JapanesePod101.com Blog

Yuri sent us an e-mail last week about why she’s studying Japanese.  Being half-Japanese and growing up outside of Japan, she told us she really wants to improve, but has trouble picking up the language.

“I am half-Japanese on my mother’s side. Although she wasn’t taught Japanese growing up she encouraged me to learn, and as I got older I began to want to learn the language myself. I have used many resources over the years but never have I found as great a listening comprehension resource as Japanesepod.

When I found Japanesepod I had already studied for several years, and so was able to jump right in at the intermediate/upper intermediate levels. I also greatly enjoyed Miki’s Blog because it was at just the right level for me, with the bonus of learning a lot about Japanese culture.
I don’t think I have a favorite section — I really am enjoying the onomatopoeic section, though
I love sound-words. And as an aspiring OEL manga creator, I just wish English had more of them!”
ありがとうございます！”

For those who don’t know, ‘manga’ are Japanese comic books. They’re often turned into full length animated shows called ‘anime’. OEL means “Originally English Language”, so Yuri hopes to create Japanese style comic books in the English Language.

Good luck with that Yuri, I hope you do well!

I’m a big fan of the manga One Piece.  It’s a long, but casual and fun story about pirates.  To study and practice Japanese I used to translate chapters for other fans.  Does anyone have a favorite manga series? Let me know your favorite series or why you’re studying the language!

Here’s a Seinfeldian type of question: Have you ever wondered why we call odd numbers odd? After all, every other number is odd. What’s so strange about that? They’re hardly scarce. (By contrast, much scarcer numbers are called prime, as if they’re of great value, like prime rib or prime real estate.)

I’d never considered the matter of numerical oddness until I came upon this compound:

奇数 (kisū: odd number)     odd number + number

In 奇数, says Halpern, 奇 means “odd number.” But the original and most common meaning of 奇 (KI, ku(shiki)) is “unusual, strange, odd,” and the meaning “odd number” clearly spun off from that. In both English and Japanese, then, uneven numbers have a whiff of strangeness about them.

Another Oddity …

It seems that the English etymology of “odd number” has to do with the “odd man out,” the “third wheel,” and that kind of thing.

As for the etymology of 奇, some scholars interpret this character as “standing on one leg.” According to one dictionary, “odd number” may be an extended meaning of that “one leg.” Standing on one leg has associations with being strange (flamingos excepted). To borrow from Orwell, then, “Two legs good, one leg bad.”
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Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

* My computer crashed, and my JapanesePod101.com files are gone!
* I lost my iPod! All my JapanesePod101.com lessons…gone.
* I got a virus, and my computer is toast.
* I reformatted my computer, and I didn’t back up my JapanesePod101.com lessons.
* I accidentally deleted JapanesePod101.com files, help!
* My computer died.
* My iPhone got wet, and….

Over the years, we’ve seen almost every possible scenario on how our Japanese lessons go missing. We weren’t sure how to solve the issue. After all subscription do run out, but people want to use our lessons forever. This simple solution was proposed by one of users who lost his audio files when he lost his iPod.

“Dear JapanesePod101.com,

I recently lost my iPod, and all my JapanesePod101.com lessons with it. I would download the lessons again, but my subscription ran out. I’ll renew in the near future, but for now, I only want Newbie Season 2 - Nihongo Dojo. I searched your site and store, but I couldn’t find a data CD of any lessons you offer.

Do you offer data CDs of lessons? If not, could you burn me a CD of Newbie Season 2? Let me know the cost and shipping. And I’ll paypal it over.

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu! Forever grateful…”

And that was it. That simple. We burned the CD. Sent it out. And this offer was created.

Now you can get a backup of any season for just $29.99 + shipping and handling. Shipped direct from Japan, you get all audio, video, and lesson notes from the season you want.

What you get:

*All main audio tracks for the season (at least 25)
*All bonus audio and video material
*All dialog only audio tracks
*All audio review tracks
*All video vocabulary
*All lesson notes (in PDF format)
*All Kanji close-ups (in PDF format)

In addition, you’ll get 5 bonus audio tracks, a special message from the team, and a special present only available in Japan.

This CD is Guaranteed for LIFE! No matter the reason, we’ll replace the content in the CD, NO questions asked! 60-day money back guarantee! That’s right! Lose it, no problem. Break it, no problem. Erase it, no problem. We replace it NO questions asked. Get your backup for LIFE of the series you love.

In addition, if you aren’t satisfied for any reason, or it doesn’t live up to your expectations, you won’t be out at all. Just send us an email, and we’ll refund the purchase price. 60-day money back guarantee!

