Broken.
The weird Japanese story today involves some background. Hang tight. Its not worth it.
So you have 3 Japanese alphabets. One of which is Katakana. This alphabet was used for foreign words like, “MacDonalds.” In general, this and all Japanese alphabets are symbols that represent small phonetic sounds. Usually a consonant and a vowel like, “To,” as in, “Toe,” or, “Yu,” as in, “You.”
Still awake? Well great. So you write by chaining these sounds along. You can also do some other neat stuff like put a small vowel next to a bigger sound. The vowel, “U, ” looks like this ウ and the sound, “To,” is ト. So if I want to make the sound, “To” as in, “Two,” then I write this トゥ.
What is the point of all of this? Well Jim was writing the Japanese phonetics out to English Christmas carols. The phrase, “Happy new year,” came up and we thought about how to do the word, “Year.” Now I thought to make the sound, “Yu,” with a small, “I,” sound to make the sound, “Yi,” like “Year!”
The Japanese teachers come over at looks and say that it is wrong and that we just wrote “Youear.” That sparked the whole debate about using the small vowels.
What it boiled down to is that yes, this is a rule, but the Japanese have forgotten about the Ys. I asked my kids and most of them would make the correct sound without thinking and then, only after they thought, they would start to mess up.
Silly Japanese.
In another note, I had one of the most perfect classes today. I hate to know that I’ve peaked already.
December 5th, 2008 at 9:10 pm by rl