JLPT N1 Textbook Quick-Caption Reviews

Since the last time I posted-- last November(!)-- I've been in Canada, to Japan, and then back and am getting ready to start a *nasal voice* graaaaaaaad school program, and as part of my prep, I've been going a bit hardcore with Japanese.

Grind-studying Japanese when you're out of Japan is kind of weird because it doesn't take long before you completely separate the language from the country and kanji and grammar become abstract concepts.

My routine has been, going through two pages from a CLAIR-published "advanced" kanji textbook (basically JLPT N2-level vocabulary) a day.

Even though a lot of the kanji is pretty basic at this point in the game, when I was a JET, I ordered these free textbooks

...and totally neglected to use them. So it makes me feel slightly less guilty for draining the Japanese government's treasury with recycled (literally) textbooks all these years.

Then I go through the textbooks with the cute animals on the cover...

and

The grammar textbook, 日本語総まとめＮ１, I wouldn't recommend unless you're pretty confident already and want a bit of review. The reason is, there aren't really any explanations of the grammar points, and it leaves you to figure it out for yourself with example questions (badly) translated into English, Chinese and Korean. I ended up having to hunt for grammar in my Advanced Japanese Grammar dictionary, on the net, and occasionally just through guess-work.

The second one there, にほんご５００問, I would recommend for anyone studying for N1. It's really casual yet has a lot of content (500 vocab and grammar quiz questions divided into a month long course with about 5 or 10 useful bits of vocab per question), so doing three questions a day is completely painless and you end up learning a fair bit. I already went through this in its entirety, so I'm going through again and reading the sentences out loud.

And then I've been going through a couple of grammar textbooks.

The first one, 日本語総まとめ問題集一級, is really bare-bones with about 20-50 vocab points per chapter and a handful of test-questions for each, but is -- on the other hand -- really well organized and provides clear explanations of vocab in Japanese. I went through this textbook about a year ago and didn't absorb a whole lot at the time, but I'm going through again, and like にほんご５００問, I'm reading the vocab, example sentences and explanations out loud.

The second book, 日本語能力試験Ｎ１語彙対策, is somewhat similar, but doesn't define a whole lot of the vocabulary, so get your dictionaries ready, but does have really good example questions, hard quizzes, and target vocabulary is printed in red, and it comes with one of those red plastic sheets, so what I've been doing here too is reading through the example sentences with the target vocab blocked out, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds.

Even though you'll feel like a bit of an idiot doing this, I highly recommend reading the example sentences, readings, Japanese language explanations etc. out loud -- preferably in an huge operatic voice -- no matter what level you are. There are a few reasons for this.

1. You use a different part of your brain for speaking than reading. The more ways to experience new vocabulary/grammar points, the easier it will be to remember. It's also good listening practice for the same reason.
2. It's surprisingly hard. Especially if you're like me and studying outside of Japan where everything becomes aforementioned abstract concepts, this sort of thing happens a lot:
   
   
   
   Along these lines, there are a lot of kanji I *think* I know. I recognize the shapes and know what it means, but I'll get to a point where I actually have to produce the sound, and nothing comes out.
3. If you're in public, especially if you're in a small town where 99% of the people are very very white and couldn't tell the sound of Japanese apart from Hindi or Russian, let alone Chinese, being hunched over a mysterious book with squiggly writing on the cover, concentrating with absolute focus to read "verses" out loud might prompt a terrorism alert, which is always fun. The added bonus is, if you're doing this in Japan, where everyone will understand what you're saying, the assortment of non-nonsensical context-free example sentences will make you sound like a human-Don Hertzfeldt cartoon.
   
   
   

How to Count Flying Bunnies in Japanese

(Ignore that watermark)

Japanese is not an easy language to learn at the best of times. One of the things which is, while not exactly hard, a headache is the fact that it has a couple of hundred "counter words". We have these to some extent in English too, like three pants (the North American variety) are "three pairs of pants", or two cows are "two heads of cattle", etc. But in Japanese, there are tonnes of 'em. There's nothing outstandly difficult about learning these besides volume, but there are a few irregularities. One such irregularity is the counter for birds, which is 羽. One bird is 一羽, two is 二羽, and so on. This counter, however, is also used by one mammal: rabbits.