This CD is shipped directly from Japan with a Special Gift from the Peter, Naomi, Sakura, Natsuko and the entire JapanesePod101.com TEAM!

Want to backup your CD’s for LIFE? Click here to find out more!

Have pen pals?  Lars wrote in to tell us since using JapanesePod101 his pen pals have been quite surprised with his Japanese.  He also told us about how he first decided to learn the language and why.

“I’m Lars (38) from Germany and I have a relationship to Japan for many years. I like Japanese sports and culture. And finally I have decided to start to learn this beautiful language Japanese.

I went to at a local public high school and noticed soon that the style of the textbook does not really cover current daily Japanese language. Additionally there are not many chances to practice conversations in a big class. So I went on looking for other options.

My search ended with japanesepod101.com.

I like browsing through the podcasts and listen to them on the train every day. With access to daily spoken Japanese, useful grammar exercises and learning videos I can really see how my Japanese gets better and better.

Meanwhile I also have Japanese penpals and I am happy to surprise them with many natural phrases and words that I have learned from JapanesePod101.com”

Pen pals are a great way to practice your Japanese.  I had two while going to college and they really helped me with learning natural, conversational Japanese and gave me interesting opinions which really taught me more about the culture and the Japanese perspective.

Does anyone have any experiences with pen pals?  Send us your story to contactus@japanesepod101.com, subject line: Mail Bag or discuss in the comments below.

Today’s blog features two parts: a contest and a palindrome puzzle. They’re both challenging in their own ways, so 頑張ってください (Ganbatte kudasai: Good luck)! Back next week with a more typical blog!

Contest!

Do you want to win a copy of Crazy for Kanji: A Student’s Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters? I’m hoping that my new book will make you fall in love with kanji. I’m also hoping it will serve as a map that orients you in the vast and often confusing world of kanji characters.

For a free copy, try your hand at the eight questions in the contest at the first link. Whether you’re a kanji newbie or an expert, you’ll find a fairly level playing field here. By and large, the questions don’t draw on knowledge but rather on intuition about the logic (or illogic!) of kanji.

The rules are simple:

1. Three winners will receive signed copies of Crazy for Kanji.

2. Winners are those with the greatest number of right answers. It’s a hard quiz, so the highest scorer may have answered just a few questions correctly!

3. Feel free to consult dictionaries or other reference material.

4. The contest ends on March 29, 2009, at 11:59 p.m., Japan Standard Time.

5. Contestants should email answers to evekushner@yahoo.com with “JPod Contest” in the subject line.

6. Answers should be formatted more or less like this: “1a, 2b, 3c, etc.” No need to include words.

7. On April 3, I’ll post both the quiz answers and the winners’ names on the blog. I’ll also notify winners by email. At that time I’ll ask for a snail mail address, so we can ship you a copy of the book.

8. Have fun with the contest! That’s the most important rule of all!

For the Contest …

Palindrome Puzzle

Recently, a Japanese man sent me a palindrome. He wrote it entirely in hiragana and challenged me to convert it to kanji. And he said this palindrome has been making the rounds in Japan for a long time.

Actually, it’s appropriate for a palindrome to make the rounds, when you consider the first kanji in the compound for “palindrome”:
Read the rest of this entry »

Today we’d like to share another story from the Mail Bag Contest we did recently from Nathan Mittelman of Sydney, Australia.  What do you do while listening to the podcast? Nathan walks his dogs and has even taught them commands in Japanese!

Here’s his full story:

“On my first trip to Japan I was sure I would pick up Japanese easily.  I had the wonderful opportunity to work at Tokai University Hospital for a working holiday.  Although I had no previous experience with the Japanese language, I had been able to pick up European languages quickly and easily, and so smugly I thought Japanese would be a pushover.  I bought a phrase book at the airport in Sydney and spent a few hours reviewing it on the plane.

The problems started immediately on arrival.  

From trying to read the kanji on a train ticket automatic dispenser, to a simple query for a direction, I was lost.  I was supposed to go to a hotel in Akasaka, but while I was on the train I looked at a map and became confused with Asakusa.  Everything sounded the same!   I got off at the wrong stop and because the train had stopped under a department store I couldn’t find my way outside. I just kept on going up into the department store. No one seemed to understand my frantic “Where is the exit?” question. If it wasn’t for the kind help of a passing ‘gaijin’ I probably would still be lost in the Daimaru kimono department.

I had to admit that simply ‘picking up’ Japanese was going to be impossible.  My Australian accent was a real obstacle and so real communication was very limited.

Two months time flew quickly and I fell in love with Japan.  The kindness and patience of the Japanese people led me to enjoy a magical time and I was certain I would return. Secretly, I made a resolution that I would speak Japanese on my return.

