Was very honored that Mystic asked if she can learn Japanese from me...
Hmm... have no experience 'teaching' Japanese through the net yet lah...
Anyway, I think the word 'karate' （空手）is well known all over.
'Kara' as in 'empty' and 'te' as in 'hand'...
So, karate means you fight with an 'empty hand'...
Similarly, the equally well known term, 'karaoke' means 'empty orchestra'...
But why 'oke' for 'orchestra'?
My take... the Japanese are fond of truncating words to 'save' energy...
Where I live, June is a time for persistent raining.
Rain that sometimes pour and sometimes continuously dripping for days, stopping intermittently only for cloudy skies...
They call it the 'tsuyu'（梅雨）season... literally, the season of the plum rains...
But as in the unusual number of typhoons hitting our shores last year, we are having an unusual spell of dry weather.
Thus, as per karate and karaoke, we are having 'kara-tsuyu'...
The last dry spell to hit the Sanuki plain was in 1994 when taps went dry except for only four hours per day.
The weatherman today fears that we could be heading toward a drought worse than that of 1994...
The 'save-water' notice just went up… and naturally I feel obliged to follow suit...
But my poor garden...
I feel a bit embarrassed to be seen using the precious water for the plants...
Luckily, I have a habit of waking up at 5.00 am during most of the summer, so I make a quick appearance at the garden to caress the plants before my neighbors wake up...
Still, my poor plants...
Their leaves, wilting... they seem thirsty...
I should be doing the Rain Dance soon...
Gardening, photography, food, fishing, traveling, scuba diving, life in Japan, plus of course, news and views of being away from home...
konbanwa lrong-san,maybe hor u should start a blog to teach Japanese on the net leh...:P Alamak, mention me somemore :P I am having a hard time bcoz there's insufficient study materials in Msia.Most of these books r for travel and mostly written by Mat Salleh and also in romanji only. While I want to learn how to speak, I also want to learn to write.
ReplyDeleteRain dance? Umm that should be interesting... Learning Japanese on a blog that should be something...
ReplyDeleteYup, something like what I have hahaha.. learn a kanji a day :-D
ReplyDeleteMystic... konichiwa… come to think about it, if I lose my job here, perhaps I can return home to open a Japanese language school…
ReplyDeleteNorzu... yah, tsuyu season is jime-jime… think mystic is in town, but not very sure…
soohk... something like the online courses provided by the Open University, maybe?
mmulibra... learning one kanji a day is a good way… used to do that while I was in the language course…
Ii ne... finally someone talks about learning Japanese language! I will be the first to register!
ReplyDeleteBut it's pretty hard to learn well if we cannot speak the language often :(
Low... if fate dictates me that I should be back teaching the language, I would probably enjoy it... not so much for the 'business' part but for the 'relationships' that come with hanging out around folks (like me?) who share a liking for the language... very true that 'daily usage' is an important component in learning a language...
ReplyDeleteLrong: See lah already got "potential" student interested leh. :p
ReplyDeleteHey, i thought i was a free online course??? Haha!!!
ReplyDeleteOr i can offer Mandarine, Hokkien or Kantonise class in return.
Perakian's Malay, perhaps? :)
Mystic... yeap, two so far… let’s see if we can solicit for more members…
ReplyDeleteLow… I am hopeless in Mandarin… but still have no inclination to learn the language yet… when the necessity arises, yoro shiku onegai shimasu…