Not too げんきいthe past few ようび... a bit drugged up on Robitussin.

On a completely unrelated topic, is there a good online じしょう for ひらがな? I have no clue how to read these comments I get on my entries. I plugged in my last comment on Babelfish and it gave me this:

"Today. TA it increases and is. Don't you think? the word which with special care was learned does not become caught and the て ざ is don't you think? it is. The next, it should have become caught, don't you think? is!"

おもしろい, but not quite what I need. I wonder if that's what I sound like when I try to speak にほんご...

Composition

こんばんわ。ウオンです。ニューヨークからきました。あめりかじんです。コロンビアだいがくのよねんせいです。Chemical EngineeringとEarth and Environmental Engineeringをべんきょします。よろしくおねがいします。

First Encounter

So I got a chance to use my にほんご this week. Well, sort of. My roommate’s friends came over from とうきょうto visit for a few days. Unfortunately, I already knew where they were from, so I couldn’t say 「とうきょうからきましたか」, and my roommate had already introduced us by name, so that ruled out 「おなまえわ」. I couldn’t very well ask 「なんさいですか」 since that seemed a tad inappropriate for a first-time meeting. I was pretty sure it would elicit a 「すみません、ちょっと…」 response anyway. In the end, all I could offer was a mere 「はじめまして」.

My hope is that by the next time my roommate has Japanese friends over, I’ll know enough to actually carry on a conversation. ☺☻☺☻

The Japanese Language

The Japanese language, I feel, is surprisingly difficult for me. I expected it to be much easier given that Chinese was not very hard to learn. Of course, I can't compare the spoken languages since I've been speaking what most people consider the hardest dialect of Chinese at home ever since I can remember. However, many say that written Chinese is the hardest language since it is pictorial, and there is no way of knowing how to pronounce a word, let alone know its meaning, if you don't have the characters memorized beforehand. Yet, it didn't take very long for me to memorize how to write a set of characters and learn their meanings, even though I hadn't had background in reading or writing. I assumed Japanese would thus be all the simpler, given that there is an alphabet of sorts and all I had to do was memorize the meaning. To my dismay, this was not so. I often confuse the hiragana. Moreover, what I hadn't counted on were exceptions to spelling rules! Who knew long vowels took on a different spelling? And that there are exceptions to this exception?! I asked my Japanese-speaking friend how to tell when there's an exception, and she said, "You just know." Well, I don't know. I guess it might have been a bit foolish to think this would be easy.