In Australia I looked for Japanese courses at the university or adult education classes, but I couldn’t find a course to suit me.  The classes were at inconvenient times, difficult locations and too expensive. I also knew that my preferred study style was to learn at my own pace.

How was I going to learn Japanese?  It was then I received a wonderful gift of an mp3 player and discovered podcasts.

Before long I found JapanesePod101.com and within minutes I was in business.  Not only did it teach Japanese, but it was also light hearted, positive and fun.  Now I was able to study in my car on the way to and from work and have the occasional laugh.  How convenient!  I didn’t need to travel to classes and share a teacher with lots of other students.  I have my own personal teacher in the car!  I could learn at my own pace and listen over and over again until I felt that have mastered the new vocabulary.

My next trip to Japan was so much easier.  Not only was I able to communicate, but my Japanese friends were impressed with my ability.  I heard, “日本語が上手ですね！” repeatedly from my Japanese friends, but this time they seemed genuinely surprised by my quick progress. The lessons had been perfect for ‘real life’ situations and I was able to ask directions and speak to shopkeepers.

I have continued with JapanesePod101.com and find the best feature is its convenience.  I can study when or where it suits me.  I continue to study in the car, but also when I do the supermarket shopping or while walking my dogs.  Even my dogs now respond to ‘Sit’ and ‘Come here’ in Japanese!

I find listening to native speakers at normal and slow pace very helpful.   I can identify each syllable separately and clearly and learn the vocabulary before reading notes to consolidate my writing skills.

My Japanese is improving daily and I am looking forward to my next trip to Japan where I can ‘show off’ my new Japanese skills to my friends.  Thank you so much JapanesePod101 for teaching me Japanese! 

ほんとにどうもありがとうございました!”

I think Nathan’s story sums up what the first trip to Japan can be like for just about everyone.  I know it’s very similar to my own when I landed in Fukuoka.  It’s nice to see Nathan didn’t back down from a challenge and is preparing for round 2 of Japan!

When an actor wins an award for a film, one rarely hears a profound acceptance speech. But that’s what happened in January. At the Golden Globes, Colin Farrell won “Best Actor in a Motion Picture—Musical Or Comedy” for In Bruges, a movie I adored. And when he accepted the honor, he equated curiosity to love.

“Aha!” I thought. “That’s exactly right!” When you’re passionately in love with someone or something, you want to know everything you can about that love object. Which is how I feel about kanji. Which is why “Kanji Curiosity” could just as easily be called “Kanji Love” (though the alliteration would disappear).

And as it turns out, you can use the kanji for “love” to indicate that you have a fanatical interest in something. I recently made the following business card to hand out in kanji-related situations:

For the first line, 漢字愛好家 (kanji aikōka: kanji lover), I could also have written 漢字愛好者 (kanji aikōsha: kanji lover). They’re essentially the same, except for a slight difference in nuance, as the suffix -家 (ka) means “expert.” It’s highly presumptuous of me to have chosen -家, but I preferred it to -者, which simply means “person” and struck me as terribly bland.

Here’s how all the characters break down:

漢字 (kanji)     China + characters
愛好家 (aikōka: lover)     to love + to be fond of + expert

Although one might expect the “love” kanji, 愛, to factor into many other words about obsessive love, 好 (KŌ, su(ki): to be fond of) plays that role instead, particularly in words about being “girl crazy” or “boy crazy.”

Girl Crazy, Boy Crazy

The suffix -好き (-zuki) means “-lover” or “-phile,” as in 車好き (kuruma-zuki: car enthusiast, car + to be fond of).

Unrequited Love …

That suffix pops up in the following whale-fish word:

女好き (onna-zuki: Casanova, Don Juan)   woman + to be fond of

With a slight change in spacing, this might look like two women (女) and a child (子), all involved in a different kind of love story. Instead, 女好き tells a very old story indeed—that of a man in heat, chasing women in all directions and presumably catching up with them.

In the next case, I’m not sure if the men are successful or whether they’re pathetic rejects:

女狂い (onnagurui: girl crazy)     women + to be crazy about

Here we see a character that has become very familiar over the past few weeks:

狂 (KYŌ, kuru(u): lunatic, mad; suffix meaning “enthusiast” or someone with a certain mental abnormality)

That kanji also shows up in the opposite word:

男狂い (otokogurui: boy crazy; wantonness)
men + to be crazy about

Wantonness?! In ye olde double standard, the connotations become very negative when lust and love flow in the opposite direction.

Well, here’s a word without a double standard, as it applies equally to men and women … but the downside is that it happens to be a bit vulgar!

