Hiragana

Since I utilized my mother and my younger brother in order to do my last post, I figured it would be a good idea to use one of my two remaining family members for the teaching experience. Actually, it was mostly because all of my friends and roommates are crazy busy and never there to teach, but my older brother seemed like a good choice anyway.

This is Joseph. He got back from a mission the Saturday before school started. He also doesn't like having his picture taken, so yes, that is a mission picture that I stole from the facebook account of one of his companions.

I had a hard time thinking of something to teach. Joseph has done pretty much all of the same things I have done, which would make sense since we grew up together. We also did many of the same activities in school, had many of the same friends, and the reason I took the ACT for the third time was in order to beat his score. We are like that. He has, however, been talking a lot to me recently about how he wants to learn Japanese so he can talk to me when I speak Japanese. I decided that I would begin his Japanese studies by teaching him a little bit about the Japanese written language.

Honestly, I'm not sure if this really counts as folk knowledge. I learned it almost entirely from tutorials on the internet, so it obviously can be learned without being taught in person. Then again, so can most of the things people have been blogging about. I have learned how to do a surprisingly large amount of things from the internet. My roommate claims to have learned most of what she knows about doing hair from the internet, and she's obviously good at it, since her hair looks perfect all the time.

But when I taught my brother, I did teach like I would teach folk knowledge. I gave an explanation. I demonstrated to him how to write the symbols, and what they are supposed to look like when they are done. I watched him try writing them himself, and gave instructions on how to do it better. The rest of the work may be simply memorization, but he will do that by himself.

Japanese has 3 different "alphabets" so to speak. One consists of formerly-Chinese characters that have meaning and can be pronounced one of about 4 or 5 ways depending on context. The other two are phonetic, meaning the symbols stand for sounds. One, called katakana, is exclusively for foreign words. The other, hiragana, is the one I taught my brother. It originated in about the 5th century AD, and was a simplified form of certain cursive-style Chinese characters used for pronunciation (The picture is of this kind of Chinese character). Hiragana was mostly used by women at first--men used all Chinese characters--so it was called "women's writing." Modern Japanese script uses all three systems mixed together.

Oh, and here is a (partial) list of my skills, because it is apparently important:

I can sew clothes, design patterns for clothes, quilt, crochet, knit (almost), cross Stitch, play the violin, play the piano, read music, sing in parts, follow a recipe, make up a recipe (but only if there are only about 4 ingredients), cook a darn good apple pie, read Japanese, read English, speak English, tell where commas are supposed to go in a sentence, take a test well, etc.