しあわせ

Naoko Chino (Kondansha International)

Yet another title in Naoko Chino’s series. This is as clear and useful as the others.

Michael L Maynard, Senko K. Maynard, (Passport Books)

I have always liked sayings and aphorisms. Here 101 japanese sayings are collected and presented with cartoon like illustrations, an explanation of the saying with insights into the culture and an example of how it could be used. This is a short book and it feels informal and less of a textbook than others I have seen. This is good as it makes it more readable.

My only qaulm would be; if you were to use these sayings would they sound as cliched and stilted as English proverbs can sound in conversation? Or worse sound like the meaningless jargon of management-speak? maybe just maybe used sparingly they might give a bit of gloss to what you say.

Miyata Masayuki, Ouoka Makato, Ian Hideo Levy, (Kodansha International)

This is a magnificently illustrated book of poems, a wonderful piece of design.

The poems are taken from the “private” works of “The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”. They are typeset in modern Japanese (the original was written in the 7th and 8th century BC) and are accompanied by an English translation and on the facing page a colour illustration by Miyata. And the illustrations are the reason for this book. They are remarkable as the medium is paper cut outs (kiri-e). Only paper and a knife are used to make them.

Some of the poetry also has a commentary on the text providing insight into these very short poems. They are mainly in the tanka form comprising 31 syllables. This brevity makes the book suitable for someone to practice reading Japanese. It is not as daunting as a solid page of text. Also a lot of the kanji have furigana, and as a last resort there is even a romaji text.

Nobuo Sato, (Tuttle Publishing)

You know you’d like your name written in something that looks a bit more complex than Katakana. This book helps you out.

Mostly the book is a listing of common names with kanji renditions. The renditions are in several catagories. Purely phonetic, where the kanji are only used for their sound and meaning is ignored. Purely denotative, where the kanji convey the original meaning of the name but not its sound. And most interestingly several catagories of transcriptions that have sound and meaning although the meaning may not be the original English meaning. ( Should I try 鱸馬蛙妬　robaato - a donkey jealous of a frog or 名声燦然　meisei-sanzen fame and bright, the original old French meaning of Robert.)

For names not listed and surnames the author gives a chart of kanji to use for the syllables and guidance on how to go about transliterating them.

>In the end I like 驢馬跡 Now if I could figure out how to carve a hanko….

Naoko Chino, (Kondansha International)

Another small book by Naoka Chino.

This one gives formulae for sentence construction. At its most simple this is Noun1 は Noun2 です。Noun1 is Noun2. Insert your own nouns and make lots of sentences. As there are 50 patterns some of them can get fairly complicated. But usage is explained, variations are pointed out and lots of examples are given, of polite and informal speech and of male and female speech.

I don’t really think about how my sentences are structured in English, they just happen. Usually they sound ok and I hope they make sense but I’ve had years of practice. I think I’d find it hard to parse them. (Even then I’d probably rely more on the Latin and French I know). Japanese sentences are different (and new to me) so it’s very useful to have such clear examples of how to construct them specifically made so that I can reuse them to say what I want.