度すけべ (dosukebe: crazy about members of the opposite sex; being obsessed with sex or erotic matters)

Here, 度 serves an emphatic function, strengthening what follows. Meanwhile, one can also write this word entirely in kanji as 度助平 (dosukebei), where 助平 means “lewdness” or “lecher” (and breaks down as to help + flat, in what must be an instance of ateji). People use 度助平 lightly to tease their sex-crazed friends.

If you need a few more kanji-based words about fanatical love, check the link.

Kanji-Based Words About Fanatical Love …

And if you prefer katakana formations, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog. But as long as you are, see the next link.

Katakana Terms for Craziness …

Festival of Kanji

As you may know, this four-week investigation into words about craziness started because my book Crazy for Kanji finally came out. To celebrate that, I held the world’s first (?) Festival of Kanji last weekend. I’d been fantasizing about this event for two years, and it felt incredibly gratifying to see my imaginings come to life, with more than a hundred guests in attendance.

Though the event was two years in the making (or two years in the fantasizing), everything always ends up having last-minute preparations, doesn’t it? And in the adrenaline rush of the final hours, as I made sign after sign, I had the humbling realization that I was no longer sure how to draw 漢, the first character in 漢字 (kanji)! I couldn’t remember if the box under the grass radical (艹) had a stroke bisecting it. (It does.) How embarrassing!

I also realized that, despite blogging about “craziness” for several weeks, I didn’t really know how a native speaker would translate “Crazy for Kanji,” and I felt positive that a guest would ask me. No one did, but here’s one possible answer:

漢字に夢中 (kanji ni mutchū: in a kanji trance)

As you may remember from the past, 夢中 (mutchū: trance) breaks down as dream + middle, thereby qualifying as the coolest of compounds!

Despite these small glitches, the festival was an incredible experience. I’m not sure people entirely grasped the ins and outs of kanji or why it appeals to me so, but they kept saying they were having a wonderful time, and that certainly looked to be the case. As for me, I rejoiced at the chance to live in a kanji-centric world for one evening, a place where all my kanji dreams could come true! I was full of love and happiness, just as nearly everyone else seemed to be. How can you not be happy when you’re around kanji?! (Well, maybe the delicious food and particularly the cupcakes had a lot to do with everyone’s good mood!)

Many people remarked on the great diversity of guests, and it’s true. Ages ranged from 2 to 88. Two people in attendance had visual impairments (which is why there’s a very sweet guide dog, Yuki, in one photo). And some guests had immigrated from Japan, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Guam, Pakistan, India, Australia, Eritrea, Iran, Greece, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, and Canada. Amazing to think that all those people had kanji on their minds for one evening! We also had a few illustrious guests, including Michael Rowley, whose book Kanji Pict-o-graphix first got me hooked on kanji. What an honor for me to meet him at last!

Even though the party is over, it’s still possible for you to attend it digitally. Photographer Treve Johnson captured the event with bountiful pictures. Actually, he captured the early part of the evening, before the party became crowded. Most of the people I hung out with came later and didn’t find their way into the pictures. Even my husband (who left for a time to feed the dogs) didn’t make the cut! For that reason, the pictures don’t quite reflect what I experienced. But they do give a taste of the festivities.

Writer Anneli Rufus, who attended the event, blogged about it for a local paper. Thanks, Anneli! I’m glad you won a kanji T-shirt in the raffle! (By the way, her first name appears on page 35 of Crazy for Kanji as an example of something that’s as difficult to read as some characters.) And then an anime blogger picked up Anneli’s blog posting and ran with that in her own blog!

The restaurant, Kasuga, provided a steady flow of scrumptious food. Signs on the sushi bar told guests about the kanji for whatever they were eating. Even though you missed the sushi and robata, you can still feast on the kanji compounds.

The Menu and Its Meaning …

Finally, in lieu of a Verbal Logic Quiz, you’ll find a digital version of “Fortune Cupcakes.” In real life, each one had a kanji on top and a fortune attached to the bottom. Pick a kanji and see what your choice reveals about you! Lucky you—you can sample all 12 of these electronic edibles without having them go to your waistline!

Fortune Cupcakes …

If you’ve got a good head, you’re smart. That works in both English and Japanese:

頭がいい (atama ga ii: smart)     head + good

And if you have a bad head? Well, that doesn’t make a lot of sense in English (possibly suggesting a headache), but in Japanese the logic continues:

頭が悪い (atama ga warui: dumb, slow)     head + bad

OK, then, what if your head is strange or funny? For English speakers, that might conjure up images of Jay Leno (long-chinned), Abe Lincoln (long everything), or Barry Bonds post-”steroids” (plumped-up head). But in Japanese, here’s what a funny head gets you:
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