I had asked everyone to prepare a few sentences to describe to Kei-san what English people do at Christmas. Also, Kei-san had prepared a description of how Japanese people celebrate Chritmas, so the first part of the lesson was taken up with that. We had lots of useful (?) Christmas related vocabulary -mostly katakana words (minsu pai, kurisumasu tsurii etc) and a few not in katakana - kazari (decorations) iesu no tanjou ( birth of Christ) iwaimasu (celebrate)
Then Kei gave us a description of what Japanese people do for new year - this contained a lot of unfamiliar words including:
oshougatsu - New Year
omisoka - New years eve
oosooji - "big" cleaning (Spring?? cleaning)
toshikoshi soba - noodles eaten on new years eve
osechi ryouri - special dishes eaten on new years day
otoso - new years sake
kagamimochi - special decorations made of rice cakes
kadomatsu - special decorations made of bamboo and pine
otoshidama - pocket money for children on New years day
Kei-san is going to send me both these descriptions and I will email them out to you in due course.
Finally, we listened to a traditional new years song (I didn't make anyone sing)
Listen to it here http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dWsX-jeiwlk
The words go:
Mou ikutsu neru to oshougatsu.
Oshougatsu ni wa, Tako agete, koma o mawashite asobimashou
Hayaku koi, koi oshougatsu.
Roughly translating as:
How many times [do we] go to bed (sleep) before New Year?
At New Year, let's play flying kites and spinning tops,
Hurry, come, come, New Year.
We also listened to this version which is quite funny. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iczE64mONSA You can't fault the kids for lack of gusto!
Then finally we replaced the bit about kites and tops to create our own version for an British new year. (biiru o nonde, takusan tabete, terebi mite, nete...... you get the picture.)
We start back on Mon Jan 12th. If you are not going to be joining us, let me know.
Don't forget Japan Society Bonenkai on 14th Dec and Shinnenkai on 11th Jan.
All that remains to say is yoi otoshi o!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment