I mentioned to my host mom yesterday that I am doing キャラ弁＝character bento as my independent study (IS) project because I wanted to know if it was okay for me to use the kitchen in July. She was really excited, told me that she always loved キャラ弁 and showed me a recipe book she had for them, but that she still hadn't made any. She also found a キャラ弁 workshop and offered to sign us both up. My host mom is really great.
Anyways, she was so excited about character bentos that she made one for たっくん this morning and showed it to me when I came down for breakfast:
I think it's really cute!
I did my hair, so here is the back of my head:
(Thanks for the comb, Dad)
During our first, short break I got a milk tea from the vending machine. It tasted like regular milk tea.
During our second, longer break I got another onigiri which I think was salmon, and I know was Onigiri #8.
]For lunch, I went to the supermarket and got inari and some assorted maki rolls:
Inari is fantastic and is now one of my favorite things. It is basically just sushi rice inside a little pouch of fried tofu which is just a little bit sweet for some reason:
The maki were tuna, natto, and salmon (from top to bottom). Maki are basically any sushi in roll form, usually wrapped with seaweed. I like pink/red fish a lot, so the salmon and tuna were good, but the natto wasn't great. I had really been wanting to try it, and it seems like most things taste as good or better in a maki roll, but this was somehow so much worse. I will probably try it again at some point from a different store just to make sure, but to me it really didn't taste too great.
I also got this possibly vitamin-, possibly energy-drink because it was smaller than the one in the vending machine I'd been wanting to try and was only around $0.50.
After lunch we had our first Special Lecture. Our guest speaker was Professor Mutsuko Endo Hudson, a Japanese woman who teaches/studies pragmatics at Michigan State University. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on language use and context. She talked about a lot of really interesting stuff, and I wish she had had a little bit more time, but some of the main points/things that stood out to me the most were:
- In Japanese, it is important to ease people into new topics whereas in English the listener is generally given less time before a question is asked/proposal is made/etc.
- Japanese uses a lot of apologies. In an average conversation where someone is apologizing for something, that person will probably apologize at least several times in different ways.
- In Japanese a lot of the time people don't want to sound like they know what they're talking about because this sounds humble and non-aggressive. We do this sometimes in English, but usually when you're proposing an idea in English you want to sound like you know more than you might actually.
- つもり
- つもり is a "formal noun" which means it can't be used alone
- There are three uses of つもり:
- 1. non-past + つもり = intention
- 2. all others + つもり = personal belief
- 3. predicate + つもり = I'll assume/pretend (verb) happened
- The first form is taught early on in textbook Japanese, but is hardly ever actually used, and when it is used it's usually as a complaint/complaint question (ex. Do you really intend to ______?!).
- The second form is also not used often, but when it is, it is used to make yourself sound more vague and unsure and therefore more modest.
- 今日は(konnichiwa) is not used for in-group members, and is only used once per-person you're talking to, per-day.
- おはよう(ohayou) can be used at any time of the day for people in certain industries such as film and entertainment.
- Saying ”忙しそうです。”（You look busy.） when you want to talk to someone is a good way to see if they have time to talk and also sort of compliments them because running around busy all day is seen as a good thing. It is almost the opposite in the U.S. where people usually want to appear calm, collected, and in control.
- If people mention the weather in Japanese, your best bet is to just agree. This isn't a point of conversation, it's small talk.
- When you want to leave a conversation say "じゃあ、”（jaa,）＝"Well then," and the other person will wrap up. If someone you're talking to says this, they want to leave and you should wrap up. However, you shouldn't say "I have to go because..." or "I have to go do..." etc. because this implies that whatever you have to go do is more important than the person you're talking to.
Afterwards, I went to a coffee shop called café akira near city hall to work on homework and had a matcha latte. I like matcha a lot, and I like lattes, but together they aren't super great.
When I was at the supermarket earlier, I also got this peach gum which is just kind of nice overall.
Dinner:
More dessert melon (which I found out is called a Yubari melon and is a kind of cantaloupe grown in Yuubari, Hokkaido):
The panda character bento your host mom made is darling! How wonderful that she is interested in your IS project. Your hair looks gorgeous. Good points on know-it-all vs humbleness...here it seems like people often don't seem to understand the latter. Funny about the matcha latte, not the same as green tea latte here? Does anyone in your host family use a tiny whisk when making matcha?
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