2015-05-18: Egg Fueled Ranting

Japanese class today. One of my favourite bits of Japanese class on Mondays is that we do it in the morning. Morning beverages at coffee places in Nagoya have the option of Breakfast Settu.

Oeuf avec pan nestled in a koszyk (heh)

The Settu is a popular thing here at most Izakaya type places where there will be a set menu and often all you can drink for a fixed period of time for a fixed price. Given how ridiculously drunk some people get, I saw a guy that couldn't find his shoes at 7pm, this is a good thing and probably reduces the volume of Waking up to an Empty Wallet events.

Komeda is on the right side of the picture, left after the first block. But mostly I am intrigued by the Goo logo in the middle. It is the same font as Google but I think it is for second hand cars. The logo next to it looks like TDK to me for some reason.

At Komeda Coffee (a chain which lets you stay all day if you buy one coffee) where we do our Japanese lessons the breakfast set is a boiled egg with a thick bit of buttered toast and is free. Some places have fancier breakfast sets which you have to pay for but they are invariably a tiny price for what you get.

Linguistic Skills: Efficiencies in Communication

I am cobbling together a theory here.

• Japanese largely uses a written language which was borrowed from the Chinese. In keeping with their predilections the Japanese then fixed the characters and meaning. Not sure if there was ever a formal thank you from the Chinese for this fixing of kanji. They should get around to that.
• In keeping with the principle of ikibana and other quintessential Japanese things where superfluous  effort is inelegant the spoken language has, I think, the least number of distinct sounds of any language. "Oh Polish why do you have so many different sounds when you can get away with like half of that number if you are careful". This results in a lot of sounds which have multiple meanings.
• The grammar has a habit of dropping anything which the listener ought to be able to infer from context; "Are you hungry?" can be answered with "eaten". Obviously in the context the reply is "No, I have already eaten". I have a suspicion that using to many words and explaining everything is actually a bit of an insult to the listener as it implies that they are too damn thick to work out the meaning.
• Add to all of that my theory that the Japanese culture thinks it's own stuff is so cool that it uses foreign words for the shabby imitations foreigners present. When the Japanese saw a western bed they, in my mind, went "yeah cool and all and we'll probably use them a bit but we won't call it a bed using our word for bed because our beds are real beds, yours is some kind of big soft fluffy thing for weak people so we'll fix your word by chucking a vowel at the end and call it beddu". If you don't know what a word is in japanese just try and figure out how the japanese would say it if they stole it or how they would say it in their English classes and odds are good many Japanese people that claim not to speak English are going to know exactly what you want.

It is common to see native speakers drawing kanji on their hands because the listener is not 100% sure what meaning the sounds just made should have. The combination of sounds and drawing are required to carry meaning. Because they fixed the kanji the listener doesn't even need to see the "drawing" on the palm of the hand, they can see what it is by the "brushstrokes" the person is making.

I think that these thoughts explain a few things:

Japanese often say to foreigners "I don't speak English" even when the foreigner speaks fluent japanese. This is because the local sees the foreigner and makes the, fair, assumption they don't speak japanese and so the sounds become unintelligible noise.

Onegaishimasu and Kudesai. In theory both mean please but Onegaishimasu is more polite. This is obviously a theoretical answer rather than an observable reality. When you first go to a pub you ask for "two beers, kudesai". Once the staff know what you want you can just say "Onegaishimasu" and they will get you two beers. To an English speaker the first would be more polite and the latter informal, therefore the translated theory doesn't stack up. I think the difference is that kudesai is used when people don't already know what you want. Onegaishimasu is used when the listener already knows what the entire sentence would be.

Rating 9/10 (or it could be 1/10, I still don't know)

Anyway when we get the breakfast settu with the boiled egg we both now sprinkle salt on the bread as well as the egg. I think this must be a good indication that we are training hard and sweating a lot.

Maybe the dissolved salt ions in my blood supply are reducing electrical resistance and making my brain work faster!

Or maybe I am getting hit in the head more than usual.