And why is that?

According to anglo Wikipedia:

Japanese Buddhist monks were not allowed to eat any meat other than birds, but liked rabbit meat so much they came up with the contrived "explanation" that rabbits are actually birds, and that their ears are unusable wings. The rationale was that while moving, rabbits only touched the ground with two feet at a time. Nowadays, hiki is the usual counter for rabbits.

I didn't quite buy this because-- Wikipedia-- and checked around a bit. And in response to this theory, somebody posted on the Japanese internets:

I was also interested in the answer that it is related to Buddhism, so I asked an acquaintance who is a Pure Land Buddhist monk. I asked the Pure Land monk, Have you ever heard 'You can't eat rabbits, but if it's a bird, it's okay?

"Rabbits, cows, pigs, birds and fish: you can't eat any of them! Doesn't that kind of theory sound like it has the intention of showing contempt for Buddhism?" he said angerly.

Accord to Wikipedia, "There are many opinions as to the origins, but according to the Nihonshoki, in the year 675, Emperor Temmu forbade the eating of meat of the five beasts -- cows, horses, dogs, macaques and chickens -- and ordered the protection of young fish between the dates April 1st and September 30th and through subsequent bans, rabbits (usagi) which are a pun of cormorants (u) and herons (sagi), were avoided by being treated as birds, or perhaps because because their long ears resembed birds feathers [...]."

[Editor's note: what?? Okay, there are some points where I have no idea what he was on about, so I apologize for any Engrishy parts]

「仏教的に……」という↑の回答に興味を持ったので、知り合いの僧侶（浄土真宗）に尋ねてみました。
「ウサギがダメで鳥ならよいという話は聞いたことがない」
とのことでした。
曹洞宗の僧侶にも尋ねてみました。
「ウサギも牛も豚も鳥も魚も全部ダメ！ そのような説には仏教を貶めようとする意図があるのではないか」
と怒っていました。

Wikipediaによると、「この由来には諸説あるが、『日本書紀』にある天武天皇5年4月17日（675年5月19日）の肉食禁止令で、4月1日～9 月30日まで稚魚の保護と五畜（ウシ・ウマ・イヌ・ニホンザル・ニワトリ）を食べることが禁じられ、それ以降の禁令などにより鳥の鵜と鷺（または佐芸）をもじりウサギとし、「鳥」として扱うことでこれを回避した、あるいは大きく長い耳が鳥の羽に見えるからとする説が有力とされている」とのことです。

The author listed from other theories, but to be honest, the mix of extremely formal Japanese relating to empirical edicts and absolute nonsense about getting by dietary laws through semantics is a bit too much for me right now. I decided to test my luck elsewhere.

Another website states,

In Japan until the Meiji Period (from 1868), for religion (Buddhist) reasons, the eating of four-legged animals was forbidden. During that time, hungry people said "Rabbit's ears look like feathers, so let's make 'em birds so we can eat 'em!" "Rabbits fly (ie. leap), so they must be birds!

I don't want to argue for arguing's sake, but I think the "rabbit = birds", therefore "one bird, two bird" way of thinking is plausable. No matter how you look at it, rabbits are not birds (hah!) and it was just an excuse for people that wanted to eat meat. ;)

日本では明治時代まで、宗教上（仏教）の理由から四本足の獣を食べることが禁じられていました。そのときに「うさぎの耳は鳥の羽と同じだから鳥にしよう。だから食べてもいいんだ！」　「うさぎは飛ぶから鳥だろう！（実際ははねている）」といって食べていたそうです。

ただの屁理屈でしかないのですが、うさぎ＝鳥という考え方から「一羽、二羽」と数えるようになった説が有力です。どうみてもうさぎは鳥じゃないですけどね（笑）肉が食べたかっただけの言い訳にすぎないようです＾＾

Yet another website says (and this is the last one, I swear),

Before the Meiji period, there was a teaching that "If you kill a living thing, and eat it's flesh, a Buddhist curse will be put upon you", and it was forbidden. (Editor's note, I read somewhere they'd just sentence you to death, ironically, if you killed an animal to eat.) This meant, mainly, raising animals to eat was forbidden, but it was decided that hunting and eating deer or bears or wild birds and calling them "medicine eats" (Editor's note: I could probably translate that more gracefully but I choose not to) and the eating of meat little by little by sick people to help them recover was acceptable.

