bread and sunshine

I believe I wrote about this earlier, but with finals coming up, I wish to reiterate how ridiculous Japanese can actually be sometimes.

The language issue isn't as bad as I feared, but I still run into problems here and there. Japanese is much easier to speak than read, since the language uses three alphabets. The first is called hiragana, which is a collection of about 30 characters or so used to phonetically spell words native to Japanese (like teriyaki or konnichiwa). The second, also about 30 characters, is called katakana, which is used to phonetically spell words from foreign languages (the japanese word for hamburger is "hambaagaa", for example). Both of these I know in full and so I have no problem dealing with them. The third writing system, called Kanji, is far more difficult; essentially the Japanese use Chinese characters as kind of shorthand for words: instead of phonetically writing out "ku-ru-ma" (car), which would use 3 simple Japanese characters, they use 1 chinese character. The worst thing is, by looking at them there is literally no way of sounding it out or guessing what it means; you just have to know "oh this character means car and this means person" and so on and so on. Everything in Japanese is written in a mishmash of these three alphabets, so you really have to work to read things written down. Speaking is far far easier, provided you actually know the words you need to know.

Funny story: when my parents and sister were here, my mom was going to McDonalds to get a hamburger for my dad. She asked how to order it with nothing on it, and i told her it's "pan to niku dake", which means "just bread and meat". She then apparently didn't remember exactly what it was and ordered "pan to nikko (instead of niku) dake", which means "just bread and sunshine". The woman at the counter looked at her like she was a crazy person and I guess figured out that she meant meat and not sunshine.

So I've been here almost 2 months and I can't believe how fast it's gone. I have about a month and change left; I come back on the 23rd of December. It's going to be very very different coming back, especially since it's routinely in the 70's here and I expect the plane to land in about 4 feet of snow when we get back to Boston. Oh well.