6

Have you ever read one of those articles that lists words in foreign languages that express concepts in English for which we have no word? Like tartle, from Scots, "to hesitate in recognizing a person or thing, as happens when you are introduced to someone whose name you cannot recall."

Just for fun I want to make a short off-the-cuff list of some common Japanese words that English doesn't really have an easy equivalent for, and vice-versa.

The 和 List

• 面倒臭い (mendokusai*)
• A phrase used primarily by the young and/or deeply annoyed, meaning something along the lines of I can't be bothered with this (shite).
• 宜しく (yoroshiku)
• A catch-all word for commencing or ending situations. You can translate it as please treat me favorably, but it feels wooden and unnecessary in English. It is, actually, unnecessary in English, and that's why we don't have a word for it--but it's indispensable in Japanese, where 宜しく is the bookend to many formal social situations and perhaps most business-related conversations. 
• Without this magic word, conversations would materialize out of nowhere and end roughly, like ending a sentence without a period and just starting the next with a capital letter If I had to force a cognate in English, I'd point to ending telephone conversations.We have this word goodbye, but it's never enough just to say goodbye and hang up the phone--at least not in my family or group of friends. We have to warm up to the bye. First an excuse is in order: Welp, I better xyz before it gets too late. And after that bit of chitchat is done, Alright, talk to you later followed by a response, then See ya, then Bye. It's terribly illogical if you look at it for long enough, but it's the flow of our language.
• おつかれさまです (otsukarasamadesu)
• Like 宜しく above, this is a set phrase that you hear on a daily basis if you work in Japan. It literally means here's a tired respectable person, translates to you must be tired, and has a close cognate in the phrase Good job. Coworkers say it to each other when they pass each other in the hallway instead of Hi or How's it going like Americans do. 
• (One of the great feats of Japanese engineering is the average Japanese male's ability to squash the eight-syllable おつかれさまです into three or fewer syllables.)
• (It might be worthwhile to start saying Good job! to coworkers when we pass in the office. Nobody cares how you're doing even when they ask, and Good job! feels nice and is funny from the get-go.)
• 微妙 (bimyo)
• This word has an English cognate in sensitive, subtle, or delicate. But it also has a slang version where its meaning is abstracted into near-unrecognizability--like we do with cool, for example. In the slang version, ビミョー means No, but in a really vague way, like you don't want to be quoted as having actually said no.
• A fuller and altogether better explanation than mine can be found at this blog.
• -しまう (-shimau)
• This verb suffix has a number of uses (it translates as to finish in most dictionaries, but that's terribly misleading), but my favorite is when it conjugates in such a way as to give a sense of having messed up to whatever otherwise normal sentence you've just said. For example:
• 私は彼にそれをするように言いつけた。I told him to do it.
• 私は彼にそれをするように言いつけちゃった。I told him to do it (which was a bad idea).

The 英 List
I can't think of much for English because I don't know the extent of Japanese yet. That said, there is no awesome equivalent to the following two words--the first I know from experience, the second from casual testimony from two Japanese friends of mine.

• fuck
• Not that you can't swear in Japanese, but there's no fucking word quite as fucking flexible as fuck.
• remind
•  I was surprised when I heard this one. Apparently it's true. I guess it shouldn't be so surprising, since re- is a Latin suffix, not an Old English'n.
• Anyways, how neat!

*I'm transcribing the words for English speakers, not according to ローマ字, so I'm ignoring specifically marking long vowels because English speakers give remarkably few damns about them.

There must be much more interesting ones than these floating around, so if you know any feel free to jot them down in the comments.

5

 

This post would be better written on the back of a piece of scrap paper, but what the hell.

Numbercrunchtime:

I'm taking the 日本語能力試験N2 on December 1st this year. Google先生 tells me that's 172 days from now.

That's 24 weeks and 4 days. Or to put it another way, 4120-odd hours, give or take. I'm starting to sweat, because I've been spending most of my waking hours studying and immersed in Japanese since the beginning of April, and the time is flying by and I don't feel like I'm learning all that much. I feel like I'm shoveling sand into a jar with a fork.

The Grammar One

I bought this bad boy recently, as well as two more books in the series: the Reading One and the Listening One. The plan so far is to work my way through this guy, then tackle the reading and listening books simultaneously.

On top of this, I recently got a subscription to this online study website called iKnow. It's got a good interface, and it's helping me to fill in the gaping academic holes in my Japanese vocabulary. As it turns out, you don't learn technical or niche words like 管理 (management), 財政 (public finance), or ぞっと (shuddering, trembling) talking to your Japanese friends at 居酒屋 (bars).