People who ate meat once didn't forget that taste, and for warriors who used up their energy in battle, it became a source of nutrients. Feigning that it was "medicine eats" and eating wildlife made them feel guilty. Especially the four-legged variety.

So, with their feather-like long ears and hippity-hopping around, rabbits are probably just birds, right? So, they started counting "flocks" of rabbits. If so, they felt a little less guilty and could catch and eat a lot of them.

明治以前は、「殺生して、肉を食べると仏罰があたる」という仏教の教え（名目？？）で肉食が禁じられてました。 これは、食べるために動物を飼うことを主に禁じていて、狩猟したシカやクマや野鳥などを食べることは「薬喰い」といって、 病人の体力回復のために少しずつ肉を食べてもいいと認められていました。

一度肉を食べた人はその味が忘れられないし、 戦などで体力を使う武士は肉が栄養源になっていました。 「薬喰い」と称して野鳥獣の肉を食べることは後ろめたい。 特に四本足の動物は後ろめたい。

そこで、羽のような大きな耳を持って、ぴょンぴょん飛ぶウサギは鳥かもしれない、だったら１羽２羽と数えよう。 それなら、すこしは後ろめたさが少なくなる。 たくさん捕まえて食べることもできる。

So there you have it! There are many theories, but it is ostensibly because rabbits are delicious.

The Etymology of Kaba

Ikumi: your wish is my commend!

Kaba is the Japanese word for hippopotamus. This word probably has one of the strangest etymologies I've ever seen, so I thought I'd break that down.

The Japanese "kaba" uses the kanji 河馬, which comes from the Chinese "hema", using identical characters. The kanji in both cases seem to come from the Latin "hippopotamus", which is literally "river [河] horse [馬]", however, Japanese Wikipedia says it's also possibly a direct translation of the German word flusspferd, which is also literally "river horse", probably also coming from the Latin. Now, that Latin comes from the Greek ἱπποπόταμος, which you can almost see from the Greek characters is almost letter-for-letter the same. As you can see to your left, hippos used to live all the way down the Nile to the Mediterranean, where the ancient Greeks saw them in the mouth of the river and gave them that silly name. So, there you go! A Japanese word with an ancient Greek root.

The Etymology of Genki

I've been using Google Anal-ytics to keep a bit track of who comes to this site and why, and I noticed people that come here via Google searches are coming here for completely unrelated reasons. This is unfortunate.

But one caught my eye, which is "etymology of genki". Genki, as my readers know, is already one of those words that foreigners in Japan use in daily conversation, but no one really knows where it comes from.

Until now.

The breakdown:

　　元気 ("gen - ki")
　　元 gen ("base, foundation")
　　気 ki ("chi, spirit, life force")

Somewhat similar to European humorism, you could have good ki and bad ki and they would affect you physically and emotionally. This is a major spiritual and linguistic concept in Japanese, where there are well over 10,000 words which use the 気 character. Now in modern Japanese, the common word byoki (病気) means "sickness", or literally "sick ki". However, in classical Japanese, genki was spelled 減気, rooted in the word herasu (減らす-- note the kanji), which means "decrease". So, if your bad ki gets reduced, you're genki. In modern Japanese, the character's changed and it has a more positive meaning, which is "happy and healthy".

Case closed.

Translation Exercise: "Wolf Totem" (2)

Here's part two of my translation of Wolf Totem (狼图腾) by Jiang Rong (姜戎). This time, to make it a little bit more readable, I mixed in the source text (the English) with my Japanese translation. And like last time, please feel free to point out any errors, irregularities or suggestions.

