Mina-san, have you taken extra classes in the summer?

Good lesson, but a lot of words I don’t know I think that these lessons would benefit from more complex sentences. Maybe just one that could be the focus of the lesson. It took me about five minutes to decipher the sequence of relative clauses in a sentence from a children’s book earlier I can’t think when I’ve seen such a sentence in any jpod lesson.

Another thing I keep forgetting to mention is counters! There are over 100 in my dictionary’s counter catalogue, yet only a handful have come up in the lessons. Even my Japanese ‘penpal’ said that counters are ridiculous, so it would be nice if you could work them in as often as possible

What was that about jobless samurai? I couldn’t catch it. I saw a show about how Japan came to trade with the West during the edo period. They mentioned a word for roaming samurai who were redundant as a result of peace. The history seems really interesting, especially the stuff about Yoshiwara These sort of things seem to pop up throughout history

jobless samurai…
well, technically, samurai were all jobless; they were forbidden to work and were sustained off a stipend system from their liege lord. if your lord’s estate was forfeited or if you voluntarily left or were ejected from the system, you retained your samurai status as a birthright, but your stipend was discontinued. those samurai were called 浪士 (wandering samurai), an alternate term which was preferred after samurai status eliminated was 浪人 (wandering person). that’s the one that was mentioned here. the term is still used for people who don’t finish university in 4 years or take a year off…

m

I had to take summer school because I got expelled my sophomore year of high school Is expulsion common in Japan? It was at my high school!

吉原までお願いします

Sounds like a good topic for Survival Phrases

The programme focused mainly on trade, so a lot of other stuff from the period was only mentioned in passing. The situation with the Dutch and the representative who delivered Western news to the shogunate was quite interesting. Apparently his was the only outside account of life in Japan until the 1800s. I might have to buy a book myself

Javizy-san,
I think so, too. that’s good survival phrase!

Students don’t get expelled in Japan. I don’t think they even have detentions here.

In the public school I taught at, there were 2 “bad” girls who would come to school in non-standard school uniforms. They had to sit in the teacher’s office all day long and draw pictures, as they weren’t allowed to go to class.

2 “bad” girls who would come to school in non-standard school uniforms

萌え！
(I hope I used that correctly!)

いいよ！メイドカフェよりbadd girlsがいいじゃん！　

marky

In response to the question on cram school, here’s the link to the Wikipedia site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juku (or Japanese if you’re feeling adventurous: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AD%A6%E7%BF%92%E5%A1%BE). Actually, although “cram school” in English takes you to a page entitled “Juku” (short for “学習塾” in Japanese) for me, the term “予備校” (よびこう) comes to mind first.

After looking at Japanese entries for the two terms–Apparently, the former is generally cram school for younger kids (i.e. lower and middle school), whereas the latter is for older kids studying especially for entrance exams. 知らなかった．．．面白い。

実は、アメリカでも「学習塾」や「予備校」ということもある。でも、これは米国に住んでいる二系人向きです。週末に日本の基本教育を教えて、日本から来た両親の子供たちが日本に帰ったら小学、中学、高校に入られるためのものだ。この子はまじめに勉強しなければならない。

Those girls sound HOOOOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers Jason,
Ta for that!