goruden wiku and katakana

ひさしぶり！Hisashiburi! It's been a while. We've just wrapped up an eight day holiday from work. We have major trips planned in the future, including possibly going to Thailand, Okinawa, Hokkaido or visiting parts of China or Taiwan we missed the first time around. This time, though, it was like a breath of fresh air to have an extended break since we hit the ground running here in Japan. It was too tempting the spend the entire time bumming around the area. In the next few days, I'll post some entries about our mini-excursions. But for now... a very important topic. To me, at least. 

The holiday that just passed is actually a group of holidays that are all close together, so everyone gets some freebie days off in the middle of actually observed holidays. Japan is pretty good about the holiday things, despite the intense and demanding work culture here. There's actually a law (Kokumin no kyūjitsu) that when two holidays have a non-holiday in between, it automatically becomes a day off from work (in theory....).

Well, anyway, getting to my point, the holiday is called Golden Week  in English and ゴールデンウィーク/Gōruden Wīku (pronounced goh-roo-den wee-koo) in Japanese. Yes. This is one of the most interesting, amusing, and useful things about the Japanese language. Japanese has three writing systems, and one of them is reserved for foreign loan words: katakana. When a word enters the Japanese language from another language, it gets Japan-ized with a pronunciation close to the original. For example, jeans in Japanese is jiinzu and hamburger is hanbaga. 

In China, reading a menu was about the same level of difficulty as reading The Analects at some restaurants. Some of the names for food were pretty poetic, so I used to scan menus for words with recognizable hanzi (Chinese characters) for meat and vegetables. Not an issue in Japan! Many food words are written in katakana, especially at foreign restaurants (fruit juice = furutsu juusu, beer = biiru, pasta = pasuta). Since the words sound so similar, I can usually guess the meaning. Sometimes it's more of a stretch. McDonalds here is called ma-ku-ro-do-na-ru-do. Yea, hearing that said quickly in conversation isn't very helpful. Usually, I have to say a katakana word out loud several times at different speeds to hear the foreign word it's mimicking.

Me at a yakitori restaruant:

Me: What's this word....?? Horumanu? It's gotta be a food or cut of meat....
Chef: (In Japanese) Oh, its.... its like meat. It can (Japanese words I don't understand).

Me: Huh? Sorry, I don't know that word.... 

Chef: Oh, ok. Hold on. (takes out iPhone and starts to translate it)

Me: hooruman? hoooman? horumaan? hroman...?

Chef: (laughs at me and shows me the iPhone) Look. "testicles'

Me: Ooooooh... hormone. 

Chef: How many do you want?

Me: Uh.... zero.

So, katakana makes life amusing, convenient and embarassing (which is also amusing), but as an English teacher, katakana is a bit of a blessing and a curse. Students can usually guess at words' meanings because of the exposure the Japanese language has to English, buut.... 


Examples of sentences that have some out of students mouths:

• No, no, no, I am scared of jeto cosuta! (roller coaster)
• I did not go out. I had many arubaito. (part-time job - maybe this one's derived from a different language?)
• My favorite gift I ever recieved was a ma-gu kap-pu from my daughter. (mug cup = mug)

Many Japanese assume the Japanized versions are the same as English, and use them as such. In my opinion, it's better to say some words slightly incorrectly for a while and have an advantage is guessing meaning of new words, but it is still a pain during lessons. 

Anyway, I love the little unique quirks of Japanese. :) Can you guess what English words these words are?

1. sha-tsu - シャーツ
2. pan-tsu　パンツ
3. bideo geemu　ビデオ　ゲーム
4. koka kora　コカコラ
5. chekku innu　チェックイヌ
6. sarada　サラダ
7. basuketto boru　バスケット　ボール