I remember eating out with my friend Abasa in the early part of my Japan stay and was so impressed by this guy. I knew so little Japanese, but he was speaking fluently, effortlessly. We talked about life in Japan and how he didn’t follow the normal teaching route. Abasa went the business route, instead. He’d lived in Japan for quite some time, and life seemed so good for him. Running into people like him who were so positive about being here, really had a big influence on me.

I wanted to be able to experience Japan the way Abasa was. I wanted to be able to converse easily with the people around me. I wanted to understand the Japanese I saw on the train everyday, heard around me everyday. I picked his brain on how he was able to learn speak Japanese, namely the kanji side of things. Just how he was able to learn, recognize and use so many kanji? His response really downplayed his skills: “Kanji are just pictures, that’s all.” That seemed simple enough. I was still learning my hiragana and katakana then, so I those words didn’t really sink in until I actually started studying the kanji for myself.

Was Abasa right? Absolutely. Kanji are pictures. Now, the only problem is that sometimes the picture may be harder to see and recognize than you think. Why aren’t the pictures simpler? Well, kanji is one of the oldest writing systems on the planet (originating in China), and the kanji have undergone some pretty significant changes throughout the years. So with many characters, you might not look at a kanji picture right away and say “OH I SEE IT.”

Learning kanji can be frustrating for a number of different reasons: there are so many to learn, many kanji look similar, the stroke order can be confusing, there are so many different ways to read different kanji.

But for today…FORGET ABOUT ALL THAT. Today, kanji easy. We’re going to keep it simple, light, and fun! I’m going to show you fifteen different kanji and whether you know the kanji or not, I want you to see if you can guess meanings. For those who already know these, please don’t give away the answers just yet. In the chart below there are 15 different kanji pictures, I want you to match the kanji with one of the 15 words (also listed below) it most resembles. There is only one answer per kanji character.

Match these 15 kanji with the word below that you think the symbol most resembles...and for goodness sake...HAVE FUN DOING IT! You might need to grab a piece of paper.

1. One

15. Fire

Make sure to check back tomorrow for the answers to today’s quiz!!

See you then,

Donald Ash

I don’t know how many people were trying to get to the Japan Guy website this weekend, but if you were, I suspect you were getting some weird, incomprehensible error message. Oddly enough, so was I. I have was trying to fix an image problem, but ended up crashing my entire site instead. Umm, talk about scary. For a moment I thought I had lost half of my site. After the crash, I went for a long walk last night, worried that I’d have to try to re-do one years worth of Japan Guy stuff. The danger of losing something, really makes you appreciate having it so much more.

Eventually, I was able to figure out the problem. I’m so glad that I was able to get it together. The site should be working now and the pictures should be showing just fine. Time to get back to what I was going to do in the first place. Create some new posts. Sorry about the down-time everybody. Thank you for being so patient, everybody.

Sincerely,

Donald Ash

Hey Everybody, I was trying to do a pretty big post update today, and ran into a rather annoying little snag. You might be having a problem seeing images once you go to the posts from the main page. It’s an an techie issue that I’m trying to take care of, so please bear with me. It’ll be fixed soon, or my laptop will be in a hopeless scrap heap on apartment floor. I’m on it

See you soon guys,

Donald Ash

'Kanji'

“BING, BONG, BING, BONG, BING, BONG, BING, BONG.” That grandfather clock-like tone means that cleaning time is over, and it’s time for the noon break. For the last four days my noon break has been a little different than normal. Every day after lunch & shouji I’ve been getting schooled in the ways of Japanese kanji by five, fifth grade girls. Learning kanji isn’t always easy, but hearing it from a Japanese kid’s perspective was really interesting.

These five students were some of my best fourth graders last year, and the first day back, immediately after souji (cleaning time) they all came to my classroom, and were pretending like they were having an English lesson. I thought it was really funny because I don’t know too many students who pretend to have school during their free time. They stood and did a mock, formal, class introduction which I thought was rather cute.

“起立。昼休み時間の英語の授業を始めます。。。礼”

(きりつ。ひるやすみじかんのえいごのじゅぎょうをはじめます。れい。ちゃくせき。
Kiritsu, hiruyasumi jikan no eigo no jugyou wo hajimemasu…rei. Chakuseki.”)
Translation: Stand. The noon recess English lesson begins now. Bow. Be seated.

I played a couple of English games with these students. While we were playing, one of the students got a glimpse of a kanji book that was lying on my desk. All of sudden, a spontaneous kanji quiz began…a quiz that I wasn’t quite ready for, but I did okay I guess. The students asked me if they could use my chalk, and they started writing kanji, kanji phrases, and kanji sentences on the board to test what I knew. The first day was pretty easy, but they stepped it up a little each day.

The funniest girl, had the most awesome time whenever she would mark one of my answers wrong. If I hesitated too long, or if I got one of the readings wrong, she would take a piece of bright pink chalk and yell “BATSU!” which means “X” (or in this case “incorrect). Another of the girls would always yell seikai, when I got something right and put a big circle around it.** The students would try to explain what different words meant. For example with the Japanese word, fueru (ふえる), they picked up an eraser and said “ippai erasers wa fueru” or “ippai hatto (hats) wa fueru.”

** I’ve now given these two students nicknames: Batsu Sensei and Maru Sensei.**

You know there are two cool things about having fifth graders as teachers? Number one: the lessons they teach are pretty darn simple to understand, even in Japanese. My kids don’t make any assumptions about what I know and don’t know, they just teach. If I’m getting a bunch of the kanji right, they throw in something I don’t know. When I don’t understand, they make corrections, and review the tough ones with me again later.

The second cool thing is that a native-speaking, Japanese student knows a good number of kanji by the time they reach the fifth grade. They have full functional use of nearly 700 kanji. I’m not talking about them knowing their kanji a little bit. They can use and recall nearly all of these characters as easy as I could recall any letter of the alphabet. SUGOI!

I got a pretty fair dose of reading, listening, and writing today, so I’m pretty happy.

You know what these kanji lessons cost me? A game of “Donaldo Says” (which is like Simon Says, only better because the name is a little cooler, lol). This is a win-win situation for sure. The kids get to play, and use the chalkboard as much as they want, and I get to absorb some great kanji knowledge in return.

The kids asked if they could come back and teach me tomorrow, and I wanted to say “HELL YEAH!” but I remember that I’m teaching fifth graders, so I just responded with “Hai, tanoshimi desu.”

So 12:25p.m. tomorrow, I know where I’ll be. I’ll be in my classroom learning more Japanese from my new little teachers. Hopefully, I’ll get more “seikais” than “batsus” than I did next time around. I’m reallly lookin’ forward to it.

Donald

I gotten a few messages today asking if I’m okay after the tornado in Tsukuba. I wanted to say thank you to those who emailed, I really appreciate it. I’m doing okay. It doesn’t look like any damage happened to the apartments and houses in my area. I think the tornado must have hit in a different part of Tsukuba. I was on my bike, riding to Tsukuba University, when the tornado hit (guess I need to pay more attention to the news). I should have noticed something was up when my door flung open as soon as I pushed the handle down. I really thought it was just a heavy thunderstorm with heavy wind and hail (which is also quite rare). I noticed that the power was out at the student center, but it really didn’t strike me as strange, thunderstorms can sometimes cause power outages. I got a phone email from my friend Marisa asking if everything was okay, and then I knew. I wonder where the reported damage happened.

Honestly I’m a little surprised that I didn’t know about until after I checked my mail. I saw this USA Today story so I thought I’d share it with you guys:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-05-06/japan-tornado-tokyo/54783812/1

Donald Ash

You gotta check this out if you’re an manga fan. Even if you’re not a manga fan I think you’ll appreciate it. This manga is called When I saw how realistic it looked, my mind was transported back to the 80’s. Remember that video “Take On Me?” (I know somebody just sang the entire chorus to that song in their just now, or maybe even out loud). That was one of my favorite MTV videos because is was remarkably original. The reason why I thought of that video after looking at this manga was because the “Take On Me” video was the story of this real-life woman going into the coming book world and meeting the man of her dreams.

This Yusuke Murata comic is very different in that it’s almost like Take On Me’s opposite. This time the comic is reaching into the real world. This webcomic is a comic of two comic book artists, making a comic, and going into world of the comic they’re creating (WHEW!). I’ll be the first to admit that I am an anime fan. I wouldn’t say that I’m an over-the-top fan, though. I don’t know every artist who writes every manga, but I do have an appreciation for it. I also know enough to know that I’ve never seen anything this creative done with a comic book before.

I honestly don’t know the name of this comic, but it so cool because Yusuke isn’t using rocket science, it’s simple yet clever concept twist. Using, cutouts, white out, lamps, and paper folding, Yusuke breathes an element of life into manga that I’ve never seen before.

A friend of mine mentioned this comic a couple of months ago and I thought it was the coolest thing. You have to check this out. Click the picture to go to the comic:

An amazing comic by Yusuke Murata

I don’t think it’s completely finished yet, but even the pencil concepts look pretty cool!

Donald Ash

P.S.-Yes, I am a nerd.

This is just is follow-up to How to Play Kendama, Part 1.” I guess I needed to prove that I’m not all talk . You’ll see from the video that I’m not an expert at this game, just a mere beginner actually. But this will show you the basics in action. Enjoy!

Thanks for watching!

Donald