This one gets a little weird in the telling but I’m going to try anyway.

The Japanese word for milk is 牛乳.  The first character means cow.  The second character… well, I’ve only ever seen it in dairy-related words so it probably means milk.  Right?

Flash forward to Ken and I watching the news on tv.  A list of cancers pops up on the screen during a story.  Japanese characters carry meaning so even if you can’t pronounce the word you can deduce what it means anyway.  Example:  white-blood-sickness is leukemia, a cancer characterized by having too many white blood cells.

So on this list I see stomach-cancer.  Skin-cancer.  Lung-cancer.  And then there’s… milk-cancer.

“Huh, that’s a novel way to think of breast cancer,” I said to Ken.  “Cancer of the milk.  I guess that works.”

“Actually,” he replied, “that character means breast, not milk.”

“Ohhhh, I see.”

I thought on it some.

“So wait a second, all this time I’ve been using the word 牛乳 thinking it means cow-milk.  I’ve actually been writing cow-boob?!”

Ken thought on that some.

“Yeah.”

~the sound of Karla’s mind being blown~

Yet another job you’ll never find me doing–that thing was bouncing around every time someone moved.

Shin-kawasaki, Kawasaki.

So I was trying to figure out why I’ve been waking up so early.  Like ungodly, 5 am early.  I went to the new, “ooo shiny” Wolfram Alpha and remembered something.

I live in a country that doesn’t follow daylight savings.

Yokohama seems to be a mecca for street performers–every weekend you can find guys (I’ve only seen guys) doing their special brand of entertainment.  Some do magic tricks.  Some juggle with fire.  But all seem to pull out a diabolo at some point and do a ridiculously high toss.  I looked on youtube to see what else can be done with the art form and… oh my.  (The real action starts at 42 seconds.)

Last weekend Ken and I spent a great day in Yokohama going to Minato Mirai 21.  While the name literally means “Harbor Future 21″ I think it’s meant to convey something like “Harbor for the 21st Century”.  They have whole bunches of stuff there.

(Find bigger, prettier versions of all these pictures on my flickr page.)

There’s enough shopping for the most dedicated shopaholic and plenty of places to play.  This ferris wheel was the largest world but is now 11th on the list.  It also claims to be the “world’s largest clock” but that seems a little dubious to me.

After walking around we had a great time at Osanbashi, a pier sticking out into the bay.  The design is stunning.  I don’t have any good wide angle shots so check out this page for a better scope of the thing.

You can walk around the entire pier without climbing a single step.  All of the walkways are meticuliously cut and angled beautifuly.

Ken and I sat at this particular spot and ate a picnic lunch.  Once the sun got a little less intense we found an even better resting spot–on the lawn.

I can’t wait to head back… maybe on a summer evening, with dinner and ice cream on hand to compliment the sunset.

I think it’s funny and interesting that my students (largely fifth and sixth graders) think that I can understand and listen to Japanese but can’t speak a lick of it.  The two skills have no connection in their mind.  I wonder if grasping the relation is a developmental milestone, something they realize when they hit a certain age.  The point was driven home by this conversation with a fifth grader (italics = Japanese):

Cute girl:  Karla-sensei, can you speak Japanese?

Karla:  Um, no, not really.

Cute girl:  Don’t worry, we’ll teach you! [she points to the board, where greetings in a bunch of different languages are posted for that day's lesson]  Look, today you learned “konnnichiwa”!

My mouth told her she was right but the rest of my body was screaming, “Don’t you realize that I understand every word coming out of your mouth right now, and that all of those words are Japanese?  That if I know what you’re saying the chances of my being able to reproduce it are fairly high??”  There’s certainly a gap between what I understand and what I can say on command… but it’s not that big.

With my fellow teachers there’s a different, more reasonable mental disconnect.  They know I speak Japanese but are shocked when they learn I can write a fair number of characters.  This makes sense, though–being able to speak a language is no guarantee of being able to write it, especially with a character-heavy language like Japanese.  This is an easily forgiven oversight.  The kids though, that’s just funny.  I can’t wait to blow their minds with my Japanese on the last day of school, some ten months from now.  Bwahaha.

Ken and I went to Yokohama today and had a great time visiting Minato Mirai and Chinatown.  At one point we were sitting in an area with loudspeakers and heard an announcement in Japanese reminding everyone to be careful about swine flu.  Then the announcement was read in English.

It was nice of them to think of the English-speaking tourists but the execution needed some work.  The announcement was poorly rendered with weird direct translations (“new type flu”) and lots of incorrect articles.  On top of that the announcer didn’t have a strong command of English and even though she was doing her best (bless her heart) some words came out a little… weird.  It was quite the combo:

We would like to make a information.  The W.H.O. has raised pandemic alert to five.  Please remember to wash hams and wear masks to prevent inflection.

Evil, evil inflection.

The flowers have fallen and been blown away but the cherry blossoms were gorgeous while they lasted.

These trees aren’t too far from my apartment.  Walking under them was like being in a dreamscape.

These pictures may look rosy but it was actually quite cold in the beginning of April.  We wanted to sit and enjoy the blossoms but the stone benches weren’t very inviting.  I did walk through here every chance I got though.  I’m sad the flowers gone but that bittersweetness will only make them more beautiful next year.

Yup, there’s IKEA in Japan.   It’s just like IKEA anywhere else, if slightly pricier.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at the food.

I rest my case.

I managed to cast off another pair of socks today.  Really small needles and really thin yarn equaled a really long, tedious knit.  Worth it, though.

Prima Julia [ravelry].

In other news it’s Golden Week, an extremely well-placed series of national holidays.  This year they land so we get five days off in a row–sweet.  Ken and I don’t have any big plans so I’ve been knitting, studying, and trying to relax.

My handy-dandy countdown clock says there are 61 days left until the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (日本語能力試験）.  While it’s not crunch time yet studying non-JLPT material makes me nervous.  My inner critic says stuff like,

You should be working on kanji!  How about those reading passages you wanted to get through?  Not to mention grammar…  oh, and your flashcards!  How have those been going, hmmm?

Le sigh.  So JLPT grammar, reading, and kanji it is.  I hate working from a set list when I feel like I could learn so much more from everything around me–tv news, magazines, conversations with friends.  One way to work through the tedium is to tell myself it’s only temporary.  Another is to buy myself new toys.  The newest:

This book is awesome because it explains the trickiest parts of Japanese grammar in English.  All the nuances are laid right out.  Example:  I’ve been having some trouble with related expressions like ue no/ue de, ue ha, and ue ni.  One tiny particle can change the whole meaning.  In the dictionary ue de has the following listed as one of several notes:

Ue de is used to express an idea that someone will do something rather important (quite often decision-making) after they have done something as a preparatory action.  The image is that the action expressed in the main clause is on top of the accompanying action.

Light bulb!  I love it.  There are two other dictionaries in this series as well, covering basic and advanced grammar.  I’m hoping to one day own the set though the price (roughly $40 a volume, or $120 for the set) will make it a piecemeal process.

The one complaint I have about the book is that the entries are in English alphabetical order, not Japanese あいうえお (a i u e o) order.  My brain jumps through a couple of hoops to figure out where a Japanese word ought to be.  That’s the only downside I’ve found so the book gets 4.5 stars.

Tomorrow:  more of the same.  Wish me luck!