Earlier this week I had lunch with Becky Selengut, author of Good Fish and humor columnist for Edible Seattle. May I just brag unabashedly about my good fortune for a moment? Becky’s column is hilarious. Here’s a bit from a recent installment: If you have kids and you send your precious progeny to school with […]
Note: If it’s okay with you, I’m going to write Japanese words and phrases in romaji when I’m not talking specifically about writing systems. Before Iris and I took our first trip to Japan, in 2010, I took Shigeki Kajita’s conversational Japanese class. Kajita has been teaching the class since the mid-80s at the University […]
For Christmas, Iris got a Lego Egyptian pyramid, complete with a spring-loaded sarcophagus that attacks grave-robbing archaeologists. When you build a Lego model of something, you have to start with the plastic bricks you have available, and the result will be recognizable but with an obvious Lego personality. In other words, when you look at […]
In hiragana, the simplest of the Japanese writing systems, most characters represent a consonant-vowel combination—a syllable. In English, you can smash letters together in unlikely combinations like “strengths” (nine letters, one vowel!) and it’s perfectly legit. In Japanese, however, certain simple sounds are just plain illegal. For example, “wa” is a common syllable in Japanese. […]
Japanese has four writing systems. Let me say that again: Japanese has four writing systems. If you want to read and write it fluently, you have to learn four writing systems. This is like being told that if you want to pass the driving test, you will have to build a car from scratch, and […]
