I have a 10-year old male student whose family is originally from the Ukraine.
Some relatives of his who have fled the war there are now living in his house temporarily. The parents use the basement and their two children use my student’s bedroom so he uses the home office as his room.
The father can speak English, but the other three can only say basic greetings in English.
I think my student’s family are very kind and generous.
It is cherry blossom time in the Toronto area. The sakura are in full bloom in High Park and other Toronto parks and also Kariya Park here in Mississauga.
But this year there has been a rare added feature – snow was falling on the blossoming trees this morning! A friend sent me some photos.
The first is a screenshot from the video cam that the City of Toronto set up to remotely view the sakura in High Park.
The next one is a photo from Centennial Park in Toronto.
Hi everyone! I have written before about a student of mine who likes anime and cosplay.
Recently she made a cosplay video and posted it online. She was very surprised to find that it now has over 220,000 views. Her previous cosplay video only got 5000 views.
I watched them both and they are both made with the same high quality.
My student thinks that maybe the host app chooses random videos to promote and her latest video happened to be chosen to be promoted.
Anyway, she is now motivated to do another cosplay costume and make a video of it. She will play コレキヨ (Korekiyo), a character in the computer game キミガシネ (Kimi ga shine).
Two of my former students, a married couple, now live in Okinawa, Japan.
They posted a video on their Facebook page showing how to cook chicken wings.
I was proud of them because the video was all in Japanese and they spoke it fluently. I was also amazed because I tried their recipe for tonight’s supper and it was delicious!
They both looked so happy! I am glad that they are enjoying their life in Japan.
March 3 is Girls Day in Japan. Families with young girls take out and display in their homes dolls resembling a middle ages emperor’s court.
I told the students in my classes today that it was Girls Day and many of them thought that it was for teenage girls and young women, and expected that they went out to celebrate!
It is always fun to describe interesting parts of Japanese culture to my students.
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Hi everyone! I hope you are keeping safe and well.
One of my private students asked me a question about the fruit which is placed on top of rice cakes (mochi) at New Year. The two-layer rice cake is called kagami mochi (mirror rice cake) and is written in kanji as 鏡餅, but I had to look up the answer about the fruit!
The fruit looks like a mandarin orange (mikan), but it is a daidai, which is an Asian variety of orange that is very bitter to taste.
It is not put on the kagamimochi for its taste though. It is there as a pun!
Most Japanese use the katakana word オレンジ (orenji) for the word orange but there is actually a Japanese word for orange (colour and fruit), pronounced daidai. It is written in kanji as 橙色.
There is also another meaning for daidai and that is ‘from generation to generation’. The kanji for that is 代々.
So placing a daidai on the kagami mochi expresses a hope for prosperity for many generations!
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I have been relaxing a little bit over the holidays. Yesterday my husband and I played an old Japanese game. I was reminded of it when I watched an old Japanese TV show on Youtube which was called 「志村けんのだいじょうぶだぁ」(Ken Shimura’s It’s all right). The game became popular among Japanese primary schoolers.
You start by putting some treats beside both players. The entire game consists of two kinds of games. First you do Rock Paper Scissors with both hands, and the winner leads the next gesture game using Ultraman’s gestures. The winner of the gesture game can then eat one treat. We played three games and I won all of them, so I ate all of the treats.
I am looking forward to a new term and a new beginner class this week! My Mississauga and Oakville classes will all be online again.
In my last posting, I wrote about a student of mine who is an anime fan and was making a costume of Chihiro Fujisaki from Danganronpa. She finished her costume and took a picture of her wearing it as cosplay. She posted it on her Instagram account and sent the link to me during our class this afternoon.
Before each of my subsequent classes today, I showed the photo of her dressed as Chihiro to my students. I then discovered that I had a problem. All of the male students would sigh and have a dreamy smile on their faces. As well, they were not able to answer any of my questions for the first few minutes. lol
So for the rest of my classes this week I will wait until the end of each class before showing the photo to my students.
One of my students at my Japanese School in Mississauga is really interested in cosplay.
She let me know that yesterday, November 20th was the release date of the new Zelda game and that November 25th is the 10th anniversary of Danganronpa’s PlayStation portable game software.
She is working hard to complete a costume of Chihiro Fujisaki by the 25th.
She has been crazy about Zelda for a long time and is anxious to complete her costume by then.
I am confident that she can do it and look forward to seeing photos of her cosplay!
I am excited that my webpage will soon be given a complete makeover. It will still have all the important information about classes but will contain some new features including photos of some of my classes and lessons.
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