カナン、カナン。

Osaka City have a nice starter guide to kansai dialect up on their website here:

http://www.city.osaka.lg.jp/contents/wdu020/english/osaka_dialect/index.html

I just learned the word "kanan" there. It means "hateful". As it's bucketing down in Kyoto today I have been repeating the example sentence to all and sundry:

雨の日はかなんな。
ame no hi ha kanan na.

I hate rainy days.

Learning Kanji on Twitter

Here are a couple of twitter users who can help you study Japanese.

@learnkanji (http://twitter.com/learnkanji) writes: "Learn japanese vocabulary with Twitter! You will learn a new word every day. Each word will be written in kanji, hiragana, romaji and english."

A simple idea but a good one. @learnkanji is probably better for beginner/lower intermediate levels though as the kanji are pretty simple. Here are some recent examples:

女 -- おんな -- onna -- woman‚ female
南 -- みなみ -- minami -- south
漢字 -- かんじ -- kanji -- Chinese characters‚ kanji
今年 -- ことし -- kotoshi -- this year

For a bit more of a challenge try @wa_k (http://twitter.com/wa_k). The kanji tend to be harder and they post two or three each day - also you can click through to a nice calligraphic version. I tend to pick the hardest one each day and stick it up as my computer's desktop background. So everytime I come back to my desk between classes the kanji is reinforced. Learning one kanji a day may seem like a slow process, but it's better than doing nothing and I figure I'm here for the long haul. Also - it works. Here's one kanji I learned the other day:

拝 - MEANING: worship, pray to, adore, look at (with reverence) PRONUNCIATION: hai, oga(mu) http://flic.kr/p/7UfFcg

Later that evening I was watching a movie ("A Merchant of Venice" with Al Pacino as Shylock as it happens) and as my eyes lazily hovered over the subtitles this kanji kept leaping out at me, most notably in these words: 礼拝堂　（れいはいどう - chapel) and 拝啓 (はいけい - a formal salutation at the beginning of a letter. So you see, slow and steady really does win the race!

Transitivity

There's a nice (and useful!) guide to transitivity in Japanese grammar up on JapanSoc today. I think I might just have to add their learning Japanese pages to my Language Links on the right. Here's the link to the article: Transitivity in Japanese Grammar.

An Easter Resurrection

Some of the people I follow on twitter are writing in Japanese - (another tool for vocabulary expansion!) - and today one of them had obviously had a heavy night:

んぐんぐ。コーヒー飲んで二日酔いから蘇生。

んぐんぐ isn't actually a word as far as I can tell. Maybe it represents the sound of drinking? Or the throbbing of one's sore head?

コーヒー飲んで二日酔いから - is easy enough. "I'm drinking coffee because I'm hungover".

This word I didn't know though: 蘇生 - そせい - revival, resuscitation, rebirth, resurrection. The kanji 蘇 is one I'm unfamiliar with but its kunyomi is 蘇る - よみがえる which also means to be resurrected. Powerful stuff, coffee! Happy Easter!

Inseparable

My girl and I have been together now for well over two years. Naturally things have not always gone smoothly. In fact both of us have at times even spoken in favour of the idea of separation and yet... somehow we just can't seem to be without each other. One day my girlfriend sighed and said that maybe we had a 腐れ縁.

腐る - kusaru - means to go bad, to go off, to go rotten. Obviously this word has negative connotations!
縁 - en - is an interesting word. On the surface it means some form of relationship or connection but there is a deeper nuance that this connection is fated in some way.

So what 腐れ縁 (kusare・en) seems to mean is some kind of fated yet undesirable relationship. You might wish you could break it off - but wishing is useless. It's simply meant to be.　The example in my dictionary is:

彼女とは腐れ縁で手が切れない。

Which I suppose means something like "Unfortunately, my girlfriend and I are meant to be together, so we can't split up."

Not a particularly optimistic way of looking at our relationship I suppose (!) but one I won't forget either!