Reading Japanese Is Easier Than English

"Japanese is easier to read," says my five-year-old daughter reading her Nontan ノンタン library book. And it is!

English has crazy spelling rules that can be broken (ex: sight, site, cite, psyte, seit ... ok, i made up the last two), hundreds of sight words to memorize, and lots of frustration for beginning readers before they can read a book on their own. The Japanese language has a hiragana alphabet chart to memorize. Once you do that, you can read a children's book. By yourself! Yes, it gets more complicated than that afterwards, but for beginners learning to read in Japanese is straightfoward. If you take the letter "su" す and add the letter "shi" し, you get sushi すし. The names of the letters are the same as their sounds. Spelling is a breeze. None of this "H says hhhhh. T says tttt. S says sss" nonsense. In fact, there are no such things as spelling bees in Japan because it would sound like this: Spell the word "sushi." "Hmm, SU, SHI ... sushi." Boring.

If you don't yet have a hiragana chart, here are some cute ones from hiragana mama's blog. Start memorizing!

Sports Day (運動会) with 98% parent attendance!

Parents outnumbered the students for our recent Sports Day, which is called Undokai (運動会) in Japanese. In Japan, this is a huge event, so of course at our school it is as well. All but two students in our school of nearly 100 students had their parents there to watch them participate in different sporting events. Many kids had both parents and there were a few grandparents in attendance as well. Our elementary school is a dual-immersion bilingual Japanese-English school with roughly half Japanese families and half American families. Thus, the Undokai events included competitions from both cultures.

Here are pictures of the three-legged race, a typical American game, as well as the たまいれ (tamaire), a Japanese beanbag toss game in which two teachers hold laundry baskets or something on their heads and two teams (white and red teams) try to get as many beanbags of their team's color as possible into the baskets before the time is up. The whole crowd joins together to count the beanbags at the end ("ichi...ni...san..."). The school had us parents do several tug of war games against the other parents and a crazy balloon pop race in which we raced to sit on balloons and pop them. We were exhausted by the end, but it was lots of fun.

No Nestle Quik for Lunch

One time my daughter came home from school without her Dora thermos. She had mistakenly put someone else's Dora thermos in her backpack. When I went to wash it, I noticed inside was mugicha, which is a kind of barley tea. It seems like such an adult drink to me, unsweetened barley tea, but here it was, in a Dora thermos for a three-year-old. The preschool, like schools in Japan, tells us to only send water or "ocha" おちゃ (any kind of Japanese tea) for the kids to drink with their lunch each day. Absolutely nothing sweet. No juice, no sweet tea, etc.

Is It Possible to Make an English-Japanese Bilingual Yearbook?

Since my daughter's school is very young, they have never had a yearbook before. So I've decided to head the yearbook committee. The problem is that none of the easy-to-use, print-on-demand online yearbook creation companies can handle Japanese characters. Why, you ask?

"(The multitude of characters in the Japanese language) cannot fit in the 256-character code space of 8-bit character encodings, requiring at least a 16-bit fixed width encoding or multi-byte variable-length encodings. " (Wikipedia)

Or put more simply, when I type in Japanese on the yearbook layout software, nothing shows up. *sigh* There are yearbook companies in Japan, like sotsuenalbum.com, that can easily handle Japanese characters, but I can't navigate the sites very well and the shipping would be crazy expensive. So I may just have to photoshop each and every name onto the pictures beforehand. Lots of work.

The Japanese Momotaro Story and Momotaro Song

It was a special day at my daughter's Japanese-English kindergarten. High schoolers came to perform the play "Momotaro" (Peach Boy), which is a popular kid's story in Japan. In the story, an old lady finds a little boy inside a peach. Crazy.

She came home happily singing the Momotaro song, which I had never heard of before.

A few favorite Japanese kids' songs - with some listening practice

Ton Ton Tomato-chan (Pow-Pow Little Tomato)
Listen for the use of と to mean "with," as well as very child-like pronunciation of あそぼう (let's play) and かくれんぼ (hide and seek).

Omocha No Cha-Cha-Cha (Toys Cha-Cha)
Listen for さよなら (goodbye) and こんにちは (hello).

Anpanman No Okao (Anpanman's Face)
Listen for the use of the honorific お in the body parts. おめめ instead of め for eyes, おくち instead of くち for mouth, and おはな instead of はな for nose.

Inu No Omawarisan (Doggy Cop)
Listen for どこ (where) and ～ても form of verbs ('even when').

Donguri Koro Koro (Acorn Rolling)
Listen for いっしょう　に　あそびましょう (Let's play together).

Genkotsu Yama No Tanuki-san (The Badger From Genkotsu Mountain
Listen for また　あした　(see you tomorrow).

First Graders Walk to School (Mostly) on Their Own

My Japanese friend has decided to take her six-year-old son to Japan for a few weeks starting this month to experience first grade in a Japanese school. Her biggest worry is him walking to school without her. In Japan, most elementary school kids don't ride a school bus. They follow a sixth grader "hancho" (group leader) and walk in small groups to school, mostly on their own. And guess what, that is where we get the term "head hancho" in English.

Sometimes children living in the same neighborhood go to their school in a group. In places where there's a lot of traffic on the roads, parents and school employees take turns watching at the crosswalks to make sure the kids can cross safely. Children are taught to raise their hands to let car drivers see that they're crossing; sometimes they also get special flags to use at the crosswalks. And certain elementary schools have their younger pupils all wear the same sort of brightly colored hat when they're on their way to or from school to make it easier for drivers and others to see them.
From: Web Japan