A Japanese and Chinese Major

Archive for November, 2007

A hard fact to swallow when I went to Japan was that, well, I wasn’t very good at ordering food at restaurants. This is because I didn’t do what very few people realize to do before they come, and that is to learn how to read food kanji like those found on dinner menus.

Although this menu to you may seem easy to read and order off of, the truth is that MOST Japanese restaurants did not offer pretty pictures like these with their menu, and that was especially true for ramen shops.

Not only that, but if you could read the kanji it might not make any sense to you or give a false impression of what the dish actually is. Although it’s a learning experience, it’s not a very happy one since you would have to eat whatever came to the table.

To prevent this from happening, learn some names of the basic dishes and ingredients before you go to Japan. Namely, vegetables, fruits, and meat would be a very solid starting point.

And as the owner of Iron Chef would say, “A la Cuisine!”

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Japanese symbols are known as “kanji” and originate from the Chinese written language. Technically, there are four parts of the Japanese written alphabet, and that is hiragana, katakana, numerical characters and kanji. You must master them all to learn the understand the reading.

Here are examples of the three types:

Hiragana:

Katakana:

Kanji:

A common kanji that I’ve already discussed in my blog is the love kanji.

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In Japanese this symbol is used to represent love, and pronounced as “ai”. This is the kind of love that can be looked down upon, such as love for oneself. It could also be the traditional form of love that we think of today.

Not only is the love symbol one of the most common words in the Japanese language, but it is also very popular among those looking for kanji tattoo designs.

If you’re learning Japanese, this one’s a keeper.

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I feel I did very well on this morning’s anatomy quiz, I guess all that studying pays off after all. The rest of the day was pretty much same old same old, I took my physics quiz and came back (I guessed gamma rays are the biggest radiation waves, is that right?), and Julie and I made some pasta with meatballs and spaghetti sauce being that we lacked anything better to make. I just wanted to play Halo for an hour but instead the Internet was running terribly slow and I wound up running up and down the stairs trying to figure out which cord was Andrew’s computer and unplug it since I thought he was uploading things. Well I took an hour doing that and then I just gave up and when I just simply restarted the router after I came back to my room it worked perfect again. And since then I’ve been in front of the computer cleaning house on my server space and deleting a site I had up for almost exactly a year, it’s funny how I made it, ignored it, and then suddenly gained interest back in it exactly a year later. It was the multiple blog sites btw. Ok gonna study for my written first aid exam tomorrow soon so peace out.

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Woke up and thought I would spend all day studying but instead I played Halo. I got Sean to play with me a little while too. Yesterday was the michigan vs ohio state game and happily we won. Julie and I woke up only an hour before the game at her place and I was like fuck, it’s only an hour to the game?! We hadn’t started cooking yet! So we grabbed the groceries we bought the day before and headed over to my place, and I carried the open can of chicken stock all the way back too because we only decided to go to my place after I opened it. We didn’t want to stick around Julie’s because Jen has been being a bitch lately and just making us feel uncomfortable about just being there, and we didn’t want to give her any food because she never gives us anything ever. Well even though we only had less than an hour to make everything it all turned out really good and in time for the game, we made a whole package of hot italian sausage and cooked up a batch of meatball ministroni type thing with noodles, not bad for making it in under an hour. We were so full we didn’t eat anything the rest of the day, and it was fun to eat it with our roommates in the living room while watching the game. Ok guess I should study now cya.

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I ran across a really cool site recently called Oxitown. What’s really cool about them is that they allow you to make pages with them on their site and share the adsense revenue your pages make.  I find it to be a nice source of extra change, fifty to sixty cents everyday already so far but that’s not bad for doing nothing.  Think of it, that much is better than most interest you would get from your savings account in three months.  You have to have a Google Adsense ID to get the money but if you don’t have one yet they explain to you how you can get one.  I would definitely recommend it, the little change here and there really adds up.

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