Hello all. I am still in San Diego, enjoying the January warmth, which until I got here was the January Rain, complete with rain so bad that the San Diego river (usually a laughable thing) was threatening to flood big time. I don’t know what all the fuss was about though — it’s lovely here now.
I am having so much fun in San Diego, as usual. Lots of shopping, buying things that I can’t get in Japan easily, like shoes, clothes, and good American cough medicine. (You don’t think about medicines you’re familiar with until you can’t buy them easily.) Here are some pictures of our favorite mall in San Diego, Fashion Valley (where the Apple store is, too ^_^). Also, my car in San Diego, the spiffy Miata that I let my mother drive when I’m not in town. Great to be able to drive it with the top down in January.
Today’s J-List post is below. You can also read it on the J-List website or the JBOX.com site.
It never fails — making the hop from Japan to the U.S. is a prescription for reverse culture shock, as I am reminded again of how different the two countries are. The “small” size of frozen yogurt? Ha, it’s huge. Even in Southern California with its high population, there are plenty of wide-open spaces that you don’t have in Japan. Crossing over from Japan to the U.S. also feels like traveling through a time warp. In some areas, such as cell phones, televisions, and elements of design in electronics and cars, Japan seems to be five years or more ahead of the States. The Sony PSP handheld gaming system is still months away from release in the U.S. and Europe, but I’ve had mine since November (lucky me).
Duck! Oh! That’s! These are examples of some of the more bizarre English that we see daily in Japan. Since all Japanese study six years of English in school (or up to ten years if they study it in college), most people have a general working knowledge of English, even if they can’t always communicate fluently. Duck! is the bizarre message a moving company prints on their trucks. Why? It gets attention, I guess. Oh! is the message printed on a warehouse near us, why we’re not entirely sure. And That’s! is a line of media products, CD-Rs and videotapes, manufacturered in a factory in our prefecture. Every time I go to my dentist I pass a building that says “Splush is not only the problem of age.” I’ve puzzled over this for hours, and I think it means something like “you’re never too old to make a splash in life.”
For me, studying Japanese has always been great fun, but there are were difficult patches, to be sure. One area that proved challenging for me while I was studying is an interesting category of four-syllable adjectives (the 2nd syllable is a small pause that counts as a syllable in Japanese) that have interesting meanings that can be quite complex. Sokkuri (soh-KOO-ri) is a word that means “to look exactly like [someone else],” so if you meet a Japanese man and his son, and they look very similar to each other, you can point and say sokkuri! and watch their reactions. A similar word is pittari (pi-TAH-ri) which means “it’s a perfect fit,” so if you’re trying to find the right size shirt and you finally find it, this is the word you’d use. Bikkuri (bi-KOO-ri) means “to be greatly shocked” (sometimes Japanese substitute the English word “shock” for this word), and so on. There are about 50 of these words, all with hard to learn but well-defined meanings.
