On working a cash register in Japan, and some other thoughts

Hmm, so, I've been trying to figure out what exactly I should write about in this blog. For the past three days, I've been working at Saitama University working the cash register in two different convenience store-type shops on campus that are run by Saitama Co-op. I had absolutely no prior experience working with a cash register, but I soon got the swing of things. At first, it was a little scary, since I had to conduct business in Japanese where for once I was the one providing the service instead of the other way around. I suppose we do this in the States as well, but every part of a Japanese transaction is narrated. It begins with a greeting, いらっしゃいませ！Irasshaimase! WELCOME!



Then I use my fancy scanner to scan the bar codes (thank god for bar codes), tell the customer how much that will come to, push some buttons, and wait for them to give me some money. If it's exact change, I announce that I will now humbly accept their exact change (ちょうど頂きます) which always makes me feel like I'm saying I will now humbly eat their 100 yen coin (it's the same verb you use when you announce you will now begin eating your meal, it's all about humbly receiving). If they require change, I repeat the amount they put down and then say I will humbly take care of their change. Then I do so and tell them how much change it is. And finally, we end with a Thank you very much.

I already knew a lot about Japan, Japanese, and Japanese spending habits before I started this job, so it's difficult to say what really stands out. I already knew that hardly anyone uses a credit card, it's still mostly a cash-based economy, although lately cards like Suica are becoming popular. These are prepaid cards that you use mostly for the train or the bus (I have one, very handy) which you can scan at the register and recharge later at the train station. People also try to get change back in denominations of 10 or 5, even if that means giving some weird coins in the first place. Also, 一万 10,000 yen (a little over $100) bills are not that uncommon. Perhaps the most practical thing I have learned is that if you would like the person ringing you up to take whatever money you have set down and change it, it's useful to say おねがいします onegaishimasu (please take care of this), so they don't keep waiting for you to put down exact change.

One of my favorite parts of Japanese monetary transactions is that there is almost always a little tray where the customer puts the money, and there it sits while you finish with your business. You don't have to hold it somewhat awkwardly in your hand, and it doesn't have to sit there on the counter looking like it could blow away at any second. Instead, like many things in Japan, it has its proper place, and there it stays until your business is done, when it goes into the register. They often have little rubber nubs that feel really nice to touch, so that you're not grasping something hard all day. It's the small things that count.

In other news, everyone is super nice to me and says very nice things about my Japanese. For some reason, they are all surprised when I say I can read Japanese too. I do tell them that I majored in Japanese right off the bat, but for some reason this does not automatically mean that I can read Japanese to some people. I am not sure why. Maybe it's because speaking and reading/writing skills are very divorced when it comes to the average person's proficiency in English. A lot of people tell me they can read and/or write English a little bit, but speaking is absolutely impossible. So maybe because they can see I am proficient in speaking, I must be deficient somewhere else. It's probably actually because there seems to be this notion that Japanese is a super hard language. I have never found it to be that way. Everyone is quick to point out that the pronunciation of Japanese is actually really easy. It's super regular, and the vowel sounds are all very standard. If you put any amount of effort into listening to native speakers, you can speak Japanese like a pro. English is a completely different story, as I'm sure you can imagine.

As last time, I find that I am proud to be an American. This is a pretty special feeling. I am also extremely grateful that I happened to be born a native speaker of English.

I'll have to write about the good times I'm having with my host family another time, since this is already long enough, so we'll close with a picture of the tree-filled Saitama University campus.

quick update and handy tool

I wanted to point you Japanese-learning types towards http://www.hiragana.jp/ which is a secret I learned a while ago but forgot about until just now. It takes all the kanji on a webpage and adds ふりがな。 Very useful in combination with lyrics in Japanese!

In other news, I had a rather awesome day. I bought 100 yen juggling bean bags at the 100 yen shop and while they are much too light, there are 4 of them (I need to learn how to do 4 ball, I can only do 2 and 3 ball), and I missed juggling. I also finally asked if I could play the guitar in my host brothers' room, which was ~the best~ idea I've had in a while. My fingers hurt because I haven't played since I've been here and I played a lot this afternoon. I've been busy learning more Neko Case songs and brushing up on my old repertoire of the pillows and Voxtrot. I wish I could play more but actually my fingers cannot handle it. The guitar was covered in dust so I'm just going to kidnap it unless someone wants it back. I don't know why it took me so long to ask. Just goes to show, you have to know how to keep yourself happy.

