Pop/Rock Music of Japan: My Indoctrination

Recently, I had a informal music-swapping session with a couple of friends from my department, during which we shared some music we enjoy from the countries we each study. During the course of this exchange, I was introduced to quite a few appealing/catchy/unusual songs that comprise some sort of cross-section of the present-day Japanese pop/rock music scene, some of which I thought I'd share with everyone here.


As a student of Chinese, I have found listening to music a very effective way of familiarizing myself with the language. Music can function as an excellent listening exercise, and is thus also a really good personal/independent teaching tool (both for language and culture). I have, in the process of listening to Chinese pop/rock music, not only learned some current-day slang (which naturally doesn't get taught in classrooms), but have also learned some fairly complex vocabulary that I have been able to apply to more academic settings later on. This sort of "studying" also masquerades as fun -- or, rather, really is fun -- and even further provides a great topic to discuss with people from the country you're studying.


While my Japanese is not nearly good enough to understand much of anything in these songs, I hope to continue to use music as a "fun" point of entry into Japanese language and culture. Here are a few places I've begun...


Sukiyaki: This song seems to be pretty famous, and the tune was popularized in the U.S. a number of decades ago complete with a set of English (translated?) lyrics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvuO0BsEEss&feature=related


Shuji to Akira -- Seishun Amigo: A boy-band-sounding song, which includes a video complete with backup dancers and backflips to conclude the recording. I got "terebi" and "desu" in the announcer's introduction! The lyrics are included on the screen, with some recognizable words there, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=725Iff7alAo


Konayuki, by Remioremen: A very pop-rock-ish ballad, which (judging from the video) expounds on the troubles of love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHHJwo2xFwo


Ashita ga aru sa, by Ulfuls: The video for this one has some pretty funny moments...and includes "ashita" in the title.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nDCZDLf48A

才悩人応援歌, by Bump of Chicken: Despite the very strange name of the band, I really liked this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x8uxa0ksDw




Enjoy, みなさん！

Japanese Beginnings

My introduction to Japanese during these past two weeks has been quite exciting, although the process of continuing to accumulate knowledge of the language will, I'm sure, also be fraught with some frustrations and difficult moments. Before beginning this course, I had no working knowledge of Japanese, with the exception of a few words I had picked up here and there from friends who speak Japanese and a basic familiarity with the character の from reading store signs in Taipei. As a student of early modern China and Ming/Qing dynasty literature, I hope to develop a functioning reading ability of Japanese so that I will be able to use it as a research language in the future, and thus gain access the wealth of scholarship written about China in Japanese. Of course, my interest in Japanese also stems from a more culturally-informed curiosity -- I hope to learn more about Japan itself in order to broaden my conception of "east Asia" as a geographical, political, and socio-cultural entity, and am especially interested in exploring the relationship between China and Japan. Further, I have quite a few friends in my department who study Japan/are Japanese/speak Japanese, and, quite honestly, it will be nice to have some idea of what they all are talking about.

In these first two weeks of studying Japanese, I have been struck by both the numerous similarities and vast differences in Chinese and Japanese as languages. I imagine I'll be discussing this to a larger degree in later posts, so I will only note some very basic thoughts here. I feel that my previous experiences with learning Chinese have seasoned me for the study of Japanese -- I am familiar with reading characters, although hiragana and katakana are pretty different from the Chinese characters/kanji I am more used to dealing with. Even so, I am trying to prepare myself for the likely confusion of learning kanji in a Japanese, rather than Chinese, language setting (different pronunciations, some variant character meanings, etc.). Nevertheless, my experiences with Japanese so far have suggested that it is a very logical language, and I hope that I continue to find it so in the weeks and months to come.

Self-Introduction

みなさん、はじめまして、Bernardです、どうぞよろしく！わたしはColumbiaだいがくのがくせいです、だいがくいんせいのにねんせいです。New Jerseyからきました、アメリカじんです。わたしはちゅうごくのけんきゅしゃです、にじゅうさんさいです。