jimbly dot com

Dolphin in the trees

jimbly — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:31:02 +0000

In the hills near our house there is a shape of a dolphin amongst the cedar trees

Ome Festival

jimbly — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:27:05 +0000

At the closest city to our town, about 30mins drive away, every May they have a festival (matsuri). 12 large floats made of wood (dashii) come from different areas of the city to take part, they are decorated with silk embroidery and lanterns, and at the front, there is usually 2 drummers, a few flute players and an actor, the actor is usually dressed as a fox, a tanuki (raccoon dog), a lion, an old man with a pouting face, or a samurai. These floats are pulled / pushed around the town by a group of people dressed up in old style too, normally announcing their arrival. At certain points there is also small stages set up similar to the floats. As the floats travel around the town, when they meet each other or arrive at a stage, they have a musical face-off, usually trying to be the loudest or most lively group.

The main event is when all the floats come to the centre of the city to have a big face off, normally 3 at the same time, to a judge in the centre.

The rest of the festival consists of food stalls, selling all sorts of food, ie, Yakisoba – fried noodles, takoyaki – savoury dough balls with octopus inside, baked potatoes, Okomonoyaki – a type of pizza made with cabbage and topped with veg and ham and my favourite, baby custella – small round buns made of pancake/custard dough. Yum!

There are also competition stalls, some you try to catch small gold fish using a very small table tennis style bat made of paper, the trick being to scoop the fish before the paper disintegrates.

Japanese language

jimbly — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:50:55 +0000

I started learning Japanese in 2000 when I lived in London, there I went to a night school at Thames Valley University for 1 night a week for 30 weeks per year. The class size was quite small, about 5 people, so it was ideal as a starter, the first year was basic vocabulary and learning Hiragana (the phonetic alphabet) and Katakana (the phonetic alphabet used for foreign words).

The second year was more difficult vocabulary and grammar and continuing practising writing.

The third year, the Uni didn’t have enough students for a level 3 class, so I decided to just do the 2nd level again to practice.

In 2003, I moved to Japan for 1 year, my learning curve took a steep increase as I was surrounded by the language, there was a lot of opportunity to speak and practice. Also, to help my learning, I went to a volunteer school 2 days a week. I wrote a diary in Japanese as practice for writing, this is when I started to learn Kanji (the characters that represent words)

When I moved back to the UK obviously I didn’t use Japanese much so I started to get out of practice. Then 3 years ago I met my wife and we moved to Japan again 1 year ago.

Since then i’ve improved quite a lot but not through lessons but just listening and learning.

Now what I need to do is concentrate on grammar and learning more Kanji.

Kanji characters have 2 ways of reading, the first is the ‘Kun’ this is what the character means on its own and is the basic meaning, the second way of reading is the ‘On’ this is used when the character is used with another one.

For instance the character for mountain is 山, the ‘Kun’ reading is ‘yama’ and the ‘On’ reading is ’san’

To say mountain in Japanese is yama, but to say Mount Fuji you say Fuji-san 富士山

Sometimes characters use the kun reading for character pairing.

It can get a bit tricky

new blog again

jimbly — Sun, 30 May 2010 14:47:26 +0000

Due to some server problems I’m starting my blog again, it’s bit silly really since I only restarted it in April.

Anyhoo, let me know what kinda stuff you want to know about Japan.