英和翻訳：

神なるオオカミ (Wolf Totem・狼图腾)

夜に、狼が狩りに出かける時に、陳が浅く眠る。彼はガスマイに交代する時に狼が囲いに侵入したら呼ぼうと言って、動物を退却させるのを助けて、必要に応じ て真っ向から戦うと約束した。ビルギーはやぎひげをしごき、微笑し、そんなに狼に執着している中国人と会ったことがないと言った。北京の学生が表した異常 な興味の程度に満足そうだった。

At night, when the wolves came out to hunt, Chen would sleep lightly. He had told Gasmai to call him if a wolf ever broke into the pen when she was on guard duty, assuring her that he would help drive the animal away, fight it head-on if necessary. Bilgee would stroke his goatee, smile and say he'd never seen a Chinese so fixated on wolves. He seemed pleased with the unusual degree of interest displayed by the student from Beijing.

最初の冬の間、ある雪の降る夜に陳は懐中電灯を持って、狼と犬と女の接近戦を目撃した。

Late one snowy night during his first winter, Chen, flashlight in hand, witnessed at close quarters a battle between a wolf, a dog and a woman.

「チェンチェン！チェンチェン！」

"Chenchen! Chenchen!"

陳はガスマイの逆上した泣き声と犬たちの荒っぽい吠える声で目が覚めた。彼はフェルトのブーツを穿いてデールのモンゴル風のローブのボタンを掛けてから、懐中電灯と羊飼いの棒を持って外に出た。懐中電灯の光が雪を切るように進んで、詰め込んだ羊たちから力ずく離しているため狼の尻尾を握ているガスマイを見 せられた。狼が必死になってガスマイを噛んでみていた。同時に馬鹿な太っている羊は狼にぞっとしてほとんど凍死して密集し、風除けに後退りし、雪片が 蒸気になったほどぎっしり詰め込んだ。狼は前部が動けなくされた、ガスマイと綱引きをしながら地面を足で掻き、羊に噛み付くことだけできた。陳は助ける ためよろよろ歩いて行ったが何をすべきか分からなかった。ガスマイの二匹の犬は羊にがんじがらめにされた。大きいな狼に行けないから、荒っぽい無力な吠える羽目 になった。同時にビルギーの五・六匹の猟犬が隣人の犬たちと一緒に、囲いの西に他の狼を戦っていた。吠える声と遠ぼえと苦しんでいる泣き声は天地を揺さ ぶった。陳はガスマイを助けたかったのに足が動けないほど不安定だった。生きている狼を触るという監房が身がすくむような恐怖で消えた。

Chen was awakened by Gasmai's frantic cries and the wild barking of dogs. After pulling on his felt boots and buttoning up his Mongol robe, his deel, he ran out of the yurt on shaky legs, flashlight and herding club in hand. The beam of the light sliced through the snow to reveal Gasmai holding on to the tail of a wolf, trying to turn it's fangs on her. Meanwhile, the stupid, fat sheep, petrified by the wolf and nearly frozen by the wind, huddled together and kept backing up against the windbreak, packed so tightly the snowflakes between their bodies turned to steam. The front half of the wolf was immobilized; it could only paw at the ground and snap at the sheep in front of it, all the while engaged in a tug-of-war with Gasmai. Chen staggered over to help but didn't know what to do. Gasmai's two dogs were hemmed in by the huddled sheep. Unable to get to the big wolf, they were reduced to wild, impotent barking. At the same time, Bilgee's five or six hunting dogs, together with their neighbor's dogs, were fighting other wolves east of the pen. The barks, the howls and the agonizing cries of the dogs shook heaven and earth. Chen wanted to help Gasmai, but his legs were so rubbery he could barely move. His desire to touch a living wolf had vanished, replaced by paralyzing fear.

Okay! That's it for now.

My question this time is the difference between saying "何々して" and "何々し". I know the "て" form is sometimes used to show a direct connection between cause and effect, and the stem form of a verb is often used in a list of events, but here I perhaps inappropriately mixed and matched where I saw fit. Any comments about this?

