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To commemorate the 2 week anniversary of my hernia op, here’s a double blog entry!
I guess most of us have, at some stage, struggled to speak another language, either at school (in my case, 6 years of French lessons, with a year each of German and Latin thrown in for good measure) or equally embarrassing attempts to communicate with the locals on foreign travels. When I lived in Hungary and South Korea, I failed to muster more than a few survival words and phrases in either langauge. Before coming to Japan, the only Japanese words I knew were those that have become international so, faced with that harsh fact that I would need more words than sushi, bonzai, karate, kamikaze, ninja, samurai, manga and geisha to survive, I decided to make a concerted effort to learn nihongo!I
I would like to have studied Japanese full-time but a lack of time, money and active brain cells has put paid to that notion. I’ve therefore spent the last 2 and a half years trying to learn the lingo using a variety of methods ranging from osmosis, reading textbooks, taking private lessons, watching tv, struggling with the JLPT and talking with shop staff and random strangers. Now, with a few, unplanned-for, free weeks on my hands, I’ve taken up the mantle again and have been attending the volunteer classes at my local library, as well as studying at home and in my local cafes. I'm also tempted to try some language exchanges. Although it often feels as though I’m taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back, I realise that I am slowly making progress. Don’t get me wrong, I reckon a 4 year old can still hold a better and certainly more interesting conversation than me, but things are gradually sinking in - sukoshi zutsu! Just don’t ask me to read anything with kanji in it!
In between studying Japanese, I’ve also been spending far too much time surfing the net including, of course, dropping into the SJ forums every now and again. Yesterday in the “New advances in the ski industry!” post [ http://www.snowjapan...-snow-industry/ ] I talked about my experience using nutcrackers. Here’s some more info:-
I was lucky enough to spend a month snowboarding in New Zealand in the summer 2009. Having previously ridden at The Remarkables down in Queenstown, I was keen to try out some other places and that inevitably led me to consider New Zealand’s club fields. These are small ski areas that were originally started and run by locals for locals, and are still, i think, run by volunteers on a little or no profit basis. They are not your typical ski resort and have no chairlifts or groomed runs.
Quite a few of them use nutcrackers, as is the case with Temple Basin, where I stayed for a couple of nights. The ski area is accessed by an hour or so hike up from the main road, with your gear being sent up seperately on a lift to a lodge where you can stay overnight. So what are nutcrackers? Here are a couple of pix:-
& here are my easy-to-follow instructions for using a nutcracker:-
Step 1 - Pray!
Step 2 - Make sure no-one's watching you!
Step 3 - Pray again!
Step 4 - Having previously tied the red belt around your waist, stand (on your board or skis) next to the moving rope and open up your nutcracker. Then flick it over the rope, hopefully grabbing it (with the same hand) as it comes back under the rope! At the same time grab the rope with your other hand and hopefully you're now underway!!! I did say hopefully, didn't I?
Step 5 - Lean back, let the belt take the strain of your weight and breathe a sigh of relief!
Step 6 - Don't relax too much because if you loosen your grip on the nutcracker, it will come off the rope and you will fall over!
Step 7 - Get ready for the fast-approaching pulley wheel;
Step 8 - As you reach the pulley wheel, take your (non-nutcracker-holding) hand off the rope (otherwise it will go through the pulley wheel!) and hold tight as the nutcracker runs through the wheel! NB Failure to do this properly will pull the rope off the pulley wheel.
Step 9 - Breathe deeply before the next pulley wheel, then repeat step 8 until you reach the top of the rope tow;
Step 10 - Disembark by relaxing your grip on the nutcracker and falling over!
The rope tow I used was on my toe-side so, having a regular stance, i was facing the rope. I wimped out of trying the backside-facing tow on another run as this would have been absolute carnage! Compared to nutcrackers, T-bars are a walk in the park!
As I write this, I now realise that nihongo and nutcrackers share more than the same first letter. They are both challenging! First attempts to use them invariably lead to embarrassment. They are therefore humbling. They are also bloody frustrating!! But when all's said and done, they do open up new opportunities, so are rewarding and worth persevering with. On that happy note, I'm off to study the potential form!
