Kanji are Japanese characters that find their origins in Chinese characters. In total, the Japanese language consists of roughly 6000 kanji, varying from specialized kanji used in certain areas of science, law, etc, to kanji exclusively used in names (人名用漢字　- Jinmeiyou Kanji, literally kanji for use in people's names). 2000 of them are called the Jouyou Kanji (常用漢字 - Kanji for general usage), which every Japanese person should be able to read.

Each kanji has its own set of readings. There is a general rule of thumb which reading to use for them. It depends on the combination with okurigana, or with other kanji. Sometimes though, they have totally unexpected readings, that even Japanese people will be surprised about (especially in place names).

An example of a few kanji, whose reading depend on okurigana:

I want this kitten... Enjoy!



Original

Useless words of the day:
糖尿病　(tounyoubyou) - diabetes
神経核 (shinkeikaku) - neuron
視床下部 (shishoukabu) - hypothalamus
神経伝達物質 (shinkei dentatsu busshitsu) - neurotransmitter

I was bored at work today, without anything to do, so I checked out some Science news on Yahoo Japan.

Can be quite interesting... Or not...

On Friday evening, after work, I went into Roppongi with some colleagues. Even though I despise Roppongi, I thought it should be OK with colleagues, and we went for some drink at first. What started as just a drinking out, ended up staying in Roppongi all night. We had fun though, but in the end when I was about to go home, some colleagues said they are going to watch the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. Since it was already pretty late and I was not sure if I could get the train back home, I decided to go with them anyway.

The movie was cool, even though I felt asleep at the end. The subtitles were in Japanese, and though they disappear too quickly sometimes, I could grasp the story. It was quite tiresome, reading Japanese subtitles while being half drunk...

After the movies, we strolled around in Roppongi for a bit, with no way of going back home. Ate some burger at Mos Burgers, and stayed there until closing time, and then spent an hour at an internet cafe until the first train at 5.10 in the morning...

I took the time to actually look up sunagimo from the previous blog (yakitori). It is gizzard, a type of stomach found in birds and insects, whose function is to grind the tougher pieces of food. It is highly keratinized to make the surface rough, and in certain insects, gizzards can have minuscule "teeth" made of chitin.

You have probably seen birds eating sand or grit, small stones. The reason is that they take them to put in their gizzard so it can help grinding the food. Birds do not have teeth, but use small stones in the gizzard to "chew up" food.

Gizzards in Dutch: spiermaag.