Mother's Day: The Movie

There is some jerk in this video not taking this solemn day seriously; he must have a patient mother.

Average salaries in Japan part II

Last post I laid out some salaries that I found in a book at the local family mart. It's now updated a bit (the only one I was really off on was the cop; holy crap they are really rich!). I also picked up these salaries today:

Doctor: 1,100 man. Bit lower than an American doctor I think.
Professor: 1,130 man.
taxi driver: 300 man.
manga-ka: 240 man. Another secret dream job disappoints.
writer: 330 man. Yet another secret dream job.

The book may be enjoyable to read; I found the Japanese was about right for my level. Each entry seems to be, "you may think it's easy to be x, but actually..." It was also fairly cheap, but I was more interested in the scary stories collection to its right (-_^)

Average salaries in Japan

Updated corrections in bold!
As a JET, I make 3,600,000 yen before taxes (360 man in the local lingo).
Today I read a book in a conbini that layed out the average salary of many types of jobs. Let's compare (I tried to memorize the figures as best I could so I may be off by a bit, but as you can see I can hardly afford to be buying books on my salary).

Average teacher pay (junior high): 740 man. And they get bonuses. And they live with their parents, so life is practically free. Downside: No free time and you are basically a replacement parent.
Average cop: Something like 780 man I think it was. Not bad for bike wranglers.
Average talento: A mere 280 man. Crap. That is my secret dream job. And they work so hard it seems!
Average hostess: 450 man. Does it make up for the liver damage?
Average stripper: 470 man. Probably not worth the extra 20 man a year to go from entertaining guys as a hostess to entertaining guys. And I imagine you get stuck with a Nigerian boyfriend that always borrows your money. I'm just saying there were a lot of Nigerians working for the strip clubs in Roppongi; there's gotta be a lot of hardworking Nigerians with real jobs outside of that area.
Director: 280 man. No wonder Takashi Miike makes so many films.
Farmer: 420 man. Probably not enough, seeing as I have never met a farmer without a family.
Translator: 360 man. Crap, that is my not-secret dream job.
Ramen restauranteur: 450 man.
Soba restauranteur: 800 man. Who knew the kings of the noodle industry were soba dudes?
Public servant: 700 man. Ironically, one of the easiest jobs in town is the highest paying. You have to pass a test to get in though, and maybe know some people who know some people.

Tomorrow I promise to go out and double check the numbers and maybe add a couple more. Check completed; but I missed the pages on hostesses and strippers on the second go around; I was furtively scribbling notes and worrying about how it looked to the store people, so I kinda flipped through fast.

Why my hashi are not your hashi

My hashi: chopsticks one takes with them to eating establishments to avoid using disposable ones and thus give the environment a break.

My hashi is a Japanese term. At first I was very happy that everyone seemed to be using English when I pulled mine out. "O! Mai hashi!" they would say, and praise my environmentalness--I even got a couple Japanese people in on the whole taking hashi around thing. And a trend seemed to be sweeping the nation: not of actually using the things, but at least knowing the word "my." The English teacher in me was cheered.

After a while, I started to catch on that the meaning of "my" had been lost on the general populace, despite it being a very basic word taught in 7th grade. "Oh! Clay! My car?" they would say as I got out of a vehicle.
"Uh, yes." I would say.
"Oh! My home, Clayton?"
"Well it's my home..."
"Clayton! My jitensha?"
"No, that's mine. Do you see? Mine. Not yours. My bike. Not my bike. D'oh...."

And so life has become a bit of a "who's on first" joke in this county.
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The true cause of the "my hashi" boom:

Ma Ma Mawasu! Wii Fit

There is a hairy belly in this video. It was neccissary. You have been warned. Thanks to Zara for the little neccissary gif.
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btw, A Softer World has the same problem as me.

Pusan from Fukuoka: Should I stay or should I go now?

