Fancy Chocolate

Continuing the Japanese obsession theme (I'm wandering around the house these days chanting the syllables of the katakana like someone demented -- ko ko ko ku ku ku ki ki ki ka ka ka ke ke ke... Let's hear it for brute force memorization.)...

These "choco-neko" treats are soooo cute!  How could anyone bear to eat them?  That said, I still want one.  Or two -- one to eat, one to keep!

via Elayne, who linked to the chocolate sushi.

Comments

[butuki]

You should be reciting them as "Ka-Ki-Ku-Ke-Ko". That is the proper "alphabetical" order. I'm curious... are you learning Katakana before Hiragana? Though Katakana are a little harder to learn, Hiragana are by far more important in every day Japanese. Katakana are only used for onomatopoeia and non-Japanese words and names. Not much use in most reading of Japanese.

Just wait till you start kanji! Twenty five years on I still struggle with them. Oh the joys of obfuscation!

[Rana]

Yeah, I'm chanting them out of order. The actual chanting probably goes something more like a ku o se shi ke ki e su... :)

It is actually deliberate, because I find I tend to retain information better if I can create my own patterns in it (like figuring out for myself that all the -yo/-yu/-ya signs are -i + yu/yo/ya). So I'm wandering about my apartment tracing signs in the air, scribbling them on paper in random order, and attempting to find examples on the handful of Japanese consumer goods I possess. (I can't tell whether it's whimsical or sad that I'm learning from a box of matches, a good luck charm, copper bells, a sign for the toilet, and a box of incredibly stale cookies.)

As for the katakana being the first... I was somewhat misled by the online site I'm using (Kanji-step) which advocated doing that. Of course, I get my textbook in the mail, and it's all in hiragana... actually, it's mostly NOT in hiragana; I'd prefer that by the midway point there were no more Romanized versions, as was the case when I was studying Russian. But at this stage I figure I'd better do the whole thing, rather than get confused by stopping halfway through and repeating only part of the syllables in hiragana.

So far the memorizing is going easier than I'd feared; I guess the experience of learning two alphabets, with both upper- and lowercase letters, and print and cursive variants, is good preparation. The only tricky part is learning to distinguish between similar things (like n and so) and keeping my unconscious prejudices from leading me to misunderstand things (for some reason, for example, my brain wants the sign for se to be the sign for tse -- I think solely because it looks a wee bit like the letter t. It's also odd having o be a spiky, leggy sign instead of a short round one!)

[Chris Clarke]

Ah. memories. When I was nine I studied Japanese with a teacher from Sri Lanka, a pleasant and ineffectual man who mainly taught us to sing "ichi ni san shi go roku hichi hachi ku ju" to a melody he made up, and learning about 40 hiragana characters. He lasted a year before they brought in somone who actually spoke fluent Japanese.