Double or Nothing

My last post had quite a bit about exchange students but not very much on the Japanese, so I'll take this time to go through a few more things I've learned.

First of all, I'll explain the title. The Japanese verb and adjectives conjugate. Verbs conjugate to past, present and their negative forms, and adjectives conjugate to the positive or negative. So, it seems like there's a lot of customization. Actually, no, there isn't. You see, in order to make a negative, for instance, "I have no money," you must use a negative adjective and verb. So you'd be saying "I money none not have." And if you just say "I money none have," that's slang for "I have a lot of money." It's either double or nothing for Japanese negatives (at least when describing).

Also, something that has become increasingly obvious to me in the last few days is their manners. As many of you either know or expect, the Japanese, while incredibly polite (they'll apologize for your mistakes) are also very strict. If you do something out of line, they'll act coldly towards you and they have many small things you have to just get used to. It's hard remembering to keep my hands out of my pockets (VERY impolite) and to acknowledge everything and to always wear this useless formal clothing (when I'm going somewhere after school, I wear regular clothes under my formal wear and pull a Superman upon leaving school grounds).

Today, well, today today, the rest of this was written two days ago, I had a day off from school after writing four exams in Japanese. I think I passed my physics I and math III exams but I'm not so sure about physics II and math II. I also found out that my school has lots of unused computers, some with a Battlefield 1942 demo, but there's no one to play with. They also have one of those paillars of computers, a server, I think.

I'm also having fun pulling words (and kanji) apart. It's so cool to see where they came up with this stuff, like the word for mushroom, kinoko. Some of you might remember a scene in Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime) where the main character says to some mushroom spirits, "so this is your mother, what a beautiful tree she is." Well, this seems strange until you realize that kinoko, mushroom, means "child(ren) of tree(s)." And there are many other such words that can be taken apart for their meanings and some that are really interesting.

Anyways, that's enough Japanese for now, I'll start a new post for today.