Not a calendar person. I can't emphasize that enough if I say it eight days a week. So Golden Week has once again caught me off guard. I may be able to manage passage on a ferry to Korea, even now, but have no idea if I will find things like lodging and food that doesn't bark (the rest of the country's food looks pretty good though).
And then there is the dumb cat. Dumb cat got a leg gash and has to be given medicine. Old man takes off dumb cat's no-lick satellite dish collar. I lecture old man. Old man doesn't believe me. Old man is untrustworthy substitute human. Simple present-tense sentences come out of keyboard. So can I find someone to take care of this cat? This is basically my last chance to go on vacation for a long time what with the move coming up.
My other options include a major study holiday. So many books to get through. Not just textbooks, but manga and novels. Maurice gave me about 50 manga volumes. My aunt bought me an entire Yu Miri collection of novels. I could turn off the internet and just study for five days. I could. Will I?
One last nagging thought: Wii Fit will yell at me when I get back.

1kyu grammar explanations done

I finally finished translating my big book of grammar. You may have previously seen it in a blog post, and that post is completely updated, but you can just view the full list here. If someone really wants to, I can create a duplicate list and put them on as an author so that they can add corrections and example sentences. But I am moving on; this list is gonna be copy-pasted into my Anki deck, and I am going to take Alex's wife's advice and memorize the original book (plus do all the workbook problems).
日本語は大変な試しでなくてなんだろう！See, you would already know what that means if you were reading the list right now.
Edit: Slightly edited it a little to make some things clearer.
Also: I did this for a few 2kyu grammar things too last year, but that list is incomplete and likely won't be completed (I know the grammar, so don't want to back-track).

Selling a car in Japan

I have a lot of things stressing me out about the move right now. Not the least of which is my car. But I won't even have a parking spot in the next place, so the car has got to go.
I went to the old BOE and asked their advice. They were like, "sell a car? Such a thing has never been done in Japan. What you need to do is pay someone to throw it away." Screw. That. I just payed shakken in Feb. Surely used cars can be sold somehow in a country where they are so expensive in the first place.

So I went to Fukuoka Now and posted an online classified ad. We'll see if it sells. This was the only pic I had on hand of the car:

Humour and sex. I should be in advertising.
Oh and I got the car tax note yesterday. I wonder if I still have to pay that if I sell this thing soon.
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And speaking of "Frack me," caught season three of Galactica on youku (the Chinese pirate's answer to youtube--odd how knowing Japanese lets me navigate that site). That finale was awesome! And it even made me like Lee a little. Just a little.

Japanese study blogs list

Okay I just added My "Japanese study feeds" Blogroll to the right column of my links columns, thanks to Google reader streamlining the process for me. Enjoy! But in return, can you tell me any blogs you read regularly that would help people learn Japanese?
Oh and if you want, you can click on the "read more" link at the bottom of my blogrolls to see the latest entries/subscribe via RSS. But Clay, what is RSS?
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I will highlight my friend's blog, The Daily Jo-ji, as an entertaining way to learn Japanese you could stand to check out. But in return for this one, promise me you will take his challenge and write example sentences you can think up after reading each entry on those wacky four-character idioms.

