Are ki5i hyped about the Michael Jackson thing? That would count as a summer vacation type happening.

do people actually use 酩酊? I mean, my computer gives it preference over 明帝, but its new to me.

Sometimes writers use fancy words over normal ones.

But maybe if you ask in Japanese, someone more informed than me will let us know.

海の豚っておもしろい

私は日本が末端の低下にあるという考えに同意しなくなければならない!

その必要ないかも　これから皆日本語で書いてずっと同意しましょう

モーマス君の彼女さんは日本語が上手だよね。びっくりした！

私の新しいガールフレンドは「Google翻訳」である! (彼女はSaaya Irieより若いベータにおよび!まだある)

この頃誰でも日本語ができますよ！こせこせしないで下さいよー！

9. ２０歳：一日にMP3.comのIPO（新規株式公開）で＄３００を倍にする。

マークシ君って商才がうまそうだよね。彼はインディー系音楽家に見せかけているが、実際にはずるがしこいビジネスマンだ。

He has camouflaged in D type musician, but it is the businessman

Ha, I'm assuming that should translate as "indie-type musician", but I like "D type"! This is why I'm hoping they never improve Google translation, I always prefer the mishearings. In fact, Google mistranslations of Japanese blogs supply many of the lyrics on my new (D-type) album.

あはははは！！これ、結構面白いし、テーマが「夏休み」なのがいいね（この梅雨入り時期に）。そして、なんかちょっと可愛いし。たまにはこんなBlogも読みたいな～☆☆☆ん～～よろちくっ！！！！！！！

わ〜恥ずかしい、これ！でも、なんか楽しくない？ネイティブスピーカーも遊びにくるかな？　これから談話が平等化されるかも。　批判的談話分析をしましょう！

さ、夏って、やっぱり蝉だ。米国の南部と一緒！ハハハ...

俺には夏休みはありませんけど、I'll steal your honey like I stole your bike.

マークシさん(スペルはあってるかな？）＞わざとくだらない嘘ばっかり書かれてるんですね？常連さんからどんなレスが帰ってくるのを見たかったんですか？

しかし、はっきり言わせてもらうと、ここの常連たちが日本語でレスをかいてくるのを何か不自然を感じませんか(俺も含む)？まったくマークシさんに｢俺は日本語ができるぞ」って暗示的に主張してるかのようにくだらないレスばっかり(くだらない書き込みだからしょうがないか(笑)

ところで、常連たちに質問：大半の「白人」が日本に来て｢かっこいい日本語」を覚えたがるのはなぜかな？たとえば、関西に住んでると関西弁をしゃべったり（←俺の場合）、若者言葉を過剰に使ったり、いろんな｢かっこつける外人」の形があるんです。ただの言語音痴かもしれないが、俺の場合には、日本語を上達するにつれて、一般の日本人はいわゆる「日本人の若者を気取る外人」を気持ち悪いと思ってることをわかり、俺自身がおじさん化していくと｢普通の日本語」に直そうと苦労しましたよ。早い段階でそれをわかったほうがためになるのではと思いますね。

よかったね。久々に日本語でブログを書いて、同じ西洋人達が集まってきた。言葉が変わっても、意見の多様性があまり高まらない。

「外人コンプレックス」の影響で、これから漢文で書いてみます。それか、万葉仮名。

この頃誰でも日本語ができますよ！

日本語が喋れる外人は増えちゃったから、パックンみたいな「日本語の能力しかない外人タレント」という現象が完全に消えるはずじゃないでしょうか？皆さんのご協力をお願い致したいと思います。

日本人の若者を気取る外人」を気持ち悪いと思ってる

同意です。「Whazzup, dogs?」等を使う日本人とあまり変わらない。意図的に「丁寧な日本語」を話すことに目指しています。実は、「日本人じゃないから、敬語を使わなくてもいい」という考え方はまちがっていると思います。

ところで、夏休みの記憶リストのなかに、二つのやつだけは架空です。MP3.comの株でちょっと儲かったんだけど、敵が主張するほどビジネスマンではない。

Ah, don't fence me in! A nice song in D!

If you're not a businessman, you must just be "in D type musician". Ah, but wait, there's a third occupation, your current job, which is himitsu! I suppose there's always "internet conspiracy theorist" to fall back on if we need a definition, but these days even that's been replaced by... well, by poetry!

