Episode: 026
Time Count: 33:04
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Okay, so I’ve finally got some time to post this while travelling back to Tokyo on the Shinkansen from Kyushu.
Thoughts:
Intro: It’s August, mid-summer you might think, but ever since Utaco’s come to America it feels like the beginning of the end of summer even though it’s hottest in September. That’s because with the end of the summer holidays, a new school year begins and so the end of the holidays feels like the end of summer
引っ越しシーゾン: In Japan, the new year starts in April and so it’s often said that March is the season of farewells but in America the new year starts in August & September so a lot of people move in August. This summer - unusually for Utaco - a lot of friends have moved away so it’s become for her the season of farewells. Among those who have moved away is “obachan”, the first Japanese friend she made in America. When Utaco moved to the US she was writing a blog and it was through this blog she met “obachan”. When “obachan” moved closer to Utaco, she contacted her to ask it they could meet. At that time Utaco was living in a small town with mainly Hispanic people and was also trying to immerse herself in English and thought she could get by without Japanese friends, but she found that they were essential - especially when she had problems. Obachan took her under her wing and really helped her (including baking her yummy cakes!) and was truly someone she couldn’t have lived without. Obachan and her husband were like family for Utaco and her husband. