Halloween, First Grade, Kanji and Names

Hello!

Brief update from Japan.

Halloween is almost here. It is a popular holiday in Japan - many stores sell Halloween merchandise and people gather in the larger cities for celebrations (Osaka, Tokyo, etc).

At my school, some grades had "halloween" parties the last hour of class on Friday. A lot of students go to after school care once school is finished - many of those places also appeared to have parties.

During my free time at school, I spend time with the first grade classes. These students go to school until about 2:30 each day - they go home roughly an hour before the other students most days.

It looks like this grade studies Japanese, math, music and P.E. subjects. There is probably one other subject that they do that I am not remembering.

I try to come by their class when they are studying Japanese. Right now, they are starting to learn all of the basic Japanese kanji.

The kanji are the more complicated characters that show up in daily life. First graders learn about 80 characters by the end of the year. Many of the characters are the same ones that I have learned or am in the process of learning.

For instance, one character is "山" which means "mountain." You can also write this as "やま" - this is what first graders would have originally learned. Then, later on (about now), they learn how to write the kanji for mountain (山).

So, you can write mountain two ways - 山 or やま. The first is kanji, the second is hiragana. The first one only uses one character space. There are many thousands of kanji that the Japanese learn - I think a standard student learns about one to two thousand kanji characters while in school.

Even though kanji is difficult to learn, it helps simplify sentences (reduces the amount of letters/characters needed) and clarify meaning.

For example, you can write "はし" which can mean either bridge (橋) or chopsticks (箸). If you read a sentence and see はし you might not be able to tell if the person is talking about a bridge or chopsticks.

If the sentence is written in kanji, the meaning will be clear.

Speaking of students and continuing something I mentioned in prior weeks - teachers seem to mainly refer to students by their last names rather than first names. So, if I were a Japanese student, the teacher would call me McGuire-san rather than Tom.

Students also refer to one another using their last names.

I do not know the first name of most of my colleagues. Coworkers never use first names with one another - it is always so-and-so-"sensei" or so-and-so-"san" with the teacher's last name replacing the "so-and-so." And you only use the "san" ending if you are older than or equal with someone or the person is not a teacher.

If a foreigner calls someone by their first name, though, it is okay - Japanese seem to generally understand the western custom of using first names. And students or other teachers refer to me by calling me "Tom"-sensei.

No photos this week - will include some in the upcoming weeks.

Until next time,

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