Min's epiphany - reading Japanese is not so hard afterall.

顧 敏 (My Cow) had an epiphany today. She was looking at apartments in Osaka online with what at first appear to be incomprehensible labels of room names and sizes. The sizes are indicated not in square meters but in 'number of tatami mats'. This is a pretty simple numerical conversion: one Tatami mat is 1.6529 square meters. But it was not these numbers that excited her, but rather the ones hidden in the labeling of the バルコニー room.  "Is this the Balcony?" she asked pointing at a rather small (2 tatami?) space along the side of the 客廳 (living room). See this first letter looks kind of like 八 ('ba', meaning 8 in Chinese) and the last one is ー ('yi', meaning 1 in Chinese), so it must say "ba" lcon "yi"! QUite a stretch of imagination, but as usual she was correct.

About a quarter of the nouns are Chinese characters, so if you can read those it is already a good start, then there are the katakana words. All you have to do is learn this special angular alphabet for foreign words, sound them out, and it is usually an easy English homonym. I remember having the same epiphany myself while bored at some meeting in Japan many years ago fidgeting with my room key,  looking at the apparently indecipherable squiggles on it and suddenly realizing that 回ホテルフロントデスク('return' ho-te-ru fu-ro-n-to de-su-ku) was actually quite easy to read as long as you know Chinese characters, katakana and English. From incomprehensible squiggles to coherent writing in one light bulb moment. And useful too - when checking out of my room, I certainly did not forget to return the key to the hotel front desk. So far I have only come across one Katakana word that wasn't English. In the NHK radio Japanese language course (lesson 7) that I am struggling through in preparation for the move to Osaka the main character goes to a bakery and buys some シユークリーム (chou à la crème). Or maybe it is a hyrbrid transliteration of "chou cream" mixing French and English. I look forward to finding some more languages in Katakana. Maybe Japanese could write "My Cow" asミンク transliterating out of Swedish rather than employing the Kanji form (顧 敏)?

Linguistic Note: 顧 敏 is my spouse's name - pronounced Gu4 Min3 in Mandarin. It is transliterated into English as "Min Ku" (putting the suraname last, and changing the G to K). Reading in Swedish, Min Ku literally means "My Cow". Transliterating the Swedish into Japanese using Katakana results in: ミンク. Hence: 顧 敏 = Min Ku = ミンク = My Cow. And yes, we were once invited to the Swedish Ambassador's residence, and I did in fact greet him by saying "Hello, I am Keith Alverson, and this (pause for effect) is Min Ku"