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Japanese

Retarded Japanese Essays

Short essays written in Japanese to practice specific grammar points lose their ring when you translate them into English.

言うまでもなく、日本の田舎には老人が多い。
It goes without saying that the Japanese countryside is full of old people.

米国大統領はバカであることは言うまでもない。
It need not be said that the American President is an idiot.

たとえ親であろうと、子供のため警察官を打ってはいけません。
Even if you are a parent, you must not hit a police officer for the sake of your child.

たとえ社会的に地位の高い人であろうと、他の人に命令してはいけません。
Even if you are a member of a high social class, you must not tell other people what to do.

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Categories
JET Middle School

The Workday

It’s as if my battery knew when I could go home.

countdown

Categories
Alaska

Google Streetview: Fairbanks?

Messing with Google Maps Streetview tonight, I checked to see if Omaha, NE had been added to the list of Streetview Cities. Disappointed to find that it hadn’t, I decided to head toward Alaska, but forgot to turn Streetview off. Well, lo and behold Streetview in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks. Juneau had been there for a while, but I really was surprised to see Fairbanks. Now I can soothe my homesickness with this lovely view:


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Categories
Uncategorized

Frivolous

I make a lot of fairly serious updates on this blog. Really, though, all sorts of dumb things are bouncing around inside my head. Here are a few:

Battlestar Galactica

The third episode of the fourth season might be just about the best episode of any television series I have ever seen. BSG is as a whole, an amazing show. Because it has set viewers expectations so high, if an episode is not astonishing, it tends to disappoint (“Black Market” being the one exception that was just all around lame). The season premiere let me down a little bit, but only because I was schoolgirl giddy about it. The third episode, “The Ties That Bind,” astonishes with an extremely artistic and nuanced character-driven episode. At times I felt I was watching an art house film, the camerawork, sound design and complexities of plot were so well done.

Also, did anyone notice the designation of the weapons locker the Chief, Tigh and Tory visit? 1701D. 😉

Northwest/Delta Merger

I probably fly Northwest Airlines more than any other airline, and have always thought that Delta is sort of a piece of crap (their miles expired on me last year and I had to use 9,000 of them on a bunch of crap magazine subscriptions). So I’m a little confused about the merger between them. My friend Nate works for Northwest in their training department, and he says he should keep his job, so I am happy about that. What bothers me is that the new airline will be called Delta Air Lines. I have two problems with this. The Northwest name, logo, and fleet livery will probably go by the wayside. I like the way NWA planes look. White, red, and smooth gray in broad, clean shapes makes me feel like the plane I am getting on is somehow calmer and more well-prepared than a white or silver beast with chevrons emblazoned on it. Northwest’s SEA-NRT A330 coach service is hard to beat as well. I met a Boeing engineer in Tokyo who travels between Seattle and Niigata eight or nine times a year to supervise cockpit manufacturing for the 787, and he would only fly Northwest on that route, saying that the cabin configuration and entertainment system were much better than American or Delta.  Plus, why is Northwest Airlines becoming Delta Air Lines? Who are they employing as language consultants? Compound the damn word!

Proper Penmanship

How do you write the capital letters M and N? For M, I figure everyone either goes, from left to right, up down up down in one continuous stroke, or, from left to right, down down down down in four separate strokes. Well, the penmanship for the new first grade junior high students instructs them to write an M like this: Left vertical stroke from top to bottom, far right vertical stroke from top to bottom, then the left and right middle diagonal strokes from top to bottom in that order. What is that?

Photo Website

Pbase is starting to feel a little dated, and my subscription will run out in a few months. I have an idea to continue my punny domain name trend and create a separate website for all my photos. The Japanese word for photo is shashin (shah-sheen). Both www.seanshin.com and www.shasean.com are available. Any thoughts? I’m also looking at smugmug as a new photo service.

Categories
travel

Back from the Jungle

I’ve been back from Papua New Guinea for about 10 days. I took some time to let the experience decompress before recounting it.

It was a great experience. Every one of our group came back touched by something different. For myself, I was fascinated by the language; its isolation and lack of documentation sparked my linguistic nerdiness, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand what I could. However, I found myself more curious about the geography. The valley, the coast, the mountains, the river, the flood plain, the rainforest. And how the people live with it. Emphasis on with. Developed countries have eliminated nature from everyday life; the people in the Waria Valley are a part of it. I am lucky to know nature more than the average city dweller, but the subarctic Alaskan wilderness corresponds not to the tropical Papuan jungle. Learning how local people make use of the land and the things that live and grow on it was an adventure and fascinated me far more than their language. The experience has me seriously reconsidering my interests. Even while studying linguistics at UAF, I realized that I sometimes harbor a weary complacence with people that hardly befits human research. Even linguistics itself, while immensely important, fills somewhat of a niche role in the big picture of human problems. While I am fascinated with Zia tribe and their language, how the lexicon reflects their connection to the environment, in my mind those aspects are ancillary to the broader issues of deforestation, sustainability and responsible development.

