Monday, January 23, 2012

A couple of fun things.  I was at the pet store and an older man in front of me had a dog for the hard of hearing.  I was looking at the sweet face of this very young German Shepard and reading her vest.  She began to sniff my shoes and the man turned to her and said, "Dame te yo!" I heard it at first as "Stop That!" in Japanese, but instantly realized it couldn't be that, it must be the dog's name, "Dameteyo."  What an odd name, I thought.  It must be Italian or something.  Then the man finished his purchase turned to the dog and said, "Ikimasho!" (Let's go!) The dog jumped up and they went out to the car.

When I went outside, they were still getting in their car.  I said, "Anata no inu wa nihongo wakarimasuka?"  He said, "Eh?"  Of course, he was hard of hearing!  I repeated it and he answered in perfect Japanese, Do you speak Japanese?"  I answered, "a little, but I am not yet skilled." (sukoshi, mada jouzu jaarimasen).

The dog's name is Kagemusha, or Shadow Warrior. The gentleman was very eager to see my reaction. It won't surprise you that that is the title of a Kurosawa film.  Because that's the way the universe works!


Am thinking of taking classes in the spring at SMJC to up my Japanese language skills.  I love my Tuesday night class, but am at the point where i really need to take it to the next level if I'm going to move forward in this language.  Have read a few words of encouragement from other online language learners, especially from the site AJATT.  (All Japanese All The Time).  It was heartening to see, oddly, that other students of the language have felt as frustrated as I have at making progress.  I might just join that sight and another online kanji learning center.

I still don't know why I do this.

5 comments:

  1. One cute dog.

    You don't have to know why you're doing it. You just need to keep following this very promising path.

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  2. Thanks Seana. I may have written this before, but my favorite homily in Japanese, at least as it applies to this: "Piled up specks of dust become a mountain." (chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru - ちりのつもれば 山となる. In case you wanted to see it in hiragana!)

    speck by speck...

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  3. My house is a living testimony to that! Interesting that when this came through via email, it was translated into "English", which included a lot of dollar signs--like this:

    $B$A$j$N$D$b$l$P!!;3$H$J$k (B

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  4. I just read this! Yes, dollar signs for American English. Makes sense! (Funny, I was going to be clever and write sense with the "cents" symbol, but guess what? My mac laptop doesn't have that symbol!)

    What do you think is a good way for me to get people to sign on to my blog? I will talk to you about it this weekend. I'm feeling kind of like I'm alone in a lake paddling in circles. Not that you aren't attentive, but I thought I'd have more readership by now...Not that I want to be a "star" more that I want other Japanese learners to respond and get a conversation going. Oh well...

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  5. You can email the blog to your email friends and encourage them to comment. And you can start hanging out on commenting on other blogs that you like, and start commenting there. There seems to be a sort of drift effect.

    You should also check your stats and see if more people are coming across it than you think, because a lot of people never comment.

    There are whole workshop on getting more readership, but as I don't really care about any of that stuff, I don't know the answers there. However, I think there is a lot of good advice out there.

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