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WIth all this free time I have off, I have been devoting some of it to Japanese study. My pocket notebook is filling up nicely with Japanese words (gokiburi - cockroach) and I`m working my way through an excellent textbook whose cobwebs have been dusted off. Im kind of sick of being like an infant as I described in a previous post. I want to know how that works, what to say in this or that situation and to understand why saying what I said made everybody snigger.

When you read textbooks for foreign languages, they are always full of the craziest and useless sentences. “In Summer it is hot. In winter it is cold.” We all know that. The first sentence I learned in French was, “Hello, what did you do this weekend?” Perhaps it was an attempt to promote and develop inter-cultural relationships in the hopes that any tourists going to Paris would choose that sentence instead of, “A kilo of your smelliest cheese!” or “Twenty Gaulloises please!” Yet it hasn`t seemed to work.

I`m dealing with prepositions today and so a sample sentence I have studied has been “Isu no shita ni neko ga imasu.” This means “There is cat under the chair.” An admirable sentence. A fully correct sentence at that. It demonstrates the point perfectly yet it remains a copmpletely useless sentence. I don`t even have a cat…