JapanesePod101.com Blog

You know that wedding reception table where the bride and groom seat misfits who don’t belong at any other table? Well, that oddball table is ours today! We’ll feast on a smorgasbord of random, cool things pertaining to 中.

Speaking of seating, we encountered two seat-related compounds in the last blog:

中座 (chūza: leaving before an event (e.g., a meeting) is over)
     in the middle + gathering

座中 (zachū: in the room, gathering, theatrical troupe)
     gathering + in the middle

My definition of 座 as “gathering” may have seemed strange to you; 座 (ZA, suwa(ru)) more commonly means “seat” or “to sit.” Actually, the kanji 席 (SEKI) also means “seat.” And as it happens, both characters combine with 中 in compounds. If 中座 and 座中 refer to leaving or staying in rooms, what could 中席 mean? You’ll find out if you take a quick quiz!

For Verbal Logic Quiz 1 …

Can You Be More Specific?

The compound 中席 is one of several 中 words with crazy specificity:

車中談 (shachūdan: informal talk given aboard a train (as by a politician))     car + inside + to discuss

中農 (chūnō: middle-class farmer)     middle + farm

中腰 (chūgoshi: half-sitting, half-standing posture)     middle + loins

This reminds me of the “fierce pose” or “chair pose” in yoga.

暑中見舞い (shochū-mimai: routine inquiry about (someone’s) health in the hot season)     hot + during + inquiry (last 2 chars.,
                                           which break down as to see + to dance)

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Mina-san,

Earlier this week we announced the launch of the Dialog and Review premium clips, which I hope everyone is enjoying. Today, we are glad to announce the much anticipated release of two more essential premium features which are sure to take your writing and speaking skills to new heights.

Kana Stroke Order Videos
The Kana Stroke Order Videos show you the proper stroke order for all basic Hiragana and Katakana characters. The videos, which include the sound of each character, show you exactly how to write each character stroke by stroke. They are available for all active Premium subscribers on the Hiragana Chart and Katakana Chart pages in the Reference Material section of our Learning Center. Below is a sample of one of these videos (requires Quicktime to view):

Pronunciation Practice
To address speaking practice, we have integrated a state-of-the-art software to allow you to record your own voice so you can compare your pronunciation to our teachers and continue to refine your speaking skills. This feature is available to all active Premium subscribers in the Kanji, Kana, and Romaji sections of the Line-By-Line Audio Transcript page for each lesson in the Learning Center (see screenshot below):

We hope you enjoy these new premium features and as always please let us know what you think.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

In the last blog, we saw how -中 is a powerhouse of a suffix. For instance, adding -中 to 日本 (Nihon: Japan) gives us 日本中 (Nihonjū: all over Japan, throughout Japan). What emphasis -中 throws on a compound! With that in mind, here’s a quick quiz. What does 訪中 (hōchū) mean? One hint: 訪 (HŌ, tazu(neru)) means “to visit.”

Take some time to think…. Can you hear the Jeopardy music in the background?

OK, time’s up. It’s certainly tempting to interpret 訪中 as “throughout a visit.” But no, 訪中 produces a kanji gotcha! In this case, 中 means “China,” so 訪中 is a “visit to China”!

This raises a new question: Whenever 中 appears in a compound, does the character refer to China or not? Instinct can lead you astray in such matters; wild guesses prove to be just as accurate. Try your luck with some 中 compounds in the first Verbal Logic Quiz and see how it goes!

For Answers to the Quiz …

For another devilishly hard quiz related to place names, click the next link.
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Mina-san,

Marky here! As you can probably tell, JapanesePod101.com is truly a labor of love for us! We love learning and teaching Japanese and honestly, we’re having a lot of fun. But we’re always trying to think of ways to improve what we’re doing or thinking “how can we do something different?” And often the best ideas come from you all!

Introducing 2 new Tracks added to the Premium Feed!

The Review Track

A lot of people have asked us to leave some blank space when introducing vocab so they could have some time to repeat and practice. Well, if you’ve been with us a while, you know we tried a while back. We had some good feedback about that, but it dragged the podcasts on with silence and ate up time for going through grammar points and focusing on the stories. But now we’ll begin offering a separate audio download that will focus on getting your pronunciation and pitch accent correct. We’ll review the vocab and phrases introduced in each podcast lesson. In future lessons, we may vary this a little, so we’d love to hear your feedback.

The Dialog Track

Again, a lot of people asked us if we could include a separate track that has only the conversation without the lesson. Again, if you’ve been with us a while, you know we toyed around with this idea in the Learning Center in the past (combining 2 part stories, etc…). Well, now we’ve decided to officially include this in the Premium Feed so you can take it with you on the go!

