A slight language barrier

We graduated from our crash course in Japanese, but so far, between the four of us, we can only remember about 1% of what we learned… 🤦‍♀️

I am determined to figure it out though! On the last day of class I got a Kanji book from the library (it has around 250 of the most common characters), and we have been using that to practice, along with the materials we were provided in the class, plus some other books we bought before we came here. It’s a slow process, but we are starting to make sense of things — and recognize some words and phrases out in town!

Yesterday I was able to take a calligraphy class (shodō) through the local Japanese-American Society (which I am now a proud member of!) I was the only one at class that day, so I got a private lesson. We spent the first 15 minutes on one stroke (the word “one” is literally just a horizontal line)… but it is important to master the angle of the brush, the amount of pressure, and the style of starting and stopping (a sweep vs a hard stop vs a flick back).

The order of strokes matters and the movement from left to right does too. It helps ensure the characters are written correctly. My teacher said that she was left-handed as a child and her mother sent her to a strict calligraphy teacher to train her to use her right hand instead.

I could tell she wasn't impressed with my attempts at first, but she was very excited when I finally got it right (see below for my best version of the kanji for “river” (kawa) and “mountain” (yama) — see if you can guess which is which).

My first attempt with shodō

Also, we finally have a car now, so we will be getting out more, and thus have more opportunities to practice Japanese :)

(I snapped this picture quickly to show the size of the sideroads in town…it's a little blurry, but it's basically the size of a wide sidewalk. On the left side is a canal, and yes, this is a two-way road which also sometimes has bikes and pedestrians)

Wish us luck as we navigate our way around this weekend!

良い週末を /Yoi shūmatsu o!

(Have a good weekend)