David Chart's Blog

Category: Japanese

  • Published in Japanese

    Well, it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I’m not dead; I’m just busy at work, and I’ve managed to sustain daily posts to my Japanese blog, so this one has been a bit (OK, a lot) neglected. I wouldn’t put any money on this post being the start of a trend, either.…

  • In My Sleep

    Yesterday, Yuriko told me I’d been talking in my sleep. Apparently, I told her that there was a blue light inside the light in our bedroom. When she said that, I remembered saying it, and seeing the light. It was like a bit of blue lightning, moving around inside the lampshade. Of course, the really…

  • Boil the Scrapings from Under His Fingernails and Drink Them

    This is, apparently, a standard Japanese phrase: 爪のあかを煎じて飲む. It means “learn from him by imitation”. Yuriko suddenly used it last night, with reference to me, and it was the first time I’d heard it, so there followed a short clarificatory discussion. (“Why do they want to boil my fingernails? What have I ever done to…

  • “Otaku”

    As people with a passing familiarity with contemporary Japan are probably aware, “otaku” is the Japanese equivalent of “geek” or “nerd”, or maybe “obsessive fan”. It tends to be applied to people who like geeky things, like science fiction, anime, computer games, or roleplaying. This morning the caretaker at our flats addressed me as “otaku”.…

  • A Number of Firsts

    It is true that a small baby in the home takes up quite a lot of time, even when your wife is doing most of the child rearing. This is my excuse for not writing very many English blog entries recently. However, Mayuki is growing up nicely, and she’s passed a number of really important…

  • What’s in a Name?

    Quite a few people have asked me where Mayuki’s name came from, and Japanese names work a bit differently from Western ones, so I think it might be worth explaining here. Japanese law only allows people to have two names, a given name and a family name. The family name is determined by the name…

  • Signs of Progress

    A couple of recent events that suggest my Japanese may be making progress. First, while we were on the Tohoku trip, a woman mistook me for a Japanese person. Admittedly, it was dark and I suspect her eyesight isn’t too good, but we did have a very brief conversation, and it was only a bit…

  • The Most Difficult Language in the World

    I mentioned to my sister that Japanese would take at least four times as long to learn as French (which she has already studied), and she asked me where that was from. A quick Google turned up a webpage of language learning difficulties for English speakers. If we assume that these difficulties are roughly symmetric,…

  • Writing Japanese

    I wrote a really long post for my Japanese blog today; about 2000 characters. The rough-and-ready conversion is that two Japanese characters equal one English word. Certainly, the number of times you have to hit the keys is around there. Thus, the Japanese post is about equivalent to 1000 words of English. It took me…