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Categories
JET travel

PNG Departure

In 24 hours, I will be leaving to Papua New Guinea for two weeks.  I won’t have telephone or email contact during that time.  Both of my parents have my emergency contact information, so if there is something urgent, contact them.

I am pretty much prepared.  I have four full bottles of sunscreen, two full bottles of deet bugspray, malaria pills, sunglasses, sandals, hammer, paintbrush, camera, swimsuit, snorkel, goggles, as well as a ridiculously large canvas hat from the women’s department at Jusco. A vague map shows where we will be below:


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Categories
family travel

Mom’s Desert Race

My awesome mother is flying to Morocco this Sunday to compete in the 23rd annual Marathon des Sables. Here’s an excerpt from the race website about this year’s course:

The route for 2008 is 245.3 Km long, making it the longest ever in the history of the MARATHON DES SABLES.
The race will be challenging from day one – and continue that way – offering all the variety of the Sahara. The course will take runners over ergs (dune zones), seriously steep jebels (up to 25% slope factor) and rocky plateaus. They’ll have to cross hard as iron salt-flats and the driest of wadis. The backdrop to all of this is the most beautiful of landscapes with vistas accessible only to those on foot.

I’m jealous! But 245 kilometers, even over five days, is not easy. So, I encourage you to send my mother some words of encouragement or just a ‘hello’ via the race’s email delivery service, from March 29th to April 4th. My mother’s yoga website has instructions and a link to the page from where you can send messages. There is no specific address information yet. I am assuming that will not be posted until the 29th in order to avoid spam and such. Unfortunately this means I can’t send a message, since I will be in Papua New Guinea during that time. But I encourage you all to!

This is the city where the race is based (starts?):


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Categories
elementary

Saint Patrick’s Day

The week before last, I was talking to my supervisor at Senami Elementary about what her next English bulletin board topic should be. The current one was Valentine’s Day, and needed to be taken down. I suggested Saint Patrick’s Day, which was hard to explain, especially the part about leprechauns. Anyway, she got the right idea and made a nice explanation about pinching and green and Irish stuff, using some leprechaun clip art and a photo of the Chicago river dyed green. On Thursday, I saw the board for the first time, and suggested that she add another visual element to the board. Check it out. Kudo-sensei does a good impression of Leprechaun Paris.

Bulletin Board Pose

Where’s Me Pot O’Gold?!

Categories
JET travel

The Road to Papua New Guinea

The Niigata ALT Charity Musical, Alice in Japan finished yesterday, with two shows back to back in Nakajo and Niigata. It’s somewhat of a relief, having accomplished the run of shows successfully, but it’s also sort of an exciting end, because it means that the trip to Papua New Guinea is now only a week away. I am already taking my malaria medication, and starting the packing process, including a ton of sunscreen and bug dope, snorkel and goggles. I also gathered an enormous amount of school supplies to take down to the village that we will be visiting. Our project this year is to build an elementary school in an area that doesn’t currently have one. We leave from Japan on the 22nd, and return on April 6th. I am looking forward to it immensely. While hopping around as a late rabbit, socializing with other ALTs, and involving myself in the community and in my schools through the musical has been fun, the real hook for me was the Papua New Guinea trip. We will be visiting the Waria Valley, in Morobe Province, on the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea. The specific tribal area is know as Zia (gee-ah) and this term applies to the people as well as the language. While English is an official language of PNG, so is Tok Pisin, which is used as the primary lingua franca in the country. This common language is necessary in addition to English. According to SIL, Papua New Guinea is linguistically the most complex nation of the world. Over 800 languages are spoken in the country, of which Zia is one. I’m looking forward to experiencing the place and the people and the culture and the geography. I’ll be taking lots of pictures, but you can check out pictures from previous years here.

Categories
elementary JET Murakami

Taco Night

I had my supervisor from Senami Elementary, Hiki-sensei, her two children, and two other teachers from Senami over on Thursday night for tacos. Japanese people don’t really have very good knowledge of tacos, and it doesn’t help that tako in Japanese means octopus. The ALTs in town came over too, and we had a great time playing boggle and scrabble, and eating pop rocks, pixy sticks, and peeps. Here’s a photo of Kudo-sensei from Senami Elementary, and Hiki-sensei’s two children with Hannah, the ALT in Kamihayashi-mura.

Taco Craziness

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