Lamen

I went to my first class in "survival Japanese". It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. Such as you need to know all three ways of writing Japanese in order to read anything, like books or newspapers, because one method is used for Japanese original words like teriyaki, another is used for the Japanese version of foreign words like personal computer, and the last is the Chinese symbols that they originally used and still use today for things like some nouns and all names.

It was a bit confusing. Our instructor told us we weren't getting into the reading part of it she just wanted to make us aware of it. If we wanted to learn to read we'd have to go to the advanced survival course that they just started. Perhaps next month I'll be learning to read Japanese... who knows?

Today we just learned basic "Hi. My name is... How are you? Where are you from?" type of stuff. It was pretty cool. I don't know what it is about Japanese but I get way more excited about it than I ever did going to my Spanish class in high school. Maybe it's the immediate chance to use what I learned... We learned a phrase to say after a meal that our instructor said would make restaurant servers proud of us. I wanted to eat out for supper. Shaun's working. Perhaps another day...

I also learned that I've been saying ramen wrong. The Japanese language doesn't have an 'r' sound in it. They pronounce it lamen (the 'l' sound is a softer version of 'r' if you think about how your mouth makes the sounds...) We all laughed when we found that out.

I can't wait for next week's class!