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.
   
   
   

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.

SCREAMING JAPANESE ROBOT MONKEY

from a BORED CANADIAN KEITAI CAMERAMAN

London 2012 Mascots Look Like Vortigaunts

Former Saga resident Charlene posted in her blog about London's lovable... eh... well, shiny Olympic mascots for the 2012 games, Wenlock and Mandeville -- which I believe are named after the finger puppets from Salad Fingers.

I realized, though, that I'd seen them somewhere before. It's been bugging me all day, but as soon as I got home today it hit me like a sack of oranges.

Exhibit A: Wenlock and Mandeville, Mascots


Exhibit B: The Half-Life game series aliens, the Vortigaunts.


OH. MY. GOD!!

Wenlock and Mandeville are Vortigaunts!

This is probably to get us ready for the invasion!!

AUGHHHH! *hyperventilate*

Meanwhile at the Sock Kiosk...

Introducing the official socks of the Rastafari religion:


I've been told this is revenge for marketing lattes as "zen".

Product Test: Suntory "Chocholate Sparkling"

"Chocolate Sparling", or チョコレート・スパークリング, is chocolate flavoured soda and is about as disgusting and horribly misguided as it sounds.


Let me preface this by saying that in English "sparkling" is an adjective and not a noun, and is translated into Japanese as 発泡 (happou). Just to make sure, I checked out Yahoo's Japanese dictionary, which had no entry for スパークリング (supaakuringu) at all. And for the record, this drink has NO BLOODY BUBBLES AND IS NOT SPARKLING IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD. So congratulations, Suntory. You've managed to fracture both the English language and the Japanese language in one go. That's a new one I think.

I was sceptical, but like with many impulse purposes in Japan, it had to be done for science.


It obviously doesn't have any chocolate in it, and it tastes less like real chocolate and more like scratch n' sniff chocolate. Or more specifically, at one of my schools the language lab key's key chain has a small scented plastic mock-up of a bun with chocolate syrup on top, and Chocolate Sparkling smells exactly like it smells. Chocolate Sparkling tastes like a key chain.

Since I began this article, I finished the bottle. I had to stop halfway for a while because I began to feel nauseous and dizzy. Less than 200mls to go and I began hallucinating and was rambling and speaking in tongues and imagining surviving snails on the edge of straight razors in no time.

Here's an after picture:


In short, stay away from this.

"Tragicomic"

I was flipping through some books at work looking for something-- anything-- teachable, and I happened upon a picture dictionary. A picture dictionary, for those not in the know, are glossaries of vocabulary arranged by subject which use illustrations instead of definitions.

I found this one series of pictures which was keeping it real to the point of being depressingly bleak, but had a strong streak of perhaps-intentional irony running through.

Let's call today's protagonist "Bob". Bob's my age, I reckon. 25 years old, but with a wife and eight year old daughter to support. Judging solely by the pictures, Bob's from a bad home and married young. He's an aspiring rapper from St. Louis who goes by the stage name "Ferret", because of his knack for weaselling out of things. Bob's job at the warehouse gave him time to think. Perhaps a little too much time, because after one night of heavy drinking with the guys, they decided get revenge against the bourgeoisie by breaking and entering. Someone called the cops, and while Bob's nimble friends got away easy, Bob, always the slow one, was run down by even the heftiest of middle age cops.


Caught! The misnamed "Ferret" is not looking too proud of himself. I want you to take note of one particular detail: mullet and sideburns. But in the next shot, Bob's cleaned himself up a bit for his impending trial.

But look at that vacant look his eyes. The eyes of a criminal.


His lawyer's hired/provided by the state, so now LET THE TRIAL BEGIN!


Bob and his lawyer are optimistic, but unfortunately that optimism is unfounded.


Look at his expression:


Poor Bob! He looks so sooooooooooooo sad. ☹ Good thing Bob has a lot more time on his hands, to think about his sins and how to survive on the inside.

Actually, from the look of it, the stress of prison aged Bob terribly through those seven long years, because the last panel has a significantly greyer, balder Bob walking back out into the world, so new and frightening.


He appears to be wearing the same suit that he wore to his sentencing too, leading me to believe this is the only possession from his old life that he has left.

I invite you to take a closer look at his radically different hair styles:



I think the moral this depressingly blunt story is, DON'T DO CRIME. Though, in my version, he finds religion, joining the Five Percenters, and focuses his experiences in the clink into his debut album, which sells a million copies in it's first week.

Last we heard from Bob, he was living in a 50,000 square foot mansion in Farmington, Connecticut and was doing family movies.

Lesson of the Day: Pigs Are Awesome

Today, much like Wednesday and Monday, and next week, I was correcting and reviewing scripts for student's show and tell presentations which they will do early in January. It's been incredibly frustrating, because I have reason to think the English level in the scripts is generally below the testable level of the students -- second year middle school. In worst case scenarios, I might describe the scripts as "impressionistic", as in, I can get only an impression of what they're trying to say. The problem is, major grammar mistakes. I don't know where they got these from, but they're pretty consistent. With maybe 25% of the scripts, it seems to be laziness rather than lack of understanding. Starting sentences with "And", "But", "Because" or "So" is just plain bad grammar that any native speaker's English teacher snapped at them about at some point or another. "Because, the reason is because..." came up a few times. I hope this pattern did not come from a text book, or I'll flip out and take out a whole village. Other big problem is, students trying to overshoot their previously stated "testable English level". This is commendable because they're trying, but, if they're making up sentence structure and grammar as they go long because they want to say in English what they'd like to say in Japanese, it's yabai. The top 25% of the scripts are, however, fantastic. Basic but succinct, charming English. There's one that's by far the best thing I've seen a student write, and I want to share it with the world.

Hello! Today I'm going to show you a pig doll. It's about 2000 yen [CDN $17.50]. It's name is "Boo-chan" [something like "Oinky"]. He is very pretty because his nose is big.

My grandmother gave me a pig doll in Safari Park four years ago, but there aren't any pigs in the park.

Do you like pigs? I love pigs. Pork is delicious and pigs are a lot of fun.

Thank you.

I actually cracked up laughing in the teacher's office when I read the last line. BRILLIANT!

A Lil' Taste of Home

No, not maples products. Not beaver tales, not Nanaimo bars, nor Thousand Islands sauce, poutine or Digby scallops lightly buttered and rolled in crushed dulse and pan fried to perfection (oh... my... god...). But rather, good old fashion Thai red curry. Yes. Thai red curry is by far the most Canadian meal I could think of.

It turns out the most widely sold brand of Thai curry you can get in Japan is a variety I used to buy back in "the old country". Since produce from Japan is almost the same as Canada, I'm able to make pretty much anything I want and -- to seal a phrase from a of a long-dead Japanese emperor -- "manifestly so," I cracked open some coconut milk with the jackknife-like Japanese can opener and served up some red curry with satsuma imo (more or less, a sweet potato), broccoli, spinach, onions and chicken! For the record, this is not the first time I made curry in Japan. Last time I made a from-scratch recipe involving the appropriate spices, yogurt, peppers and octopus, and had some sort of bizarre allergic reaction that I at this point can only attribute to strong agricultural chemicals on the peppers. The last time I made curry, I thought I was gonna die, so this new curry is big news!

Anyway, my only reason for posting this atrocity of a blog entry is to brag about my lovely curry, which did satisfy my nostalgic for home since this was my old stable food, so I should just stop now.

Nevermind the last post

So, I was in Kyoto. More on that later, maybe. But first...


If wearing a thousand dollar suit makes a man feel like "a million bucks", then how about a ten thousand dollar kimono?