My secrets of Japanese study

For some reason, today this struck me as a good thing to write a blog post about, since I know a lot of you out there are fellow Japanese students and I might not tell you about every cool thing I find out about.

The beautiful thing about all of these, except for Kanji Sonomama, is that they are free.

So, without further ado, welcome to

~*~Siena's Secrets of Studying Japanese!~*~

Learning hiragana and katakana:
Slime Forest
Well, everyone has to start somewhere. And that somewhere is probably learning how to read hiragana and katakana. I did it with a free game called Slime Forest which is in the style of an oldschool NES RPG in which you fight slimes by typing in the correct kana above their head. It's effective, and fun! Of course, you still have to practice writing them on your own. After you learn hiragana and katakana, you start in on some basic kanji, and while this helped me a little bit, it's overall not a terribly effective way to learn kanji (unless you put in a lot of extra effort to learn the Japanese readings by yourself, which I did...). But for learning to recognize hiragana and katakana quickly, this is definitely the best.

Online dictionaries:
Denshi Jisho (jisho.org)
Jisho.org is definitely the best online Japanese-English-Japanese dictionary, perhaps for the ability to look up example sentences which lets you see how a word or grammar pattern is actually used. It's based off of Jim Breen's dictionary, like every other good Japanese online dictionary. You can also look up kanji by themselves, or search kanji by radical.

Jeffrey's Japanese⇔English Dictionary Server
I still stand by this dictionary even after I discovered jisho.org (it's also based on Jim Breen), because it has a couple extra dictionaries that come in handy, like common names for people and also place names. It's got a bunch of other ones, but those are the ones I use.

Memorizing vocabulary:
Anki
Anki has become a critical part of my everyday studying of Japanese this semester because I have to learn large amounts of new vocabulary every week. Basically you make flashcards on your computer, and they automatically fill in the reading based on your kanji input. You can also customize the cards, so sometimes I add definitions in Japanese, hide the English meaning by making it white, and put both the kanji and the reading on the same side of the card. So, it's very versatile. It's undergone a lot of growth since I first started using it, and now I think it's a pretty solid piece of software. The point is supposed to be long-term memorization using spaced repetition, but I actually use it mostly for short-term... but don't tell anybody.

Viewing and understanding Japanese websites:
Rikaichan
This is a weird category, but Rikaichan completely revolutionized the way I deal with websites in Japanese. It works like popjisho, except it's better because it's a Firefox extension. And it's based on Jim Breen, of course, so it's basically like looking up every word you don't understand on jisho.org just by hovering over it. It's not perfect but it nearly is. It's a little like a crutch, though, and I always make faces when I have to deal with Japanese websites in a browser that doesn't have Rikaichan installed, which of course can't be every browser I use.

Looking up kanji when you don't know the reading/electronic dictionaries:
Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten (漢字そのまま楽引辞典)
Kanji Sonomama is software for the Nintendo DS, but it completely justifies buying a DS if you don't already have one (and if you do, it's a total no-brainer). It's about 1/6th of the price of a normal electronic dictionary and in some ways, is better (but in one fundamental way is worse, which I'll get to). Kanji Sonomama is critical for looking up kanji you don't know the reading for, which is what you'll encounter when you're trying to read anything intended for Japanese-speakers (otherwise you have to look it up by radical and who wants to do that?). So you draw it into your DS and it looks it up and tells you some English meanings. It's that wonderful. It's sensitive to number of strokes, I've discovered, rather than how beautifully you draw your kanji.

The only problem is that if you want to do English -> Japanese lookup, it's rather slow, because you have to look up the word then look up any kanji you don't know, which is likely to be a large amount depending on your level. Of course, if you're talking to someone who speaks Japanese and trying to figure out how to say something, you can just show them your DS and they'll know how to read it, haha.

You can buy this on the Internet, or if you're in Japan you can find it in the real world (I saw it used once for around 2000 yen). Or if you're a bad person, you can ****** it using your *** ****.

Special thanks to anyone who told me about any of these things... Eric, Andy, whoever it was at Kent who was responsible for Rikaichan (I forget), Ricky... the Internet.

以上です。