Explaining skills

Went to my Chinese language class this morning. The teacher didn't turn up, (second time this month that has happened) but not to worry I had a good chat with the other students using Japanese.

Rida san introduced the history of Japan on the blackboard, and then I had a go at introducing a breif history of the UK. Parts of my explanation were in Japanese, parts in English.

There are some grammatical structures that I need to get more used to using to make things easier to explain. I'm sure there are structures, such as the multiple uses of ように, that I know, but haven't yet mastered when and how to use properly. If I spend some time on them, my ability to explain in the language would improve a lot.

The language of earthquakes and disaster

"けっこう揺れてるね。Kekko yureterune"

This is a sentence I've heard quite a lot over the past few weeks. Roughly translated as "It's shaking quite a bit isn't it."

It's now over a month since the day when the Great Tohoku Earthquake hit Japan, but the effects of that day will continue for some time. One of the more noticable effects here in Tokyo are the continuing aftershocks.

Coming from the UK I had never experienced an earthquake before arriving in Japan five years ago. The UK seems to be ideally positioned, somewhere in the middle of a large, relitively stable, tectonic plate. Every 5 years or so you would hear a story about some minor eathquake hitting a small town somewhere, but these were pretty rare and freakish. Certainly, nobody I knew had ever expereinced one in the UK.

Over the past month I've often thought what a disaster on this scale would be like in the UK. How would the British people, government and emergency services deal with something like this? The only reasonable answer I can come up with would be to say that they certainly wouldn't deal with it as well as the Japanese.

One interesting point for me, being interested in languages, is all the new words and phrases I've come across in the past month. Listening to Japanese people talk about earthquakes has got me thinking how in the UK, not only do we not have the technology or knowhow to deal with something like this, we also don't have the vocabulary.

Here are a selection of words that I've become familiar with over the past month.

"地震 Jishin": Earthquake. In English we have 'earthquake': earthquakes are pretty common around the world, so it's not surprising that English has it's own word for this. But next we have: "震災 Shinsai" This translates as earthquake disaster, not a terribly common term in English. I guess in the UK, a disaster is a disaster, we don't have special words for different types of disaster, because we just don't have enough of them. In Japan this disaster is called "東日本大震災 Higashi Nihon Dai Shinsai" The Great Earthquake Disaster of East Japan.

The classic word that has crossed over from Japanese to English of course is "津波 tsunami". Sushi is from Japan, so is tsunami!

The Japanese method for measuring earthquakes is different from the rest of the world. In Europe we use the Richter Scale, measuring earthquake magnitude from 0 to 10. In Japan, they have a scale from 1 to 7 which, more relevantly for people living here, marks the violence of the shaking experienced in different areas during an earthquake. So in Tokyo on March 11th we experienced "震度５Shindo Go" Shaking intensity of 5. (pretty scary I might add). In the past few days however, people in the Tohoku region have been experiencing aftershocks ("余震 Yoshin") of "震度６Shindo Roku"! There is also "弱 Jyaku": weak, and "強 Kyou": strong, that are sometimes added to these measurements. I think these are upper and lower measurements for each level, so a "震度６弱 Shindo roku jyaku" is stronger than a "震度５強 Shindo go kyou".

Here are two words that really nobody wants to have to be distinguishing between "横揺れ Yokoyure" swaying from side to side, and "縦揺れ tateyure" vertical shaking, pitching. Both used to describe the type of movement experienced during an earthquake.

After such a devastating earthquake and tsunami the destuction left behind is unimaginable. In Japanese they have "被災地 Hisaichi" I think disaster zone is a good translation of this. "被災 Hisai" just means suffer from disaster, and "地 Chi" is a suffix for place or area. You also have "被災者 Hisaisha" The people affected by the disaster, many of whom have become "避難者 Hinansha" Evacuees, and are now living in "避難所 Hinansho" Evacuee shelters.

Listening to the way Japanese people talk about earthquakes gives a good indication of how much of an integral part of life it is here. This familiarity gives them a great advantage when dealing with this kind of emergency. I think this is reflected in their measured reaction to the events of the past month. In the UK, if something like this were to happen, we would have to find a whole new set of vocabulary to deal with it, and I think this would add to the difficulties.

