Today was so ultra-exciting that it's like the Zane song came on the Universal Radio and the gods were like, "Dude, I love this one! Totally pump the jam!"
No, I don't know what that means.
So in my survey-making Japanese class I had to accost random Japanese students to fill out my long and mistake-filled handwritten survey about native Japanese perspectives on English loan words in Japanese. After I got over my initial shyness, I turned into a survey machine and am now well equipped to analyze what the Japanese college dancer girl thinks about loan words and the purity of language; for some reason, at least half of the people I asked were girls on the dance team. The next step is finding adults who are just dying to fill out a survey, as I expect adults' reactions to be more traditionalist and less willing to abandon the beauty of Japanese words for meaningless foreign ones. This is sort of a complicated issue that I won't go into, but I feel very strongly about it, and want to find out what the Japanese believe; in fact, I don't resent having to do all this survey nonsense because I am genuinely interested in this topic.
This evening was the poker night, and it was all kinds of fun. Sadly, it didn't go nearly long enough, lasting only about two and a half hours, so it only whetted my appetite for more poker action. I probably just about broke even, but that's fine. Frankly, I have so much Japanese change right now that I would almost welcome losing just to get rid of it. Almost.
After everyone went home, we made a ping-pong table out of the normal tables in the lounge adjacent to the kitchen and had a ping-pong extravaganza. Our spontaneity and whimsy was such that it nearly tore a hole in space-time.
My goal of getting Wu to say that pick-up line is within my grasp. The power is frightening.
Since the Hiroshima question is of general interest, I'll answer it here. The answer as to which is correct, Hero-SHEE-ma or Hi-RO-shima, is both and neither. The stress in the Japanese pronunciation is closer to the latter, but the general sound of the former is more accurate. The sound that is transliterated as "r" is actually a flipped r/l, so the fact that the latter pronunciation emphasizes the strong English "r" sound makes it sound pretty off, and the vowel sounds of that pronunciation are off too. The former gets the stress wrong but gets the vowel sounds right and deemphasizes the "r" sound. Overall, my verdict is that when you're speaking in English it's going to sound wrong no matter how you say it, so just don't worry about it. In fact, with all loan words I am a strong advocate of following the rules of standard English pronunciation. I konw that "latino" should be pronounced with the syllables clearly deliniated and a stress on the first one, preferably while bobbing the head and shoulders from side to side and maybe snapping the fingers for good measure, but nonetheless I'm going to slur the syllables, stress the middle and not use any gestures at all because I am a total racist and hate me some dirty Mexicans.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