毛升様、誰でもボヘミアンになれるワケじゃないよ。責任負担は罪ではない。

いまわかったのは、もしみんながひらがなでぜんぶうちこんだら、おんらいんのほんやくそふとでやくできなくなるんじゃない？よみづらいけどね。

結局のところでやはりマークシの日本語が勝つだろうね。でもBrown氏等の理論が当てているんじゃないかと思わさせる。ここでは日本語能力は力の基の一つになっています。
最後の平仮名だけのコメントは情けのないトリックだ。モーマスが可哀そうにしてもいいと思うんだが、なぜマークシは日本語の新人を排除したいなのか？さっきの外人コンプレクスじゃないか？

そして何ヶ月ぶりに一回日本語の記録する上で日本人の観客の激増を見込めないでしょう。

日本語で書いても、日本人が集まる可能性が低いです。色んな理由で自分のせいなんですけど。

「平仮名だけ」は確かに優しくないですよね。普段の理論戦争は言語戦争に移動しました。

いいメタファーだ。多くの場合でマークシとモーマスの格「理論」は完全に別な言語みたいですから。
でも言語戦争は一人で催せば、誰も来なければ、まだ戦争言えないね。

ところで、選抜制度の第一歩目を越えた。来週SFの領事館で面接と試験を受けにいって来る。延べ７４時間在米になる。
あなたたちみたいに国費研究族になれるかなあ。

edict (5 entries)

骨材 [こつざい] aggregate
集計 [しゅうけい] totalization, aggregate
総合課税 [そうごうかぜい] tax on aggregate income
総量 [そうりょう] aggregate amount
負債総額 [ふさいそうがく] aggregate amount of indebtedness

that's no comment on anyone's , just an atempt to start compiling basic nihongo tango for neomarxisme 101

i mean the neo-neomarxisme

brown, nate, marxy etc .. now , while just reading through 100+ comments on couples and computers over at imomus', quite unrelatedly, following the saaya irie saga which included many misunderstandings , it got me thinking about the comment i left above. was it rude ? did anyone feel offended by it ? was it plain stupid ? (typical of a disfunctional ESL). i have lyed saying that it was unrelated to any of the comments above, it obviously picked up on whoever said that everyone's flexing their nihongo skills and some other stuff which i can't recall now. (was that percieved?) i was trying to share a joke with marxy (was it funny?) while at the same time doing a typical mild marxy-bashing, to keep some dynamic balance (is that tired?). was it disruptive to swich the flow, which (actual entry aside) i had initiated, from nihongo back to english? am i just seeking attention? . etc etc i'd appreciate anyone's opinion

and on another level, while wearing my heart on the sleeve i'm also being sarcastic to a reply from brown on the SI entry while trying , and inevitably failing (because of esl probably) to satirize momus' entry which i refered to

fell kind of flat over here, but momus, marxy, myself and others are regular purveyors of jokes that just don't hit the mark. looking back, most of the jokes around here, and a 1/3 of the jokes I make with my american friends are along these lines.

btw, the verdict around my workplace was that 酩酊 is a word that every adult knows but only old men use. maybe marxy is showing solidarity with Japan's 高齢化.

I don't think anyone needs to worry about E-J "code-switching," it's perfectly natural. I'd like to commend everyone here on their fine Japanese! All too often foreigners feel uncomfortable and/or competitive about their Japanese skills. I think having a supportive environment is a wonderful thing.

And on that note, let me say that while I might agree on an asthetic level that foreigners who talk like 13-yr old kids are "uncool," we need to look at the roots of that kind of judgement. This is a perfect example of Bourdieu's "cultural capital" at work, and it's also playing right into the hands of centralizers and "modernizers" from Meiji on up:

Anderson, Benedict
"Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is There a Difference that Matters?" (see Battle of the Tongues)
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24302.shtml

田林葉
ジェンダー、地域、年齢などによる差異と 「正しい」日本語の規範
http://www.ps.ritsumei.ac.jp/ assoc/policy_science/103/10308.pdf

Pulvers, Roger "Opening up to difference: The dialect dialectic"
http://www17.ocn.ne.jp/~h-uesugi/openinguptodifference.htm
(check out the rest of Pulvers' website/blog too- he was dialogue coach and assistant to Oshima for "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," among other things!)

I'm not saying we shouldn't know how to speak "proper Japanese," (it offers us the chance to be understood by the largest audience), but no one should be ashamed of being conversant in regional and subcultural dialects (big up Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West)! Hold your head up high when you speak 東北弁など！

Also, we all have varying degrees of Japanese fluency, but putting our thoughts down here in Japanese is a way to include the very people who are the primary subject of this blog.

[Now notice how I didn't follow my own advice and (try to) express all this in Japanese- Because I don't have the time? Or confidence? Excuses, excuses!]

As MC Rumi (http://homepage.mac.com/arairumi/) says:

「あらゆる壁壊して。ジャンルの壁、性別の壁、夢と現の壁、常識の壁、限界の壁、善悪の壁、すべての、あらゆる壁。壁は初めからあったのではない。誰かが、何かが作ったのだから、壊せない壁などない。」

I'm looking forward to trying to understand all of this Japanese, maybe I'll pick up a few more words to add to my vocabulary. woot!

Just in case you haven't tried this, http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/ is a great plugin for the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email programs. It's fantastic for those of us with weak Japanese skills...

brown, i don't know why i can buy wholesale something like the deluze/gauttari spiel on 'minor language' and go wow, yet still find what you're saying ultimately kind of patronizing, or maybe it's just the gung-ho factor, i don't know

there's something a find kind of cool about marxy's post-blog blog, it oddly reminds me of stuff like Gordon Matta-Clark's real estate pieces from the 70s, a kind of post-ownership , bogus-ownership thing . like he drops something here to just symbolically claim his ownership, or rather logistically he's the only one who can start a new post, then people go totally nuts , he occasionally visits leaving the odd comment just like a regular dude.

