Japanese Class

This week we started the class with a Japanese card game.  I think it is called karuta, but I’m not sure about that.  It is played with a deck of cards that each have a hiragana symbol and a picture on it. The cards are spread out on the table, so everyone can see the hiragana symbols.  One person (the sensei in our class) reads something about the picture and everyone tries to find the hiragana symbol for the first sound of the sentence.  The person who correctly grabs the card gets to keep it and the one with the most cards at the end wins.  The cards we played with were about the history of Hokkaido.  It was very interesting!  The first night I went to Japanese class we played this game with a deck of cards that had flags of different countries.  I’m happy to say that my hiragana recognition was much better this week than the first week.

One of the exercises in the class this week involved dialogs with people referring to their family members. I was very surprised to find out that the word a person refers to his or her own family members is not the same word someone else calls that person.  How is it that I haven’t heard of this before? The words are also different depending on whether that person is older or younger. I call my husband otto, but when you refer to him, he is goshugin.  You call your own father chichi, but I would call your father otousan.  I think I am going to have to make some flash cards for this new vocabulary.  There are a lot of family member words!

 My classmates read my post about the library and gave me advice on what I need to do to get a library card.  I also found out that with a library card, I can check out ten books at a time!  I plan to go to the library on Saturday to see about getting a library card. Everyone is so helpful.