Wait a sec, didn't his country INVENT the damn language?

I didn't have a student for one class tonight, so I got to listen to a British dumbass fumble his way through a countable/uncountable lesson.
Countable and uncountable are the two classes of nouns that are defined by whether or not they take a quantifier.

For example: I'll have a BOWL OF soup (soup is uncountable).
There are FIVE apples on the desk (apples are countable).

Generally, uncountables are liquids (beer), made up of many small pieces (salad, rice), or are words of foreign origin (curry). Which is why you can count pigs and cows (old English words), but not pork or beef (originally French words.) This is really tough to teach people whose native language doesen't even have a plural form for most nouns.

And as far as this guy's lesson went, I don't know which was worse: his crap explanations, his piss poor examples (he asked a Japanese person to name some foods, then tried to explain why sushi, soba and sukiyaki are all uncontable, then tried to gloss over the "I'll have a salad and 3 beers" dilemma, And finally he misprounced "Cabernet Sauvignon" and MIS-corrected the student who was closer with his katakana-pronunciation.

Keee-rist. They'll let anyone be a teacher.

Why I Hate My Japanese Textbook:

An exerpt from Japanese For Busy People:

"gojikan gurai"
Do not confuse with "goji gurai" which expresses an approximate specific time."

It took me 15 minutes to figure out they meant the difference between
"about 5 hours long" and "about 5 o'clock."

C'mon, "an approximate specific time?" How the hell can a language textbook company have not one editor on staff who could catch that? Bunch of stupid bastards.

I mean "aitsu-ra, bakamono-tachi."

What Have We Learned?

Try to imagine a series of TV programs for learning how to do stuff. Do you remember that old show with Bob Ross on PBS? The one where he taught you how to paint happy little trees? Imagine a show with some sincere, knowledgeable, slightly creepy guy telling you how to avoid the most common mistakes of whatever hobby you're trying to pick up.

Now imagine one for business English. And one for advanced business English. And one for British Football English. And one for conversational English. And one for German, Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean and Mandarin Chinese.

Now imagine one for cooking. And making apartment furnishings from stuff you got at the 99 cent store. And one for caring for your pet hedgehog. And one for making miniature aquarium diaramas. And one for making paper airplanes. And one for golf. And one for swimming.

And one for walking in high heels.

Hey, look at that. We've just covered most of the offerings on NHK-E, the educational channel offered by Nippon Hoosoo Kyoukai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). The Japanese government pays to produce TV programs that teach people how to waltz. Or say "Where's the toilet?" to a guy from Hamburg. Or how to walk in mules and look sexy without making that fpap-fpap-fpap sound.

What... you want some kind of comment that explains the significance of this? It's clearly a representation of some sort that shows what the government thinks the average person with enough free time wants to know, but how the hell can you sum up everything that implies? I'm putting together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture, no border, and no end.

Someone told me once that the abillity to make tools was what separated ancient humans from animals.

Then it was what separated higher apes from lower animals.

Now it's just higher apes, some kinds of mammals, and this crow.

What is it about being human that makes us special again?

I've been in Japan for a little over a year and a half, and I'm finally starting to understand a few of the little things I'd seen in movies or comics or cartoons or books before I came here. Take summertime, for instance. I can't tell you how many times I saw the exact same scene in movies or cartoons to indicate it was summertime: A couple of long shots of either farmers' fields or a suburban neighborhood. If it was the neighborhood, all the colors would be kind of washed out, if it was the field, everything growing seemed to be a kind of iridescent green. But no matter what, whether the movie was a comedy or a drama, if the cartoon was set in feudal times or at a school for robot pilots, there would always be two things: a total lack of movement in the scene, and the constant sound of cicadas. I couldn't figue out if it was just a cinematic shortcut, like a tumbleweed in a western or a minor chord in the soundtrack for the villain, or what.

Turns out that the feeling of summer in Japan can be concisely and accurately evoked with exactly those things. I thought the rainy season was hot, but what came next has been a shock. On the days when I did have to go outside between 11:00 and 4:00, I was usually the only thing moving. Or at least, the only thing stupid enough to be moving AND wearing a black suit. And the sound of the cidadas didn't become truly omnipresent until the end of the rainy season. I can hear them buzzing now. I could hear them buzzing all last night. And the day before and the night before.

Maybe I'd just taken it for granted that regional differences would keep everyone from assigning the same meaning to symbols. When I see film footage of kids playing in piles of red leaves and throwing horse chestnuts (not to be confused with "horse apples," by the way) at each other, it doesn't remind me of the feeling of Autumn at all, because it's totally outside of my experience of Autumn. And I'm fairly sure that filling paper bags with sand wouldn't make any of those Ithaca kids think of Christmas.

But the people in Tokyo and Fukui and Osaka and Kanazawa that I asked all seem to have the same resonses to the cicadas and the still scenes for summer. I wonder if it's because the island is small enough to share a similar climate for most of its area? Or maybe because so much of the media is produced in Tokyo and Osaka (sorta like the central part of Japan) that most of the easily identifyable symbols from this area would have been repeated again and again and distributed all over the country. I dunno. It's puzzling.

Kinda like a lot of life here.

Why haven't you watched this video, like, a dozen times yet?

(Thanks, Karla)

Did you know that there is a rainy season in Japan? Well, don't get too excited to talk about it, the National Meterological Association officially declared the rainy season over last week. There was a notice in the newspaper and everything. Leaving aside the concept of officially sanctioning a change in seasons (which seems really bizarre to me), there is the matter of it now being summer. Competely and totally. Now that there isn't a barrier of dismal, gray cloud cover and misty, foul-smelling rain shielding the island, Japan is at the mercy of the sun. Which, being the Aztec god of war, has no mercy.

In the desert, if you sweat you'll feel better. Your body gets too hot, releases water on its surface, the water evaporates and takes some of the heat with it as it re-enters the air around you. But here there's usually something like 98% humidity. So when your body gets too hot it releases that water-stuff on the surface again, and it can't be re-absorbed by the atmosphere or your skin. So it goes the next best place: into the cloth of your shirts. Especially around the pits and collar. Then it goes into your suit. That'd be the black suit your company requires you to wear every day of the week.

Summer bites.

Do you have any idea how depressing it is to get off the last train of the night and have to run to the oly food source open at 12:50AM (a crappy bodega-supermarket), only to realize they're all out of everything instant, frozen or ready-made that you'd consider eating (plenty of day-old octopus salad, day-old salted fish stomachs and day-old liver stir-fry though) so you'll actually have to buy ingredients for something you know how to cook so you can make THAT after you finally walk home, secure in the knowledge you'll be getting up to repeat the whole damn routine in five hours?

Eh? Whaddaya mean it's only me?