Going Back...

I began to think about how little I want to go back to Perth. I’m not saying that I want to stay here or that Japan/(Japanese people) are better or anything stupid like that. What I am saying is that when I go back I expect I will hate a lot of the conversations I have when I get back. I think a lot of people are going to ask a lot of stupid badly thought out questions like:

• “I’ve heard that some Japanese writing can be read lots of different ways. That must be really hard.”

At this point I can only hope that there is a Japanese/Kanji/Linguistics/Psychology/(Computer Science) textbook handy to beat them over the head with until they physically can’t ask any more questions. On a related note, I’m surprised by the number of Japanese people that tell me that lots of Kanji don’t have a meaning. Luckily I can just pretend that its a translation error and they mean that lots of Kanji don’t form a word on their own, or that simply because they have mostly learnt Kanji intuitively from words it is difficult to notice the common concept a given Kanji holds. Or I could be wrong and lots of Kanji really don’t map to one rough concept. I hope not because its a pretty refreshing idea for me. Actually, I think that translational difficulties are one of the reasons me an Rie stayed together as long as we did. It was a convenient excuse to have more tolerance and work on problems.. sometimes :P

• “Japanese people are really quiet and polite, you can be pretty loud, how was that for you?”