Hey-ho, look who got to WaniKani Level 10.
Category: 日本語 （にほんご）
Temporary
Subtweets from WaniKani? 仮 Temporary
ｲ Leader + 反 Anti
Meaning Mnemonic
Your leader is very anti-everything, making it all temporary. You get a new shirt, “I’m anti shirts!” she yells, and out it goes.
She tires of things so quickly, you hardly have time to get used to them before they’re gone.
Reading Mnemonic
The leader’s most temporary possession is her car (か). Or… cars, because they’re all very temporary. She buys one, drives it around, and then suddenly she’s anti red car. She needs a blue one!
Picture all of the temporary cars she’s tried filling up an entire junkyard. They’re all a little different, but in the end they were all just temporary fads.
Meterstones, 2023
Small accomplishments during the year, not otherwise accounted for. Not major milestones, but bigger than inchstones.
- Served as a teacher’s aide for English Empowerment Center for three terms.
- Reorganized the space behind my desk to be more Zoom-worthy. Artificial backgrounds are just evil, even if you have a green screen.
- Reached level 6 of WaniKani.
- Along with my various community science projects, I pulled-chopped-yanked-sawed a lot of non-native invasives. All told, I logged almost 300 service hours for Virginia Master Naturalists, and I’m three-fourths of the way to 1000 hours of service. On one survey trip, I found a really interesting parasitic fungus of alder trees that causes a gall-like response.
Oh! And something I stopped doing: I retired from NPR, closing the books on a 42-year career in software development.
語彙: 1
Working my way through WaniKani’s level 3, which introduces vocabulary 水中, translated as “underwater.” The Japanese kanji are water + middle, and this makes more sense than the English. If you’re swimming underwater, you’re only under some of the water (unless you’re in the benthos). You’re somewhere in the middle of the water.
Kaki
Japanese tongue twisters and suchlike.
Not so twisty, but this one might cause a stumble:
Tonari no kyaku wa yoku kaki kuu kyaku da
The nextdoor guest is a guest who eats a lot of persimmons.
Even some pescetarian options
Add this to the phrasebook
Key sentences from my textbook, p. 197:
すしに わさびお いれないでください。
“Please don’t put any wasabi in the sushi.”
Particles
Our textbook is titled Japanese for Busy People, vol. I, and the lessons are organized around situations that a businessperson would want to handle. (A very early unit concerns exchanging business cards.) Each unit has a theme, like “Express gratitude,” or “Make a telephone call,” or “Order food at a restaurant.”
With more than a little nod to James Thurber’s “There’s No Place Like Home,” I remixed some of the unit themes into
Japanese for Busy Terrorists
- Ask for telephone numbers
- Describe what is inside a building
- Talk about numbers of things or people that exist in a particular place
- Talk about schedules in detail
- Ask someone to do something for you
Japanese for Busy Counter-intelligence Officers
- Talk about nationalities and occupations
- Talk about where you live, where you work, and who your acquaintances are
- Talk about the times of meetings and parties
- Talk about what you are doing now
- Forbid someone from doing something
Hypercorrection
Sensei was amused when I asked why Mr. Smith, in our textbook, did not use the o-prefix for politeness when asking the name of the fish in the tempura restaurant scene, おなまえ sted なまえ. She said, “Nobody uses the prefix in this situation—well, maybe some senior ladies would.”