I also wanted to thank Kozo, a friend of mine from university and easily one of the nicest people I know, who gave me heaps of good suggestions. He's been doing translations as well, but rather than doing them are grammar-vocabulary exercises, he's refining his already-excellent written Japanese. He also asked if he could give a shot at his own translation, and needless to say, his is a lot more accurate. But interestingly, there are a few places where mine's not necessarily wrong, or at least not completely wrong, but our choice of words is quite different. I also saw a version his parents did, which was again quite different. Maybe he'll let me post them in some sort of translation exposé.

Translation Exercise: "Wolf Totem" (1)

Classes are over and I'm starving for something to do. I've been translating pretty much anything I can get my hands on, just for the practice, but unfortunately most of the English language literature I have is itself a translation -- either from Russian or Chinese or Japanese -- or is written in post-modern vernacular and is almost impossible to render in another language.

A few weeks ago, I tried to translate a few paragraphs of "Wolf Totem", a famous modern Chinese model by Jiang Rong. Here's the broken-Japanese result:

英和翻訳：

神なるオオカミ (Wolf Totem・狼图腾)

(甚だしい誤りを見たら、教えて下さい。)

ビルギーと一緒にいるのは慰められる。陳は頭がすっきりするように目をこすり、静かにビルギーにまばたきし、そしてガゼルと狼を眺めるように望遠鏡を上げる。

陳は先の狼と遭遇してから、草地の住民―遊牧民―はいつも狼に囲まれるまでは長くないと理解するようになった。ほぼ毎晩幽霊のような狼の姿を見つける―特にひどく寒い冬に。一、二――あるいは五、六――それとも、十二もの明るい緑の目組が放牧地の周囲に動くのが見える。百里以上。ある夜には陳とビルギーの嫁のガスマイが懐中電灯で二十五匹まで数える。

ゲリラ軍のように遊牧民が簡単のために努力する。冬の間に羊小屋は防風柵として役立つ大きいなフェツトじゅうたんが付けている荷馬車によって移動垣根となった半円だ。しかし狼を防げない。広い南部の通路は犬の一群と当番の女に守られる。時折狼が羊小屋に侵入し、犬と戦う。体がユルトの壁にドサッとぶつかって、内にいる人に目を覚めさせる。陳陣に二回起こって、寝台に落ちるのを防ぐのはその壁じかなかった。しばしば遊牧民は狼から二枚のフェルトじゅうたんだけで分離する。

注： 陳陣＝チェン・ジェン

質問：

日本語の小説は一般的に現在形で書かれるながら、英語の小説はよく過去形で書かれる。日本語では、聞き伝えとかあるキャラクターの過去の経験について話すときに、過去形は適当でしょうか。

Source text: Wolf Totem (狼图腾) by Jiang Rong (姜戎)

Having Bilgee beside him was comforting. Chen rubbed his eyes to clear away the mist and blinked calmly at Bilgee, then raised his telescope again to watch the gazelles and the wolves.

Since his earlier encounter with the wolves, he had come to understand that the inhabitants of the grassland, the nomads, were never far from being surrounded by wolves. Nearly every night he spotted ghostly wolf outlines, especially during the frigid winter; two or three, perhaps five or six, and as many as many as ten pairs of glittering green eyes moving around the perimeter of the grazing land, as far as a hundred li or more distant. One night he and Bilgee’s daughter-in-law Gasmai, aided by flashlights, counted twenty-five of them.

Like guerrilla fighters, nomads strive for simplicity. During the winter, sheep pens are semicircles formed by wagons and mobile fencing, with large felt rugs that serve as a windbreak but cannot keep out the wolves. The wide southern openings are guarded by packs of dogs and women on watch shifts. From time to time, wolves break into the pens and fight the dogs. Bodies often thud into yurt walls, waking people on the other side; twice that had happened to Chen Zhen, and all that had kept a wolf from landing beside him was that wall. Frequently, nomads are separated from wolves by no more than a couple of felt rugs.

