Going to Tokyo first time

scottro said:
Also, many kanji are simpllified from a Chinese kanji. For example, ki, energy. It's pronounced Chi in Chinese.. Japanese write it as

気.​

​

In Chinese 氣​

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It would be 繁体字 (Traditional Chinese) mainly used in Taiwan ROC, while People's Republic of China uses 簡体字 (Simplified Chinese) that is simpler than Kanji used in Japan (Shinjitai or Japanese new character forms). In Simplified Chinese, it should be 气 (U+6C14).
 
😵 So complicated! It's pretty difficult for speakers of indoeuropean family of languages to learn tonal languages. It's just sooo unusual for our brains to say things in various tones that carry no meaning other than to modify the character/word meaning. I guess Japanese is pretty tonal too, it has some high-low pitch/accents thing, which is basically tonal. Whyyyyyy. It's so unnatural to our voice boxes.

Bigger question - if your tones are used to differentiate various characters/words, how do you express tones of speech that come from emphasis and emotion? Like, in English you can say "My God" in different ways (that are kind of like tones) to express various emotion. How do you do that in Japanese or Chinese? You can't. So sad. So what do you do??

But there's nothing more superior than Mochi ice cream. No one. Will. Understand. Who has not yet got up and run to their Japantown supermarket and acquired this asap. It is the most incredible desert in the history of the universe. Do Japanese people even understand people live their entire lives and die having never tried mochi? What a crime against humanity.
 
That specific example came from an old martial arts Tshirt I had in the 80's or 90's. Don't even remember the rest of the shirt, might have been a tiger. And the Japanese ki I just knew how to write back then.
One thing I would say to loveydovey, sometimes you have to take the translator apps with a grain of salt. My niece went to Japan, and a few days later my wife went. So, my niece went to see her but had been a bit ill. She'd gone to a drugstore, and using a translator app got something for a cold or flu. My wife looked at it, and it turned out to be an allergy medication. Though, aside from that, my niece managed rather well before my wife got there.
 
What's your favorite Japanese food, scottro ? I know you already said sashimi (dayum or "miam" as French would say). I volunteered mochi. I would add fresh (not instant) miso ramen soup.

See, we have to reveal the full picture piece by piece because T-Aoki and Japanese people do not tell us anything and don't reveal secrets. Did anyone see T-Aoki go, "Oh, hey, guys, try this really delicious X food from Japan, it's really famous and super good." Nope, he did not.
 
Crivens said:
I'll not go into the chopsticks etiquette.
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https://www.wikihow.com/Chopstick-Etiquette

When thinking of doing the same things with knife and fork it's not so different from our table etiquette - when you were teached some basic manners, which, when I look at not so few guests in restaurants, seems to be not the common standard case anymore.

cs.png

"If you want to eat like a dog, you can live and sleep outside like a dog."
 
loveydovey said:
So complicated! It's pretty difficult for speakers of indoeuropean family of languages to learn tonal languages.
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Same can be said for Japanese to hear / speak other languages including indoeuropean ones, as non-Japanese languages usually have far more variations of pronounciations.
One thing I've surprized was that Korean (Hangul) language seems to be quite similar with Japanese in grammers.
Before, I've requested to check several documents of a Korean company.
I cannot read / write Hangul, but the document was in mixture of Kanji and Hangul, with ruby in Japanese Hiragana for Hangul characters.
Surprizingly, those documents were almost sanely readable as Japanese!

Note that, as far as I've heared, Korean documents are usually in Hangul characters only. So those wouldn't be readable for me, as of different pronounciations for same Kanji. The fact Kanji is logograph helped me.

FYI, US gov discloses this document.

loveydovey said:
Bigger question - if your tones are used to differentiate various characters/words, how do you express tones of speech that come from emphasis and emotion? Like, in English you can say "My God" in different ways (that are kind of like tones) to express various emotion. How do you do that in Japanese or Chinese? You can't. So sad. So what do you do??
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Hmm... Hard to answer.
Basically, in Japanese, pitch in pronounciations are used to determine meanings, while intensities are used to determine passions, unlike indoeuropien languages. But unfortunately, as Japanese have quite limited pronounces, many words cannot be distinguished by itself and need the whole contexts to understand. And this makes developments of Japanese IME quite hard. (This is the main reason I hate Wayland! Why didn't use input method frameworks of X11 as is? Crazy! And why forcing per-compositor configs?)
For example, both 橋(means, bridge) and 箸 (means, chopsticks) are pronounced "hashi", but the former has accent on "shi", while the latter has accent on "ha". But in case 雲 (croud) and 蜘蛛 (spider), both are pronounced as "kumo" having accent on "ku".

loveydovey said:
But there's nothing more superior than Mochi ice cream.
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Do you mean Yukimi Daifuku? 😁

Well, in this hot (nearly boiling or steaming!) season, Unadon (鰻丼) / Hitsumabushi (ひつまぶし) are beloved in Japan.
For deserts, Kakigoori (かき氷) is beloved as icecreams. I like icecreams better, though.

In Japan, 4 seasons are relatively clear to be distinguished. So every season has "must have"s. Even for Sashimi, which fish is delicious depends on seasons.

Ah, I'll need to mention about 喫茶マウンテン in Nagoya. Non-Japanese pages are unavailable on Wikipedia...
If you're interested in strange foods (i.e., sweet pasta, shaved ice served in a bucket), it's must-visit place. Me? Tried when I was a highschool student.
But at the ancient era, strange menus are quite limited, just huge-sized (for typical Japanese people) with normal (or a bit cheap) prices, targetting mainly male students that are always hungry.

If you love deep roasted and dripped coffee, CAFÉ DE L'AMBRE at Ginza, Tokyo and Cafe Bach at Nihondutumi, Tokyo should be must-visit. I love both!
 
T-Aoki, my wife often watches K-drama (with Japanese subtitles) and I've been surprised how often there are very similar things, such as adding desu ka to a question, etc. When I first was learning Japanese, before cable TV was all there was, regular TV used to have various stations in different languages. I remember turning something on, I thought it was Japanese, there were lot of "ne" and "yo" but I thought, "That's odd, I don't understand even one word. Finally some writing appeared, I saw it was Hangul, (Korean) and realized that it was not a Japanese program, but a Korean one.

loveydovey, I don't like Japanese food that much. I tend to go for chicken dishes, and don't really like seafood. It annoys my wife, but she's gotten used to it after 30 years. And noodles. Especially cold noodles with sauce in the hot weather.

And for both of you, yes, the grammar, etc. of any foreign language can be tricky. In our first y ear or so together, my wife often mixed up past tenses and participles. I still remember her shouting at me, I am more annoying than I've ever been. (She meant to say annoyed). I simply muttered, Yeah, probably. That's one that's funny in retrospect, but one's efforts in a foreign language can amuse native speakers. I remember telling a friend that as a child, I was a bit wild and often punished. But for punished, I used a term that a Japanese samurai drama had the main character say, with the subtitle of "Punish them " It turned out that I had said my parents often executed me, which amused my friend. (For those who know OLD shows, it was from Abarenbou Shougun, and I used the term seibai.
 
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