I guess most of us have, at some stage, struggled to speak another language, either at school (in my case, 6 years of French lessons, with a year each of German and Latin thrown in for good measure) or equally embarrassing attempts to communicate with the locals on foreign travels. When I lived in Hungary and South Korea, I failed to muster more than a few survival words and phrases in either langauge. Before coming to Japan, the only Japanese words I knew were those that have become international so, faced with that harsh fact that I would need more words than sushi, bonzai, karate, kamikaze, ninja, samurai, manga and geisha to survive, I decided to make a concerted effort to learn nihongo!I
I would like to have studied Japanese full-time but a lack of time, money and active brain cells has put paid to that notion. I’ve therefore spent the last 2 and a half years trying to learn the lingo using a variety of methods ranging from osmosis, reading textbooks, taking private lessons, watching tv, struggling with the JLPT and talking with shop staff and random strangers. Now, with a few, unplanned-for, free weeks on my hands, I’ve taken up the mantle again and have been attending the volunteer classes at my local library, as well as studying at home and in my local cafes. I'm also tempted to try some language exchanges. Although it often feels as though I’m taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back, I realise that I am slowly making progress. Don’t get me wrong, I reckon a 4 year old can still hold a better and certainly more interesting conversation than me, but things are gradually sinking in - sukoshi zutsu! Just don’t ask me to read anything with kanji in it!
In between studying Japanese, I’ve also been spending far too much time surfing the net including, of course, dropping into the SJ forums every now and again. Yesterday in the “New advances in the ski industry!” post [ http://www.snowjapan...-snow-industry/ ] I talked about my experience using nutcrackers. Here’s some more info:-
I was lucky enough to spend a month snowboarding in New Zealand in the summer 2009. Having previously ridden at The Remarkables down in Queenstown, I was keen to try out some other places and that inevitably led me to consider New Zealand’s club fields. These are small ski areas that were originally started and run by locals for locals, and are still, i think, run by volunteers on a little or no profit basis. They are not your typical ski resort and have no chairlifts or groomed runs.
Quite a few of them use nutcrackers, as is the case with Temple Basin, where I stayed for a couple of nights. The ski area is accessed by an hour or so hike up from the main road, with your gear being sent up seperately on a lift to a lodge where you can stay overnight. So what are nutcrackers? Here are a couple of pix:-
& here are my easy-to-follow instructions for using a nutcracker:-
Step 1 - Pray!
Step 2 - Make sure no-one's watching you!
Step 3 - Pray again!
Step 4 - Having previously tied the red belt around your waist, stand (on your board or skis) next to the moving rope and open up your nutcracker. Then flick it over the rope, hopefully grabbing it (with the same hand) as it comes back under the rope! At the same time grab the rope with your other hand and hopefully you're now underway!!! I did say hopefully, didn't I?
Step 5 - Lean back, let the belt take the strain of your weight and breathe a sigh of relief!
Step 6 - Don't relax too much because if you loosen your grip on the nutcracker, it will come off the rope and you will fall over!
Step 7 - Get ready for the fast-approaching pulley wheel;
Step 8 - As you reach the pulley wheel, take your (non-nutcracker-holding) hand off the rope (otherwise it will go through the pulley wheel!) and hold tight as the nutcracker runs through the wheel! NB Failure to do this properly will pull the rope off the pulley wheel.
Step 9 - Breathe deeply before the next pulley wheel, then repeat step 8 until you reach the top of the rope tow;
Step 10 - Disembark by relaxing your grip on the nutcracker and falling over!
The rope tow I used was on my toe-side so, having a regular stance, i was facing the rope. I wimped out of trying the backside-facing tow on another run as this would have been absolute carnage! Compared to nutcrackers, T-bars are a walk in the park!
As I write this, I now realise that nihongo and nutcrackers share more than the same first letter. They are both challenging! First attempts to use them invariably lead to embarrassment. They are therefore humbling. They are also bloody frustrating!! But when all's said and done, they do open up new opportunities, so are rewarding and worth persevering with. On that happy note, I'm off to study the potential form!