Question:

Japanese novels are generally written in present tense, while English novels are frequently written in past tense. In Japanese, when talking about hearsay or a character’s past experiences, is past tense appropriate?

Top 10 Japanese Words that ALTs Use In Casual Conversation (Part 2)

Part two of my top 10 list of most common Japanese words used by foreigners in Japan. I hope you enjoy!

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Konbini [kon-been-ee]
- noun

Ever wish there was a place where you could buy such things as snacks, stationery, a bottle of French wine, concert tickets, some lunch, DVD movies, clothing, video games, umbrellas, and "love magic", and where you can even pay your bills; all in one convenient store? Try 7-11, Lawson, AM-PM Mini Mart, Family Mart, or one of the many other fine Japanese konbini.

Yes, I know 7-11 exists outside of Japan. In fact, most of the Japanese konbinis started off life as American companies, then were bought by Japanese companies, but in Japan they're unbelievably highly competitive, doing very specialized and localized market research which they call "Dominant" (yes, an English adjective), and end up being something else altogether. So much so, that they go beyond the North American image of a "corner store" and little by little has become... the konbini!

[Origin: Japanese コンビニ, itself from the English convenience store]

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Gaijin [gahy-jin]
- noun, adjective, interjective

I've been in Japan for about a year, and I'm willing to guess that anyone who knows a smattering of Japanese phrases has come across this one already, so I won't go into the details of the nuances or etymology beyond the meaning "foreigner", except that it's a shortened form of gaikokujin, or "person-from-a-foreign-country". And, it's pretty rude. And Japanese people say it all the time. And the Japanese people that use this shortened form of gaikokujin would be horrified if they I used the shortened forms of "Nipponjin" or "Japanese".

And let's not even get into nanban chicken.

All this, of course, does not stop the gaijin community from using "gaijin" in every other sentence. In fact, just the other day I was in Fukuoka with my gaijin friends and spotted some strange, suspicious, possibly criminally-active foreigner-looking gaijins coming our way and I said, "Goddamn, there're a lot of gaijins here!" with a bit of autoxenophobic excitement.

I personally used the word "gaijin" 46 times today. I counted.

See also: Gaijin Smash.

[Origin: Japanese 外人, itself a contraction of 外国人]

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Eki [ey-kee, ek-ee]
- noun

Train station. I don't know why we use this particular Japanese word since Japanese train stations closely resemble their Western equivalent, but maybe because very few of us had lives so intimately connected to a mere train station. Ever wake up at 6:15 AM to be on time for a lonely commuter train? If you have, you feel my pain. Pushing through a noisey, hostile crowd of uniformed students, barely (and sometimes not) avoiding hitting your head on handle bars which are all at a painfully low six-foot level -- pushing through just to get out at your stop...


At the same time as I associate the eki with so many terrible things, it's also the home of plenty of good memories, so what can I say? I love my eki.

[Origin: Japanese 駅]

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Onsen
- noun

Ever feel like sitting in a bit bathtub filled with sulphuric water, ass-naked with a few of your best mates? Well then you'd best to Japan, me son! This is at first the most uncomfortable thing in the world, but after a couple of times, it stops being anything of an issue and becomes one of the most relaxing things to do on a Sunday afternoon. Especially if you're sipping a beer and are outside in the warm water on a cold winter day staring off at the mountains. Said to be quite healthy too.

The first time I went to an onsen was at the very end of operating hours, and as we were leaving, a security guard came to ask my naked self to bend over and pull out the big onsen bath plug to let the water out for the night. Awkward!

