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Lightning strikes! Twice before the J-List office
has had the bad luck of being struck by lightning, frying our
main air conditioning unit and causing us to spend a week or so
sweltering in the heat and humidity of Japan's high summer.
Well, it's happened again, and currently the J-List staff is
trying to work in near-sauna conditions. Fortunately the
lightning also knocked out the ice cream freezer at my parents'
liquor shop, so we had an excuse to eat all the ice cream before
it melted.
One thing I've learned about the Japanese:
nothing makes them more pleased than when one of their own
attains international recognition, and writers like Yukio
Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, directors like Akira Kurosawa and
Hayao Miyazaki, and athletes like Hideki Matsui and Ichiro
Suzuki all occupy a special place in the hearts of their fans at
home for this reason. So you can imagine that Japan is pretty
proud of its latest hero, astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who went up
in the U.S. Space Shuttle Discovery. Every time I turn on the
television I see footage of Noguchi-san, making jokes while
floating in zero-g or talking to his fans on the ground. As a
former English teacher, I'm happy to see men like him become the
new heroes to kids in Japan, and I hope it encourages more young
Japanese to try harder to master English. Yesterday morning the
crew of the shuttle was awakened with a broadcast of Japanese
children singing the theme song to My Neighbor Totoro
("Let's Take a Walk") because it was the day of his
first spacewalk outside the ship. Urayamashii! (OO-ra-ya-ma-SHE,
which means "[I am] so envious [of him]!")
There's no doubt about it: the most complex
part of learning Japanese is kanji, unless you're fortunate
enough to already be fluent in Chinese. An educated Japanese
person generally uses around 2000 kanji, compared with 3500-5000
for the same person in China. Because the Chinese writing system
was basically grafted onto the existing Japanese language in the
5th century, there are fundamentally two ways to read any
character, the on (rhymes with bone) or Chinese reading, and the
kun (rhymes with spoon) or Japanese reading, the latter being an
existing Japanese word that's been assigned to a kanji based on
the character's meaning. As a general rule, you use the Chinese
reading for compound words made up of two kanji (for example,
the word for hibernation, toumin, written with the characters
for winter + sleep), and there are quite a few Chinese and
Korean words that are the same in Japanese for this reason. The
Japanese reading is usually used for kanji words that appear by
themselves (e.g. the character for winter written all by itself,
fuyu), or in special cases like names of people or places. It's
hard to believe, but it's easier to memorize Japanese vocabulary
words through kanji than, say, learning from a book which prints
Japanese in romaji (the Roman alphabet) For example, the kanji
for "most" can be combined with a variety of other
kanji to describe ideas like tallest, shortest, for example
"saikou" (most + high = highest, also meaning the
best), "saitei" (most + bottom = the lowest, meaning a
real jerk when applied to a person), "saisho" (most +
begin = the first), "saigo" (most + after = the last),
and "saishin" (most + new = the newest). Memorizing
these words in kanji only takes two "bytes" of your
brain's memory once you've gotten used to the characters
themselves, but memorizing the words in the Roman alphabet would
be harder since they're just a jumble of letters. (See the main
website page for examples of these kanji characters.)
J-List loves DVDs, and we sell hundreds of
unique DVDs from Japan. While most of our titles are region
free, so you can play them on any standard DVD player, Japanese
anime, specialized "indies" and some other discs are
published as region 2, meaning you need a special player to play
them. We've got two great region-free DVD players from Lasonic,
the karaoke-enabled 7880K and the amazing 7050, which plays DIVX
movies burned onto DVD-R, DVD-RW, you name it. We've lowered our
prices on these players to just $78 and $98, so why not pick one
up today?
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