On top of that, I'm still using and adding cards to Anki daily, which lets me focus on the tougher grammar bits from the book, review kanji, and would supposedly help me learn difficult sentences I found while reading Japanese for pleasure if I could kick myself back into the habit of reading Japanese for pleasure.

But this is a numbers game, and I'm hesitating to calculate because I'm worried that I'm setting myself up for a scare. But here goes:

• I have roughtly 170 pages left in the grammar book; there are 192 pages and 101 pages to cover in the reading and listening books respectively.  The last few days I've had an easy schedule at school and have found out that I can study a grammar chapter, do the accompanying mini-test, and 入力 the questions I got wrong or find difficult into Anki at a rate of about one page every 20 minutes. (A very rough guess, but it'll work for now.)
• If I'm going to stick with iKnow, there are 6000 vocabulary words separated into 6 courses of 10 chapters each. I tested into Core 3000, which means, as of now, I have about 3600 words to go to complete all the courses.
• Anki-wise, I can clear 100 cards in about 40~50 minutes, and I have two decks (grammar and kanji) that I should tackle daily.

So, to whit:

• 463 pages (with the grammar book taking another estimated 23 hours+the test at my current speed)
• +3600 words
• +90分minutes of 暗記Anki 勉強study per 日day
• divided by 172 days
• イーコルequals!

=About 3 textbook pages per day (about an hour at the desk/computer);

=About 21 new words per day (about two hours, including new words+review)

Hm. That seems doable. Too doable. I wonder if I'm miscalculated somewhere...

 

Ah... Summer. Beautiful Everything, Nagano. Right.

4

I have the best coworker in the world. I'm sorry everyone else; you lose.

Here's a little story about the past few weeks.

My coworker is a math teacher whose desk faces mine. We chat every day about this and that. A few weeks ago we got on the subject of James Joyce and I gave her my Japanese copy of Dubliners and introduced her, just for kicks, to Finnegans Wake.

(Usually when I start talking FW people start backing away slowly. But my coworker is different. That's one reason why she's the best in the world, as I said.)

She started reading Dubliners and the other day, nearly finished with the book, she asked me why I liked James Joyce so much.

In stumbling Japanese, I said Joyce was interesting because his writing style changed with each book. That he was neat-o.

In response, she compared Joyce to Natsume Soseki and commented on the way Joyce depicted life in Dubliners straightfaced, without comment, and the effect that lack of verbal decoration had on the narrative as a whole.

She said lots of other things, too, but I couldn't catch most of it. Part of the reason was because, as I mentioned before, my listening abilities in Japanese are dismal; but another part of the reason was that the conversation had turned me into a tightly wound ball of wonder and I was too caught up in the moment to think. Like when a fanboy meets his idol by chance in the street and can only gape at awesome fortune, here I was finally, after years in Japan, having a deep conversation about literature in a foreign language with someone much better read and a more articulate thinker besides. I was too existentially happy to bring anything to the table. Because--I'm saying--this was a dream come true. I have good conversations about literature all the time with non-Japanese friends over here, and I can get my lit-fix on the Internet anytime. But this was the first time that I had a serious, high-minded conversation on the topic with a Japanese person in Japanese.

It was thrilling. And that episode was followed up this morning when my coworker pointed me to this gardening blog written by a Japanese woman living in England. She recommended it to me on the basis of it being beautifully written in an older style of Japanese (take this for example: 「本当に長いご無沙汰の後の更新ですが、そして薔薇のシーズンにはまだ数週間を要しますけれど、今の庭の様子をご覧いただければ幸せに存じます」), and by telling me that "when I try to talk like that, my tongue catches."

I can sense the beauty of that sentence like I can fathom a glacier from its bobbing iceberg tip. But it's a start, and I have someone who can guide me sitting right across from me.That, to put it mildly, is McAwesomesauce.

Anyways, really happy with my luck this year. In fact, I've been having nightmares all week about the stuff I went through last year--school and roommate problems--but the atmosphere in my area of the teachers room is even better than the nightmares are bad. The kind of person my coworker is is truly rare, and I'm incredibly fortunate to have someone as quality (and as patient) as her to talk to every day. It's the kind of understanding we should always strive for in communicating with our friends, but perhaps rarely do. It's a return of that electricity that I felt most often in late high school and throughout college talking with my friends. It turns out it doesn't necessarily fade with age, just in the people who let it.

Maybe this is a small thing, but I don't think so.