ビデオ

Here's my first video. I could not for the life of me figure out how to video myself using iMovie––seriously, I am technologically-inept––so I tried making this collage of various images, some more appropriately "Japanese" than others. 

トクマルシューゴ

When I visited Japan, I was amazed by how similar *and* different Japanese culture differed from American culture. Japan boasts an ancient tradition that the US can never match–– especially since we Americans constantly tell ourselves that we are so brand new, and our culture is rife with reifying examples of characters' shaking off the fetters of old world (European) traditions. But where Japan and America absolutely overlap is in the astounding consumer culture that has taken hold of much of the world in the last century (and especially in countries where the US exerted direct influence, as was the case with Japan after World War II). Japanese candy, music, television, movies: though these obviously draw on unique Japanese flavors-- like smoked salmon candy, for example, because no American would eat that!-- they still reminded me repeatedly of American mass culture, as an almost weird mirror-image. And like American mass culture, what lurks below the blaring AKB48 singles in gaudy obnoxious department stores and sky-high malls is a vibrant independent music scene.

All of this is to say that Shugo Tokumaru is an artist all his own, and that his music stands out against the Japanese and American mass cultures that we all love to love, and love to hate sometimes too. Here's a nice track (though they're are many more!):

And here's an add that ran this summer in Japan, when a well-known confectionary company decided to make dried Salmon chews (I've tried them, and they're disgusting, but the ads are adorable, so why not share!).

I have a lot of Japanese music (old and new) that I'd like to share here, so keep checking back and hopefully I won't be too lazy to write again soon!

じゃ、また！

Days of the Week

We have a quiz tomorrow covering, among other vocab, the Japanese days of the week. Here's a song that's helping me memorize them-- may work for you too if you prefer cute old songs to rote memorization!

Learning Goals

こんばんはみなさん！

As I mentioned in my first post here, I took Japanese on something of a whim. Which is not to say that I woke up one morning thinking to myself that I ought to take a notoriously-difficult language for reason whatsoever, but that I fell in love with the language and culture while traveling in Japan and couldn't stop myself from learning more. Here, then, are the few things I want to see improve as I continue to learn Japanese. 

1. I want someday to read Japanese literature in the original language. Strange though it may sound, I'd rather sit in a darkish room by a lamp reading a Japanese book than chat with the local grocer in his Kansai dialect; the latter is certainly fun, but language-learning for me equals, more than anything else, literature-reading. To this end I plan to devote considerable effort to my reading and listening–– not at the expense of my writing and speaking, though. I have already borrowed a mostly-hiragana children's book from Sato Sensee's small library, and hope to spend a few hours a week reading through it, even if I have to use Google Translate to figure out what the words mean. As I progress, though, I'd like to challenge myself by reading actual literature. We'll see how doable that is, though!

2. About those Kansai grocers: I'd also like to talk to them, too. I'm hoping to spend my summer in Japan, traveling and catching Pokémon and reading Zen tracts and whatever, and of course talking to actual people in their actual language, especially in those country towns where my English will be of no use at all. I hope to speak in Japanese whenever I can, multiple times a week, for absurd durations–- even if that means talking to myself, out-loud or in my head, as I wander around Princeton's campus and the streets of wherever-else-I-find-myself. 

3. I also want to be able to understand the various animes and J-pop divas (Pamyu pampyu!!) that my friends and I have been obsessed with since high school, at least (in this I am sure I am not alone!). I want to watch episodes of Line Offline (a favorite) at least once a week, and will continue listening to excerpts spoken or recorded Japanese, even if I don't understand it, if only for the exposure. This website (https://jclab.wordpress.com/) has lots of fun audiobooks that help ease one into Japanese sounds, and the more I learn the more I understand, so it's a fun way to track proficiency.


4. I want to understand every single word of this song:

....and I want to be able to dance like the singer, though I suppose that has less to do with Japanese language learning than the above. Toward this end, though, I will listen to this song (and watch the video) every waking moment of my entire life, from the minute I finish writing this till the minute I take my very last breath, except those spent with the Sensees in Frist 307. (Pic related, it's the dance seen round the world!).

こんばんは!

はじめまして！

カルボさんです。あめりかじんです。わたしわプリンストンだいがくのだいがくいんせです。せんこうわぶんがくです。わたしわ”えとんとおん”のニュージャージー州からきました。

どぞよろしく！

Japanese, Part 1.

こんにちは.
KONNICHIWA.

Welcome to my blog, where I'll be recording the trials and tribulations of my Japanese-learning!

I'm a first year PhD student at Princeton University in the Comparative Literature department. I came here because I wanted to work on Arabic and Hebrew literature–– both of which I've studied intensively before–– yet here I am now dedicating myself, or at least trying to, to a new language much further afield than any of my others. I'm okay with that, though–– I love languages, and literature(s), and I don't think I could limit myself to one region or even family terribly long. I've felt for some time that I ought to add another language to my repertoire, and even tried to do so twice in college (alas, to no avail). At Princeton I'm forcing the matter and diving headfirst into kawaii music, zen koans, honorifics of every shape and size, and everything else that can only be said in Japanese.

A little more about me: I'm from the Jersey Shore (not exactly near Snookie, unfortunately), and only last May finished my BA in Written Arts and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College. Last August I headed to Japan for a two-week entry-level romp through the country and its wonders, and from that adventure I am still drawing the inspiration and energy needed to actually learn another notoriously-difficult language. I have a habit of reading books only about or written in the language of the country I'm in while I'm traveling; in Japan I read Tanizaki Janichiro's incredible modernist novel "Sasameyuki," the kanji of which I have stolen for my blog (細雪). "Sasameyuki" means "lightly falling snow," and might refer as much to wintry effervescence as to my soon-to-be inability to remember any word or stroke in Japanese, but Edward Seidensticker (the translator) renamed the novel "The Makioka Sisters" at his own Western whim. Naturally the original title is what speaks most to me, and I hope to you too. (Apparently Tanizaki also wanted to hint at Japan's famous sakuras or cherry blossoms with the title; if you read the book, and you absolutely should, you'll find out why).

As a title for a blog it works as well as any other. Yet it also serves as a reminder of the long road I've doomed myself to follow, for I own a copy of Sasameyuki in the original, and my undertaking to learn Japanese is at least in part in effort to be able to some day to return to that text in its original language, without Seidensticker's ornate mediating. We'll see how realistic a goal that is in due time, but for now–– time to learn how to write in hiragana!!!!!

(Writing is the most fun part of all this, right?)

喉から手が出る <– Google says that means "my hand is coming out of my throat," lol how appropriate
じゃまた!