Introducing Newbie Appendix Tracks

Included with our usually free podcast lesson, we’ve decided to supplement Naomi Sensei’s Newbie course with some occasional appendixes. This week we were covering numbers, so we thought it would be nice to dedicate some audio specifically for this reason. This won’t be for every lesson, but when we tackle some important topics we thought it’d be better to separate this detailed info from the regular podcast lesson. Hopefully we can stay more focused this way. (fingers crossed, LOL).

Of course, the occasional bonus track will be called for. These will be anything from supplementary material, off-topic discussions, studio outtakes, etc. We’ve always had a lot of fun with these so we’ll keep at it.

Ask a Sensei!

Also, this week we will be going into the studio with Yano Sensei to address the questions you submitted to us. We’re really excited about this because a lot of you have told us you don’t have a Japanese teacher or can’t take classes in your area. I think this is a cool way to put you in touch with a man who has A LOT OF EXPERIENCE teaching Japanese. If you don’t know what this is all about, then please check our earlier post:
Your Turn to Interview a Sensei

O-Bon Kaidan

And if that wasn’t enough to keep us working late while everyone else has お盆休み, I wanna talk about something I’m really excited about.
We’ve been talking up our ghost stories lately. But why did we decide to this?
Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, Yūki-san and I were talking one day about the Edo Period tradition of 百物語怪談 (100 Ghost Stories). This happened duing O-Bon season, families and friends would gather together and light 100 candles. People would take turns telling a ghost story. After the story finished, 1 candle was put out. This carried on until the last story was told and the final candle extinguished. It was said a ghost would come into the room at this time. Now, exactly why people wanted to hang out with a ghost, I can’t really say. But I’m sure a lot of great stories were told! So we thought, let’s try something totally different from other JPod lessons. Let’s take a break from the lesson format, and just tell some stories. It’s our way of thanking the Basic and Premium listeners for supporting us. It also gave us a chance to do something really cool. Like I said before, we love what we’re doing so this was a bonus for us too! We really hope you enjoy these stories.

On that note, I’d like to refer to you a cool site. This is for Zenshoan Temple which has a famous (well, not really) gallery of 幽霊画 (Yuurei-ga), or paintings of ghosts. Very, very cool stuff.
http://www.theway.jp/zen/html/gallary/somnailindex.html

As with anything we do here, we’d love to hear your feedback!

宜しくお願いします♪

マーキー

In last week’s blog, we saw how a single 中 can change “deep in the night” (夜中, yonaka) into “all night” (夜中中, yonakajū). Despite its simple shape, 中 packs quite a punch. And with 中, you get three suffixes for the price of one! That is, the suffix -中 has three meanings. As the meaning changes, so might the yomi. Let’s look at each meaning.

1. Period of Time: JŪ

Let’s say you have a compound expressing a period of time (a day, week, month, year, and so on). The suffix -中 (pronounced -JŪ) enables you to convey that something happened throughout that period of time. A few examples:

For a Note About 今週中 …

On How Your Days Are Numbered …

For the most part, this table is straightforward. Even the breakdowns are self-explanatory. But there’s an exception to the pattern:

午前 (gozen: morning,        午前中 (gozenchū: all morning)
noon + before)

This compound refers to a period of time but atypically uses the yomi CHŪ. A mnemonic may help with this aberration:

All morning I chew.

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Today our friend Yukako Tajima, AKA Tajee, has informed us of another useful website that can be used as a tool for Japanese language acquisition. The website World Podcasting News, still in beta, provides short audio clips in Japanese about podcasting and related topics. The audio clips are based on articles from Podcasting News, and a link to the article is available in the post. Therefore, if you read the article and then listen to the short audio clip, this may prove to be a useful tool in your quest towards mastering Japanese.
We would be very interested to hear what you think of this site.

When a Japanese friend emailed me that he likes to stay up all night, it blew me away on two accounts. First, I can’t imagine wanting to stay up till dawn. I did plenty of that in college, and I’m not eager to revisit the experience. Second, look how he said “throughout the night”:

夜中中 (yonakajū)

Two instances of 中 in a row, each with different readings! Let’s break this down to see what’s going on here:

夜 (YA, yo, yoru) means “night.”
中 (CHŪ, naka) means “in, inside, middle.”

Yonaka combines two kun-yomi (yo and naka) to mean “deep in the night.” (When read as yonaka, 夜中 also means “midnight, but let’s set that aside.)

In 夜中中, the final 中 is a suffix meaning “throughout.” Two notable things about this suffix:

1. It makes the whole compound mean “all night.”

2. As a suffix, 中 has two possible yomi: -CHŪ and -JŪ. In yonakajū, clearly the latter applies.

In any case, I can’t think of another compound in which a suffix creates back-to-back instances of the same kanji. Can you?!
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