Why Japanese?

If you hadn’t caught on, I am self-teaching myself Japanese. Some people ask me why Japanese, why not Chinese or French. I then tell them that I actually wanted to learn Greek, at first. I even learned the letters of the Greek alphabet, and how to write them, and that my name, unlike what I had previously thought, is correctly pronounced(in its original pronunciation anyways) “Selene”, with ‘e’s like in the word “Meet”. I’ve always called my self “Selene”, with ‘e’s like in “Pet”.

However, I was stopped short of my Greek learning when my very good friend Jorge Bucaran convinced me that Greek is a very limited language. He suggested other languages, including German, Russian, and Japanese. I, being a huge anime dork, chose Japanese. I had no idea that, a year from then, I would not only still be following through with my Japanese, but that I would be a much more hardcore Japanese lover.

I have come to not only love the language, but also the culture and the people. It is true, I have never been to Japan, but I do respect many of the values which are present in their society. For example, I think Western culture needs to be more courteous. Also, it is a fact that anime is much better (or, as they say on the streets, pwns) than what we here call “cartoons”. In fact, there is a very interesting article I read yesterday exactly about this fact, which theorized that anime teaches more values to children than anime, and that it helps the child become more mature at an early age.

Now, I don’t know if this is true, but I do think that the differences are glaringly obvious. Without going into my full opinion on the subject (perhaps I’ll save that for another day), I think that many people wrongly label anime as mere “cartoons”. It deals with so many topics that western cartoons don’t even touch. In anime, there is usually a storyline or plot, character development, and themes of self-sacrifice, courage, and leadership. As the article I linked to earlier explains in more detail, western cartoons seem to be somewhat afraid to show this to the children, sheltering them and keeping them “safe” of more mature topics.

This vast difference of the message in the media is also reflected in other places as well. Poetry, movies, books… all are different between our Western world and Japan. I think this difference is extremely fascinating; what, culturally, has made them that difference from us?

Although Greek was a good language to start thinking about language learning, Japanese, to me, is a lot more fascinating. If I know Japanese, I can get one step closer to understanding the Japanese, and being able to enjoy media that is only available in that language. It will be like a wide array of knowledge and emotion that I couldn’t get otherwise…

Now that is exciting, don’t you think?

Mass of the Fermented Dregs

Recently, I’ve been following an excellent blog on Japanese indie, rock, and alt music called SparkPlugged. Besides the fact that it has an attractive and simple design, it is also a great source of new Japanese music.

It’s most recent post talked about this post-rock band called “Mass of the Fermenting Dregs”. Yeah, talk about a name… I even looked up what dreg means (Sediment in a liquid; By extension, the lowest and most worthless part of something).

But besides its facepalm-worthy name, it is actually not a bad group. In fact, I liked the song so much that I looked for more… and downloaded “The World is Yours”. That was yesterday. Today, I have played every song on that album about three or four times, sometimes in a row. I simply cannot get enough of this group! Although I can’t understand the songs very well (yet), the whole music seems positive and soothing… but is still rockin’ awesome!

Here, I share with you their newest PV, ひきずるビート.

The Japanese Anime Dictionary (Feelings)

All the images of Kimi ni Todoke are from Random Curiosity, an excellent blog on anime that I have on my RSS feed

うれしい

孤独（こどく）

泣く（なく）

悪（あく）

哀れ(あわれ)

Here is some more of the story of the twins. I use both of these two songs to learn vocabulary because I absolutely love both of them and I could listen to them for a long time.

悪ノ娘（あく　の　むすめ）Evil’s Daughter

Lyrics (kanji)

悪ノ召使（あく　の　めしつかい）Evil’s Servant

Lyrics (kanji)