Updated: Apr 10, 2024
Chinese people eat rice as a staple food, the same as Japanese. So, when they came to Japan for their trip, they tend to choose rice cooker as their souvenior in electric shops. According to this video news, they are pleased to buy these products. It seems that they prefer rice cookers made in Japan.
Updated: Apr 10, 2024
I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to do after I retire, and I have one plan in mind. The idea is to use the Internet to teach Japanese to foreigners who want to study it.
Japanese is sometimes said to be a difficult language for foreigners to learn. I don't know if that's true. Learning another country's language is difficult for anyone.
Let's think about the difficulty of learning Japanese. I think one of the reasons for this is that there are three written characters. Hiragana, katakana and kanji.
For Japanese people who are proficient in Japanese, texts written only in hiragana are very difficult to read. This is because by interweaving kanji expressions with hiragana sentences, the meaning of complex sentences becomes clearer.
However, kanji are difficult for beginners of Japanese. This is because there are many types of kanji. It is said that the number of kanji commonly used in Japan is about 2,000, but the number of kanji that actually exist is in the tens of thousands. Therefore, even Japanese people cannot remember it all.
First of all, beginners of Japanese need to memorize hiragana, how to read them, greetings, and simple sentences.
So I started making videos that introduce simple written expressions using hiragana. I'm making this little by little and uploading it to YouTube. I would be very happy if this would be helpful to people who are starting to study Japanese abroad.
It was Saturday night. That must have been 20 years ago. Late that evening, I was on the train. On the train on my way home from work, I was a little drunk because of a party with my colleagues that day.
I got on the usual train at Nagoya Station and headed to Gifu, where I live. Nagoya is the third largest city in Japan, so many foreigners also live there. After the train had been running for about 15 minutes, the number of passengers on board became thinner.
“Is there a hotel I can stay at in Gifu?”
A young man near me spoke to me. He wasn't Japanese.
Normally, I would just answer the question briefly and call it a day. After all, my commute to work takes four hours every day. That's why if I talk for a long time, I'll arrive home late.
But this day was different. I was drunk and feeling liberated. I felt relaxed. So I wanted to have a little talk with this young man. I started chatting with him.
“I’m coming to Japan from Pakistan,” he said. I didn't know if he was in this country for his job or to study abroad.
Apparently his girlfriend lives in Gifu. So he had made an appointment to meet her. The date was scheduled for the next day, Sunday, so he had to stay alone at a hotel that day.
When the train arrived at Gifu Station, we got off the train.
There are many hotels near Gifu Station, but in order to find one that has a vacant room, you must first look up the hotel's phone number in the telephone directory and then call and ask. After all, that was 20 years ago. I didn't have a cell phone yet, and the Internet wasn't as developed as it is now.
There was a house near Gifu Station where my parents lived. For now, I decided to take him there. My parents were surprised when I suddenly brought a Pakistani with me late on Saturday night. Mother served us tea.
I looked up the hotel's phone number in the phone book and called to see if there was a room available. Fortunately, I quickly found a place for him to stay for the night.
He wasn't fluent in Japanese, and I didn't speak his native language. So I didn't know the details. However, I understand that his girlfriend seems to be Japanese, that he encountered her in Tokyo or somewhere, and that they have arranged to meet in Gifu.
Then my father drove the car and I took him to the hotel. It was almost 12 o'clock at night. He thanked me and left us.
I don't know what happened after that. It is unclear whether he was able to successfully reunite with his girlfriend who lives in Gifu. However, I was feeling a bit good because I could help him with his international romance.