[Origin: Japanese 温泉]

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Keitai
- noun

Keitais! Teacher, mother, secret lover. While you Westerner types are spending X amount of dough on Blackberries per month ($100+?), my little keitai -- the Japanese word for "cell phone" -- was the smallest of the small and cheapest of the cheap, and it combines an ordinary phone with a dedicated e-mail client, web browser, mp3 player, video player, digital camera, digital video camera, dictionary, calculator, etc. Behold(!):


Much like Golem from Lord of the Rings, I love and hate my keitai. I love it because it's fairly useful for communication, but really because it's an endless source of entertainment. Get bored? Send an innane e-mail to all my friends. I hate it because, aside from brain tumors, and for that matter a tumor on my thigh where my pocket is, it's annoying! First of all, I use it as an alarm clock, with it's handy mp3 player playing Kid Koala's "Like Irregular Chickens" (starting at the one minute point) and so I associate it with waking up at 6:15 for crowded commuter trains, but also, it's like a computer in every way, but much less convenient. I don't LIKE typing e-mails with my thumbs, damn it! Lastly, I got that ultra-slim model. The purple one on the top right, actually, because I thought it was dark brown in the muted lighting of the store, and I think dark brown electronics will eventually replace the white lacquer look that Apple's been pushing, so might as well get behind this one now. But I got the smallest phone they had, because my goal was a phone the size and shape of a credit card, and the only drawback, or at least the principal drawback is, I have to endure all manner of folk telling me "It's cute that such a big man has such a small keitai." Pff! Whatever. At least I'm not overcompensating for anything.

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I know this is a "top 10" list, but I didn't number them, let alone choose a favourite. Have a favourite? Post a comment and tell me which! Also, I put two movie and two TV references in this post: figure out which, and I'll buy you a beer.

Top 10 Japanese Words that ALTs Use In Casual Conversation (Part 1)

I've heard the Japanese in Vancouver is rather "slangy". The English in Montreal's soaked up Francicisms enough to be considered a distinct dialect, and Acadian French contains such witticisms as "ridez le truck". Minority languages tend to work this way-- slowly creolizing, de-creolizing, and then eventually disappearing.

I used to be one of them Montreal English, and now I'm a foreigner living in Japan. There aren't too many of us, and if there's one thing that unites us, it's how we fracture the Japanese language at the expensive of our own. Here's the first half of my top 10 list:

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Haro! [hah-roh]
- interjection

English, sort of. Think of this as English fried and then refried. If you've ever been within 50 metres of a group of 10-year-old Japanese boys, you've heard this. If you've been in Japan long enough, you've probably said it.

Today's kids are getting savvy to the fact that... not every white person is a English speaking American citizen, and they occasionally throw out the buenos días and namashites. One time when I got a "haro!" from somewhere behind me, I threw back a nice, crisp "bonjour!". You know, to internationalize. I assume it's the first time he ever heard this, 'cause I faintly heart a sad and confused "bon... jour?"

[Origin: Japanese school children ハロー!, var. of hello, itself var. of hallo, itself var. of hollo, itself var. of earlier holla]

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Genki [gen-kee]
- adjective
Genki isn't in any English dictionaries I know of, but make no mistake: we gaijins have bastardised and Anglicised the sucker until it's Sino-Japanese etymology is just a painful memory. But what does it mean? Genkiness is a mix of exitement, happiness and healthiness, or in other words... "exuberance"?

A quick Google image search yeilds a genki carrot:


Notice the glassy look of excitement on his face and the gung-ho attitute. After spending even days in Japan, everyone's genki or not-genki. There are no other emotions.

[Origin: Japanese 元気]
-Related forms
Genkiness, genkize, genkify, genkerific

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Nomihodai [noh-mee-hoh-dahy]
- noun, verb

All you can drink for two hours for about $15-20. Way to give'r to your liver, eh? Sometimes you get free food and it often it involves making an ass of oneself with coworkers singing terrible songs in karaoke.

I did this last night, in fact, and now I'm feeling not-so-genki.


Note: nomihodais may lead to liver failure.

[Origin: Japanese 飲み放題]

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Tabehodai [tah-bey-hoh-dahy]
- noun, verb

All you can eat for about $10. Sometimes it's à la carte, and sometimes buffet. Either way, prepare to eat a lot of meat, fish, squid and pizza or indeterminable quality.


Sometimes, you can get "nomi-tabehodais", which combines the two into a swirling vortex of fatty meat, a cynical single vegetable serving consisting of some raw cabbage and an endless amount of watery booze. Highly recommended.

[Origin: Japanese 飲み放題]