Having trouble reading that? Don't have Japanese text support on your computer? Well allow me to translate:
Konbanwa! Minna-san genki desu ka? Ima aisu kuriimu wo tabete, nihongo wo benkyou shimasu. San kyuu kanji wo benkyou shimasu. Chotto muzukashii desu, demo ganbarimasu!
Does that make it any easier? No? Okay, how about this:
Good evening! How is everyone? Right now, I'm eating ice cream and studying Japanese. I'm studying 3-kyuu kanji. It's somewhat difficult, but I'll do my best!
Now let me explain a little about what I'm studying here. First off, I'll start with explaining kanji. Kanji are the characters the Japanese language borrowed from the Chinese. They're easily identified because they are the most complicated-looking of Japan's 3 alphabets. Kanji are used to make up... most words in their language and roughly 2000 of them are used in your basic Japanese newspaper.
There are two other alphabets the Japanese use: hiragana - the curvy, rounder characters that mainly make up grammatical words/particles, and katakana/kana - the boxy, but simplistic characters mainly used for writing words borrowed from other languages (like "ice cream"). Of these two alphabets, there are about 46 characters each and they are the easiest to learn.
If the text I wrote up top looks like a bunch of squares to you, here's a picture to illustrate what I'm talking about:
(That sentence says "I drink coffee," by the way. I don't actually drink coffee, but that's beside the point.)
Okay, now that you know what kanji are, let me explain what "3-kyuu" means.
For the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (henceforth known as the JLPT), there are 4 levels, with 4 being the lowest or easiest and 1 being the most difficult, considered incredibly difficult for all but the most fluent speakers. Each level of the JLPT has a set of kanji that it tests you on (amongst other things like listening, reading and grammar). Here's (roughly) the breakdown:
- JLPT 4: 103 kanji
- JLPT 3: 284 kanji
- JLPT 2: 1023 kanji
- JLPT 1: 1926 kanji
Now that you're probably completely bored, I guess I'll update you on how the trip planning is coming along.
Well today I helped Cinnamon register for a race. ...I think. It was pretty tricky, since the whole page was in Japanese, but I'm pretty sure we got it, haha! I believe it's the 48th annual Tamagawa River "health marathon" commemorating the opening of the "Gasu" bridge. It's an 8k and is taking place June 15th at 10am. She'll probably drag me out of bed to go watch her run and take pictures, but she gets a t-shirt for it and that's really all she wanted. So wish her luck!
Other than that, I do believe maybe tomorrow I'll - or rather we'll - finally purchase our JR passes, since the dollar's up a bit against the yen (currently at 103). There's not much else left to do aside from book some hostels and rent a phone. And thank god, because we've only got 45 days left to go! Woo~
1 comment:
[this is good] That's totally what it said! (And what you just selected there is in Korean, which I can't read. :P) I think that would be something like "こんにちは、漫画家さん。 コーヒーを飲みませんか？” To put it in a language you can read, that says "Konnichiwa, Mangaka-san. Ko-hi wo nomimasen ka?" Somehow I doubt I'll ever have the occasion to say it, though.
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