphabet, HIRAGANA (ひらがな), that corresponds to various syllables and is used for Japanese words.

-There is another alphabet,  KATAKANA  (カタカ),   that is different to the above and is used for words derived from foreign languages and sometimes in advertising.

-They occasionally use the Roman alphabet as well.

-Hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, (Kanji), characters are  used for the their meaning, each character generally having two distinct pronunciations depending on whether it is in a compound word or not.  Compound Kanji  tend to be pronounced more as a Chinese person would say them. 

-The Kanji characters can also be used phonetically, i.e. for their sound not their meaning. Thus symbol for rice:

is also the symbol for the USA because to early Japanese ears it sounded a bit like the "Ameri" in America.

So you can get all five systems in the one sentence.  It can be quite taxing at times, sort of like trying to do a kryptic crossword written in different languages all mixed up.

There are some great derivations and hilarious origins of the Kanji. Also trying to decipher what the English word is that Japanese are trying to write phonetically can provide hours of entertainment. I'll show you some of my favourite Kanji treasures in another post.

 

Mother's Day Boo Boo.

Today is (was) Mother's Day and Tomono got breakfast in bed consisting of  most of her favourite things. The main present was a very nice bunch of flowers purchased at not inconsiderable expense. Cut flowers are pretty expensive here, whereas garden plants are incredibly cheap.

But I made a major mistake as this particular bunch of flowers is intended for offering only at gravesides. Luckily we have a shrine dedicated pretty much to her mother's memory here in the house. So the flowers went to her mother and loss of face was avoided and the gift gratefully accepted.

Blood Group Menu

Now here's a funny thing from a local restaurant:

 It's a menu choice based on your blood group. No kidding. In Japan many people believe that your blood group determines much about you. One of the questions they may ask people they are meeting is "What is your blood group?"

 People with different blood groups are meant to have different personality traits etc, sort of like, and as silly as, the horoscope. Also apparently, although I have never checked, different size condoms are sold according to blood group. Go figure, as they say.

The Morning Commute

It's about forty five minutes from the house to Yokohama station. Then it's ten minutes walk to the school. I leave at about 7.45 each morning and join the morning rush heading up towards Tokyo. The monorail is a great idea it takes up a lot less room than ordinary rail and has the advantage of running up steeper hills and not messing up the landscape so much. The Japanese train system is quite honestly one of the wonders of the world, more on that later.



 Down the street,                                                      

                                                                                                      turn at Mr Azalia's splendid garden.

Catch the monorail, 

 

then the train..

Become a sardine at Yokohama Station.

B

Studying in Kamakura The Host Family

I arrived on Sunday afternoon with Tomono at my new family's house. They are thankfully awfully nice and most importantly, of course, the mother is a great cook.

I have a sunny room upstairs in the corner of the house with its own balcony. There is a lovely view over the
green hills. The building code is very strict and what you see are buildings in the valleys with green hills poking out all over the place.

It's Childrens Day May 5th, (well boys day originally).

May the 5th  and it is time to fly carp kites. Our neighbour puts up a large pole with decorations and in a display reminiscent of the Christmas tree light wars, tries to outdo everybody.

Cat Manga

 

 

Bought at the local supermarket and spotted by Tomono of course .There is a manga and magazine for everything here. Despite the digital age and the Japanese obsession with gadgets and all things electrical there is not another country in the world with so many bookshops, at least not one with a bookshop at every railway station.

 

The house

Upstairs:
Dining room,living room, kitchen, traditional Japanese room with the family shrine, balcony.

Downstairs:
Western main bedroom, Japanese bedroom, spare kitchen/ store room.bathroom.

Set lunch at Hanadoro

This is the $15 set lunch from our local restaurant, Hanadoro. Unbelievable value, and super fresh and healthy food. This set lunch is all vegetables and tofu.  It's in a beautiful place in an old merchant's house with many quiet rooms and excellent decor. It also has the most elegant dunnies in  Japan.

Local Traditional Barrel Maker

Near our house is an old little shop where a 90 year old man makes wooden vessels the traditional way. He selects the trees, cuts them down and ages the wood in his yard. He is one of the few people in the entire Tokyo area who still knows how to do all this properly. On the left are Taiko drums he is making from bamboo. Drumming schools from all over Japan are stocking up and sending him many orders as they worry that when he goes it will be impossible to find such good workmanship.  In the past he made wooden bathtubs as well.

We got him to make us a wooden rice serving bowl, top left. We want bring it back to Australia but don't want the customs to spray it.