Monday, February 05, 2007

Hiragana

About a month ago I started learning kana, which is the phonetic set of characters used to read and write japanese. There are 2 alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is used for Japanese words, and katakana used for foreign words. Because apparently foreign words aren't cool enough to hang with the Japanese words. So now I can read all those Japanese menus and stuff, right? Not exactly. See, most hiragana can be written with a kanji character, Chinese style. So the only things that are consitantly in kana are katakana (foreign) words. And I don't know katakana yet. I'll start learning that one this week.

One of my students was happy I was learning, so she translated her new pencil case into hiragana for me. The case was covered with slices of cakes and other desserts with little cat heads poking out. One was "yummy peach mousse tiny cat cake" and another was "choco banana tiny cat cake." I have yet to see cakes with delicious cats baked in, but I'll keep looking. There was that feral cat colony that disappeared a few months back...

As for this weekend... meh. I had plans to ride with some people I met online, but the Chinese food I ate Saturday for lunch messed me up something bad. I tried to sleep it off, but it was not to be. So my sleep pattern got all messed up and I spent the whole weekend watching videos. I got caught up on Lost by watching about 8 episodes in a row, checked out some of The Office, and some movies. Children of Men and Babel. Everyone seems to love those 2 movies so I won't say anything bad. I've got time, so I think I'll watch Pan's Labyrinth in a couple minutes.

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