Church talk in Japanese

I miss my babies incredibly. The house and car and everything feels so empty.

Today I spoke in church in Japanese. A three-page talk turned into a five-page talk when it was written out in romanji so I could read it. Kaeta helped me by translating the talk into Hiragana, then romanji, then recording himself on my minidisc player so I could listen and practice. There are four types of writing in Japanese: Hiragana, the basic alphabet; Katakana, the alphabet for foreign words; Kanji, the beautiful pictoral symbols; and romanji, japanese words written with the roman alphabet (a,b,c, etc).

I practiced my talk all week. I hooked up my minidisc to our car stereo and listened to Kaeta saying my talk all week long, everywhere I drove.

When I first read my talk out loud on Monday, it took me about 45 minutes to get through it all. Kaeta's recording of the talk is only about 8 minutes long. It was very difficult, much harder than I'd imagined. Saturday night when I practiced reading through it for the last time it took about 25 minutes.

Today at church it went pretty well. Things finally clicked to a certain extent, and this week I learned so much japanese it makes me want to study japanese seriously. The sounds are very similar to spanish sounds, and today at church for the first time I could understand a large amount of what was said, because of studying my talk all week and our stay here in general. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to learn so much, it makes me want to come back again and really buckle down and learn the language. It's not as far out of my grasp as I'd thought before.


Anyway I miss my wife and daughter very much. Tomorrow I'm going with the Bytheways to Matsuyama, to the oldest onsen (japanese bath) in recorded history. This onsen was the inspiration for the bathhouse in Miyazaki's "Spirited Away".