The 2nd Week

I wanted to catch you all up on this week's topics in the Japanese class.  This week, your child learned Japanese greetings such as:

OHAYOO GOZAIMASU     "Good morning",                     
KON NICHI WA                  "Hello, Hi, or Good afternoon",
KON BAN WA                     "Good evening"
SAYOONARA                      "Good-bye"

In addition to these practical greetings, students have started to learn how to read and write hiragana, one of Japanese phonetic characters.

In this week, they learned 5 Japanese vowels: あ, い, う, え, お.

あ/a/ is pronounced like a in father. "ah"

い/i/ is pronounced like i in machine. "ee"

う/u/ is pronounced like ue in Sue. "oo"

え/e/ is pronounced like e in ledge. "eh"

お/o/ is pronounced like o in obey. "oh"

Please encourage your child to memorize hiragana!

In addition to hiragana, students learned how to say "This is XXX." in Japanese.

The Japanese word for "this" is KORE, and "is" is DESU. Also, in Japanese, "WA" is placed after whatever is to be marked as the topic. (A topic marker topic marker is a grammatical particle found in not only the Japanese but Korean languages used to mark the topic of a sentence. ) 

Since Japanese word order is SUBJECT, OBJECT, and VERB order, "This is XXX." would be

 "KORE WA XXX DESU."

Then, students learned how to form a question from a statement sentence. Making a question in Japanese is quite simple. In Japanese, the word order of a question is the same as for statements, except that KA is attached to the end of sentence. So, "Is this XXX?" would be "KORE WA XXX DESU KA." Easy, right?

Then, students learned how to say "What is this?" in Japanese. "What" is NAN in Japanese, so you just place NAN to OBJECT place. Now we have "KORE WA NAN DESU KA." which means "What is this?" Please note that there is no question mark "?" in Japanese because the sentence-ending particle KA indicates a question.

In addition to KORE "this", students learned SORE "that", and ARE "that one over there."

Like English, KORE "this" refers to something near the speaker, SORE "that" refers to something near the listener, and ARE "that on over there" refers to something distant from both speaker and listener. However, those KORE "this", SORE "that", and ARE "that one over there", cannot be used for people except for people in pictures and photos.

By the way, Japanese /ra/, /ri/, /ru/, /re/, /ro/ sounds are produced so that the initial "r' sounds somewhat like a combination of the English "l" and "r" sounds. Therefore, Japanese people have difficulty distinguishing English "l" and "r" sounds like:

play and pray
lip and rip
light and right
lice and rice         etc...

Ask your child the story about a Japanese tourist who went to a restaurant in US, and tried to order white rice at a restaurant.

Moreover, This week, we covered numbers.


1.    Pronounced ‘ichi’ (rhymes with ‘peachy’).



2.    Pronounced ‘ni’ (like ‘knee’).



3.    Pronounced ‘san’ (like ‘sun’).



4.    Pronounced ‘yon’ (more like ‘yong’ actually) or 'shi'.



5.    Pronounced ‘go’ (a very short sound). 



6.    Pronounced ‘roku’ (pronouncing it as ‘loku’ is actually closer to native pronunciation).



7.    Pronounced ‘nana’ or ‘shichi’ (“shee-chee”).
 


8.    Pronounced ‘hachi'.



9.    Pronounced ‘kyuu’ (just like the letter Q) or 'ku'.



10.  Pronounced ‘juu'.


Above ten, you would say something to the effect of "10 and 2" to stand for "12." 

Therefore:

11 = "ten (and) one" = "juu ichi"


12 = "ten (and) two" = "juu ni"


13 = "ten (and) three" = "juu san"


14 = "ten (and) four" = "juu shi" or "juu yon"


15 = "ten (and) five" = "juu go"


16 = "ten (and) six" = "juu roku"


17 = "ten (and) seven" = "juu nana" or "juu shichi"


18 = "ten (and) eight" = "juu hachi"


19 = "ten (and) nine" = "juu kyu"



For numbers from 20 through 99, you would say something like "3 tens and 6" to mean "36."


Therefore:

36 = "3 tens and 6" = "san juu roku"


43 = "4 tens and 3" = "yon juu san"


71 = "7 tens and 1" = "nana juu ichi"


99 = "9 tens and 9" = "kyu juu kyu"

Speaking of numbers, in the Japanese culture, certain numbers are considered “bad luck” or “good luck,” much like the number 13 is considered bad luck in Western culture.



The “bad luck” numbers in Japanese are 4 (SHI) and 9 (KU).



The number four is considered inauspicious because it is pronounced the same as the word for death (SHI). Therefore, one should not make presents that consist of four pieces. In some hotels and hospitals the room number four is skipped.



Also, 9 is bad luck number in Japanese culture because it is pronounced the same as the word for suffering (KU).



Eight is considered good luck because of the mountain-like shape of the kanji for eight 八. Mountains are regarded with reverence in Japan. Also, the character 八 resembles a fan shape, which is considered lucky because it suggests spreading out, growing and increasing, as in mounting good fortune.



Also, in Japan there are certain things one does not do because they are thought to cause bad luck.
A few examples are:



• Stick chopsticks into the rice: Do not stick your chopsticks into your food generally, but especially not into rice, because only at funerals, chopsticks are stuck into the rice which is put onto the altar.

• 

Give food from chopstick to chopstick: This is only done with the bones of the cremated body at funerals.

Sleeping towards the North: 

• Do not sleep towards the North because bodies are laid down like that.

Wow! Students learned a lot, didn’t they?