Roses Are Red, Violets are Blue...

Have you ever started to sing along to a song even though you’ve never heard it before? Paused ever so slightly after saying something that unintentionally rhymed? Are you a poet and you didn’t even know it?

I never realized how pervasive the concept of rhyme is in the everyday life of the English language until I came to Japan where almost every word ends in a vowel sound. My first thought was that everything rhymed. Now, I know better. Nothing rhymes. Rhyme simply doesn’t exist here.

This has been ever so apparent in my classes when I sing popular children’s songs to the kids. So many rely on rhymes and where English-speaking kids would latch onto those rhymes immediately, these kids just look at me like with blankly. I try to stick with songs that include lots of repetition, rhythm, and most importantly actions. The Ants Go Marching is discarded for Alice the Camel.

Understanding this, I can look back to something one of my agents from OWLS said with greater appreciation. We were discussing my degree in English and some of my favorite writers. She said that she had taken an English Lit class in college, and really enjoyed the poetry of Tennyson. She liked all the rhyming. I remember thinking at the time that while I enjoy Tennyson, I occasionally feel his rhymes to be repetitive and slightly unimaginative. I can now see how his ceaselessly repetitive rhyming would be appealing to someone who spoke Japanese as a first language once they grasped the concept.

Speaking of the Japanese language did you know that the Japanese have three different systems of written language? Hiragana uses characters to represent syllables (ma, mi, mu, me, mo) to write Japanese words. Katakana uses characters to represent syllables to write words of foreign origin. And Kanji (Chinese characters) are used whenever possible. What’s funny is to see Kanji with hiragana above it for the people who cannot read the Kanji. What’s the point, I ask.

I’m fairly proficient at reading katakana and hiragana (reading being entirely separate from actually understanding it). It’s the katakana which throws me the most, though. Since it’s used to write foreign words – mostly English, though sometimes German or French – I have some expectation that I should be able to decipher the meaning. Often times, however, the pronunciation is so far removed from the original English word, I’m at a loss. A recent example of this can be found on a poster plastered all over Kumamoto. It’s for a movie (documentary?) and shows a picture of Earth from space with pictures of dinosaurs on either side. The title of the movie is Aasu – as transcribed from katakana. Aasu. I puzzled over this one for weeks. Finally, I was with Stewart when I saw the poster and asked him about it. Have you figured it out yet? Aasu is Earth. Stewart had to say it a few times and finally say, “The aasu beneath my feet” before it all clicked in my mind. I never would have put that together.

I’m sorry for the short and somewhat pedantic nature of this post. I have to get back to work teaching Japanese schoolchildren all about the Fourth of July, but I’ll try to make my next update full of fascinating and exotic things.

- Jenny