April is a really beautiful month because it's when all the sakura trees bloom, so I was able to go to quite a few hanamis or picnics under the sakura trees. It is also the month of my birthday, so it was full of flowers! My host family had a party for me with some of the members from our Hippo club and at work they had an adorable cake, shaped like little rabbits. :) Who would have thought that I would spend my 23rd birthday in Japan, surrounded by my Japanese family, friends and co-workers? It was really nice!
Since Easter is also in April and my host family had never celebrated Easter, I had my mom send me some easter basket candy and things from America and made and hid Easter baskets and plastic eggs in our apartment for my host family to find. I think they had a lot of fun!
Sometimes people ask me how I have been learning Japanese or how I learned to write, since I haven't ever formally studied it. At first I was completely mystified as to how one would learn to read or write in Japanese without memorizing an infinite amount of characters, but actually it turned out to be a lot easier than I thought.
The answer is that I learned how to write kanji and katakana and some kanji from the computer. When you change the language to Japanese, you still type the sounds of the word using roman letters, for example "nihonngo"(Japanese language) is typed just like that, but when you change the language "ni" becomes に、and "ho" becomes ほ、and so on, in hiragana characters. At first I didn't recognize the hiragana characters, but after typing them over and over I began to be able to read them and write them on my own.
When you press enter, the computer will also give you a list of options for the kanji (chinese character) for many Japanese words.. There are a lot of kanji whose meanings I don't know, so a lot of the time I just leave the word in hiragana characters, which everyone can read and understand. I found out that this is actually how little kids first start to learn Japanese, and as they get older they start to replace them with the kanji they know. So I am just like a little Japanese kid in that respect. But I can recognize a few kanji that I see evryday and when I do know recognize it, I can press enter and it appears on the screen . Ex. "nihonngo" first becomes にほんご in hiragana, and when you press enter, the kanji, 日本語 appear. If I don't recognize a new kanji when I am typing, I enter it into google translate to see if it is the word I am trying to say, and if it is, I use it. In the same way that I learned the hiragana characters, I also learn new kanji that way.
Interesting fact: did you ever wonder why Japan is called the land of the rising sun? I had always thought it was just a western name given to the country, but it is actually in the Japanese name itself. Japan is 日本 . 日is pronounced "nichi" and means sun or day (because a day is one rotation of the sun). 本 is pronounced "hon" and means book, and also something like origin. When you put the two together, it is pronounced "nihon" and literally means sun origin, or land of the rising sun!
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