Today's language thoughts

Another Japanese-centric post. And long! If you would rather not see these in your feed, I think a little work with yahoo pipes may do the trick (I try to tag all such posts as 日本語). But I'll throw an unrelated bone out there to my non-moon speak talkers at the bottom.
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So... 好く is a real word, it would seem. Which means I incorrectly corrected a boy when he was translating my worksheet assignment today, and I will have to issue a retraction. I'll probably do it on the announcements so that I have the class' attention (I want to make sure that they don't get confused by my officially given translation on the blackboard, which was basically love instead of like). But anyways, it bugs me that I never noticed this word before, despite Mai always saying 好かん (I don't like it!) (I just thought it was hakata-ben)(don't get it into your head that she was saying she didn't like me!)(four parenthetical statements: bad grammar, or awesome grammar?). The issue got a little muddled because before class, a teacher and I got back into the thing about whether 好き is a verb. Most Japanese people tend to think it is, despite looking nothing like a verb. But in their minds it is 好む or 好く, more or less. And if we factor in the fact that だ is more or less a helper verb, 好きだ is very easy to see as a verb.--by the way, Bobby, if you are reading this, which I doubt you are while you are building houses in India, I have encountered a 国語先生 that thinks of na-adjectives as not 形容動詞 until you get that だ or な on there. Thought you'd like to know, though you won't, cause you can't read this. All aboard the digression train! Oh wait it already left!--But the question remains, why don't I ever see 好く? My best guess is it just sounds like too many other things, so people favor 好き. What do you think, lovely reader, with full red lips I could kiss? That was weird. Why did I say that? Still like this entry? Or are you going back to that Boing Boing* tramp? Okay, I have totally lost my Japanese readers now (as opposed to my readers of Japanese. No, wait, they're both gone).
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So, I thought a section on how Japanese is written, from Wikipedia, was interesting. Therefore, lets have some passages and my reactions!

ニュアンスを伝える日本語表記系

他の言語では説明を追加したり単語自体を変更したりしなければならない情報でも、日本語の表記システムを用いれば同じ単語の表記を変えるだけで伝えることができる場合がある。例えば英語の「 I 」、ドイツ語の「 Ich 」、ロシア語の「 Я 」に相当する「私」は男女兼用でフォーマルな文章にしばしば用いられる。ひらがなで書いた「わたし」は、優しい感じがするので、男女ともにインフォーマルな場や、親しみやすさを表現したい場合に使用される。例えば、女性が日記や友人への手紙で用いるなどは、その典型である。

Okay, fair enough, but I have to point out that other languages have tools such as italics, fonts, elitist French and Latin words, color, and CAPITAL PRINT to convey nuances. But yes, Japanese can get pretty fun when you mess with the characters you choose to write in, and perhaps less jarring than some of the methods I just mentioned.

カタカナの「ワタシ」はほとんど用いられず(時々一人称を強調する時や、外国人が片言で話すニュアンスを出す場合に用いられることがある)

Yeah what the article doesn't tell you is how much it pisses you off to read the local paper and see that all your quotes are in katakana implying that you speak Japanese as well as an animal. At least that's how we feel.

文体上の狙いで漢字の複合語を恣意的に読ませることもできる。例えば夏目漱石は短編『十五夜』の中で名詞の「接続」を動詞的に活用した「接続って」を「つながって」と読ませている。これは通常ならば「繋がって」「つながって」と書くものである。

Yeah Soseki drove me a bit crazy at first because I didn't know he was gonna be pulling this sort of thing. I was like, is this an archaic way of saying it? Imagine if we could get away with this in English. Printing something like "connection(tied)." Well, looks kind of annoying in English, but furigana can make it seem natural in Japanese somehow. Another thing you can do with written Japanese is have a word with foreign pronunciation implied by furigana. Like 獣化兵（ゾアノイド）(the Zoanoids from Guyver).
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Promised whatever:
I am finally getting into Battlestar Galactica. It is pretty good, but my theory that all SF movies and TV shows are kinda stupid is holding up. It is odd to me that the suave scientist is the only humorous character (gruff doc doesn't count). Don't get me wrong, he's my fav, but the rest of the show kinda doesn't match. They had one oddly funny scene, complete with stereotypical musical cues in season one, but otherwise melodrama. And I hate Lee. And I'm in love with many Cylons. And there shouldn't be so many episodes stringing things out, giving us stupid stories like Lee the detective. I fracking hate Lee.
Bonus fact: Did you know that the original series, and consequently this one, are littered with reference to Mormon concepts?
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*I stopped reading Boing Boing because I already had seen everything they wrote about. I really may be the king of the internet, as someone recently labeled me.