What I'm reading at the moment

Just added an image I've been playing around with to the Qing Dynasty page on this blog (see right-hand column).

Recently started reading China's Last Empire: The Great Qing, by William Rowe. It's a good read, and covers a really interesting period of Chinese history. As the title of the book suggests it was a great dynasty—probably in the top five, if not the top three as far as reputations of Chinese dynasties go—but, because of the fact that it was the last imperial dynasty, and it took China through the turbulent years of modernisation that were taking place around the world at that time, it is also a very historically important dynasty.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about it all is though, that the dynasty was not actually formed of ethnic Han, or "Chinese" people—the Manchus really didn't exist as an important factor in Chinese history right up until they took over the whole empire! The book goes so far as to suggest that their race and culture was almost an invention of political convenience to give legitimacy to the band of warriors who had taken over the empire.

Anyway, I think I might be getting out of my depth here talking about all this, so I'll stop before I say something wrong and suggest you read the book if you're interested in Chinese history like me.

Yes, I can!

I'm in a "Yes, I can do it!" mood today.

No sweat!

It's all about control. You need to have control over your learning. Get the best tools possible at your disposal: internet, texts, ipod, srs systems, teachers, whatever, and control your use of them.

A word comes up in your book, you've heard it before on your ipod: Put that track back on the ipod for tomorrow.

You're reading jokes online, you get bored: Switch to that long article about Mao Zedong you were trying to get through. Enough of that, back to the SRS.

Time is filled with learning. Control is important because control gives you confidence, and a consequence of confidence is concentration. When you are concentrating, it is much easier to take things in. You can pay attention to the material easily, and notice what is going on, making it all much easier to retain.

My new 4 step approach to language learning:

control = confidence = concentration = retention

How good is that? Do I need to take a patent out on this? What do you think?

A walk in Tokyo (東京散歩)

Using my new Tokyo walks magazine I went for a walk on Sunday. First I had to decipher some of the Kanji!

Headed to Northern Tokyo. They have trams up here.

This is the grave of a famous Japanese writer, Natsume Soseki. 夏目漱石

Back in the day, they wrote the name backwards. That's natsu (夏 summer）on the right, me (目 eye) on the left. Summer Eye, good name for a writer.

護国寺(Gokoku Ji) A 17th Century Buddhist Temple, one of the only ones not to be destroyed during the war.

I liked the roof.

This grave was better than Soseki's.

A Japanese garden.

Met this little lady in the Gardens. Apparently she is the goddesses of handicrafts like tea ceremony and cooking...

...and PC (パソコン)—that's computers; not being careful with your gender-specific terminology. I guess if you're a goddess these things aren't hard to pick up.

This is a marriage hotspot too. Here are two for the price of one.

Navigating my way around using the magazine was good fun, and got myself immersed in the language. There was a little museum at the end of the course with some Buddhist artifacts that had been collected over the years. All the signage in there was only in Japanese too. I actually found myself being able to read some of the signs in their entirety, which was a good feeling. This is a stone statue of the seated Buddha from the Tang Dynasty in China (8th Century). It's well old!

Emperor project

This is a project I've had in mind for a while now. I'd like to make some sort of record of all the main Chinese emperors. Chinese history is very interesting, and I find the emperors themselves, and all the ceremony, myths, legends, and intrigue related to them, fascinating. Quite often they were just figureheads and the people with real control of the empire often lurked in the background, controlling the emperor as they liked (often this would be a eunuch or dowager empress who planted a young, inexperienced emperor on the throne in order to take control themselves). On the other hand, some emperors were absolute tyrants, who commanded vast armies, and undertook massive construction products at great cost of life. My first choice falls into this category: Emperor Yang of the Sui. From what I read he has a pretty bad rep among historians, but was also responsible for some pretty impressive construction projects including completion of the Grand Canal, which was so vital to China's trade and commerce over the coming centuries.

I'll be placing them on a separate page, which can be found on the links to the right.