Learning Japanese!

This time I'll post a short but interesting video, just for fun! ;) It is a performance style called rakugo, or 落語（らくご） in Japanese. This video came from Katsura Sunshine (桂（かつら）三輝（サンシャイン）), a Canadian traditional Japanese rakugo comic storyteller [1]. As you may realize, this kind of performance is mainly for entertainment. Specifically for this video, it used an exaggerated as well as amusing way to talk about honorific speech in Japanese. References [1] Katsura Sunshine - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsura_Sunshine

The guest lecture this Saturday was pretty good. Actually, it was even better than I expected. Yet it's a pity that I forgot to take any image. So I'll borrow the nice image from the course blog and put it here: Speaking of the most impressive part, it was definitely the experiences of Prof. Angles with both Japanese and English. In addition to "another self" with learning the second language, I think that there is a lot of fun to enjoy while living between two languages (three for me though). Prof. Angles used an example of translation to show that sometimes it is not easy to convey some interesting ideas in one language with another language. As far as I'm concerned, this, on the other hand, illustrates the joy of learning multiple languages. Knowing more than the native language opens a broader window of knowledge, and provides different angles to observe the world. This enables more potential to understand various people as well as cultures, and many of these ...

As an important part of Japanese, Katakana form a lot of expressions in Japanese, some of which are commonly used in daily life. This post gathers some examples of Katakana usage. It is expected that by knowing more about Katakana, the last piece of puzzle to learn Japanese can be completed. Foreign Words Similar to words we have learned, e.g., coffee (コーヒー), pizza (ピザ), hamburger (ハンバーガー), Katakana are widely used in words originated from foreign languages. (Starbucks menu in Japanese. Source: https://starbmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Starbucks-Japan-menu.png) It is easy to quickly find some examples from this image: espresso (エスプレッソ), tea (ティー), fresh juice (フレッシュジュース). It is noted that some of these Katakana words have Japanese expressions that already exists, but Katakana forms are still taken. For example, tea can be represented as お茶(ちゃ) as well. There are multiple reasons for it. Luckily enough, Katakana forms come quite straightforward. Basically, just slightly modify the...

This time I would like to share the song Sunshine by Monkey Magik. It was the ending song of the Anime "Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan" (ぬらりひょんの孫（ まご ）). Here is the song on Youtube: I first listened it while watching this Anime, which was recommended by a friend of mine. Frankly speaking, it was not so popular as some famous Anime series. But I must say it's really a good one and worth watching. As for the song, it was sung by a J-POP band Monkey Magik, some of whose members came from Canada, making them producing quite a few English songs in addition to Japanese ones. This song also uses English and Japanese, and as far as I see, they work quite naturally.