Marxy is not a blogger. Marxy is not a musician. Marxy is not a businessman.

Marxy is a living legend.

Lurker: good luck in your language study!

dzima: Why is marxy a living legend? I have to admit I haven't heard much of his music and the only article of his that I've read in a major publication was that thing he did about podcasts for the Japan Times. Is there something else I should know about him (besides what's in his very own wikipedia entry)? And why don't people call me a living legend on *my* blog??

brown: As nice a concept as that is, the idea of living the change you want to see in the world in terms of one's own Japanese seems kind of irrelevant and possibly counterproductive for gaijin living in mainstream Japan.

Acknowledging or being proud of cultural/linguistic differences is one thing; going out of your way to imitate those things and failing miserably makes you sound like a freaking newbie and often comes at the expense of going the next step - and that's reality. How many people have you met who have achieved a certain level of fluency that's, say, sufficient to enjoy a night of drinking or keitai chatting, but can't read their own paychecks? That's fine for some people, but if your goal is working outside the eikaiwa realm or gaining a more robust understanding of Japan as a society, it's decidedly lacking. For me, it took a few years to get out of that trap.

Nate brought up the idea of Japanese ability being used as a kind of cultural arbitrage (ここでは日本語能力は力の基の一つになっています), which is interesting since that's what the second post EVER of the neomarxisme blog is about. But of course given the very real information gap and that Japanese is a language that's spoken in a country thousands of miles away from the major centers of the English language, there's probably no helping that. But as marxy noted, that language gap is closing if ever so slightly - more Japanese-speaking Westerners, much better English-language news reportage (Asahi translates Tensei Jingo and the full text of its editorials every day!) etc.

To really get an idea of, and then to comment on, what's going on in Japan (the point of this blog?) it is basically necessary to be able to follow and understand media, mass culture, and the man on the street, a good portion of all of which are simply not available in English (or other languages I would assume, except maybe Korean). In the business world, there have been cases where this information gap has resulted in massive failure for American companies trying to make inroads into Japan.

It's certainly not the only thing necessary - there are lots of ignorant native Japanese speakers as well as successful gaijin who don't speak Japanese - but it's kind of like reading a book with a whole chapter missing. You know something's missing, but you'll never find out unless you go and get the missing section. If you don't, you'll either have to make it up yourself or rely on your friend to tell you what you missed.

Sure, it's lame for someone to say "I speak Japanese and you don't, so shut up" (I know people who have made a career of it, though they are all Japanese) - but I don't really see that happening all that much at least on this blog.

Marxy is a living legend.

He was being sarcastic. Or passive-aggressive. Or something.

I think a lot of people confuse the fact that this is my personal blog with some sort of habitual self-aggrandizement.

Also, for the record, I did not create my Wikipedia site.

As for the Japanese language, I tend to see Japanese as a communication tool for speaking with Japanese people and understanding Japan more than a goal/object within itself. I understand my limited range of expression in this adopted tongue, and I find it hard to want to write in Japanese unless I am specifically talking to only Japanese targets. It's cute that we as foreigners can do these kinds of posts, I guess, but I think there is a fundamental reason why this blog is mostly in English.

This is a perfect example of Bourdieu's "cultural capital" at work, and it's also playing right into the hands of centralizers and "modernizers" from Meiji on up:

I am not sure that we are saying "kansai-ben" is not "proper" as much as that there is something grating about a non-kansai born foreigner intentionally taking on kansai-ben - ironically in a twisted Bourdieuian attempt to prove "authentic" experience for self image-enhancement. I don't think you get any cool points for using keigo and keeping your post-position particles in your sentences - you just sound "neutral" and less annoying.

本当に面白い話がしたかったら、外人の男性には「俺」か「僕」かどちらがいいかに関して議論しましょう。

How many people have you met who have achieved a certain level of fluency that's, say, sufficient to enjoy a night of drinking or keitai chatting, but can't read their own paychecks?

I haven't just met such people, I am such people! :-(

Here's hoping grad school will 日本語理解アップさせる.

the fact that this is my personal blog ...

i kind of disagree but to prove this i'd have to quote you extensively (maybe selectively) and resort to post-modern theory. what i'm trying to say is that you have set up a more or less unique little spot. and this is a compliment.

本当に面白い話がしたかったら、外人の男性には「俺」か「僕」かどちらがいいかに関して議論しましょう。

昔の先生は「僕が子供っぽくて、俺が無礼すぎて、私を言う男性はとてもクール」と言いました。

I think I give an "earnest and idealistic youth" vibe to my coworkers and friends when I use 僕.

I always use 僕 though when possible, quite often, avoit the 1st person pronoun altogether. might get to use washi before being able to comfortably use ore. 外人の男性 using 俺 sounds rather stupid if you ask me, though it works if it's contextualized in some sort of quotation marks or italics/ie. irony . 外人の男性 who really speak japanese like japanese can often use 俺 very effectively , ( a somewhat disorienting effect.). i should use watasi more often.