Denshi Jisho

A while ago Meghan showed me the Denshi Jisho website, and I found it pretty useful. I’m bored at work at the moment, so I decided to write about it. Basically it’s an online translator, but one that actually seems useful for Japanese. I’ve tried using Babelfish, and the Yahoo version, but both of those always return some pretty ridiculous results. With this site, however, a number of results are usually given in Kanji, Hiragana/Katakana, and English (so you can see what it means literally).

Nohmi’s Joke

Today everyone at my school that can speak Japanese went to a presentation about fund raising or something. Since I wouldn’t understand what was being said, I was told to stay in the staffroom, which was ok because I actually had work to do. So then as the teachers are leaving Nohmi sensei stops and asks me “Are you coming to the presentation?”, so I said “no”. Then she just sort of smiles and says, “I know”, and then laughs a little. I’m pretty sure it was a joke, but if it was it was completely unlike the other examples of humour I’ve seen here. No one was wearing a funny costume, or getting injured, or eating something gross. I hope it was a joke anyway, because that means there is some chance of non-serious communication at work, and that Nohmi sensei is not really mean.

Stitch

This post is pretty much just procrastination on my part, as my apartment needs cleaning and I hate cleaning. Anyway, everyone at my school loves “Sutichi”, or Stitch from the movie Lilo & Stitch.

I don’t know why he is so popular now, seeing as how the movie came out in 2002, but everyone seems to love him. Kids have all kinds of Stitch stuff, like pencil cases and things like that, and teachers give out Stitch stamps as rewards. No one cares about Lilo at all.

Name Meanings

After recognizing that Hannah’s name meant either flower or nose in Japanese, I looked up the meaning of the other names I translated.

Karen – oppression, or poor, pitiful, cute, lovely, or sweet (pretty weird word)

Nana – seven

Also, Marla’s name (Mara) means something, but it’s colloquial, and pretty inappropriate. It’s also hilarious.

Update…sorta

I just got access to a computer at school, so I decided to post something pretty much just for something to do. I`ve been writing posts at home, so when my Internet is hooked up I will post them all at once, along with the pictures I have taken since getting here. So…check back in a couple days.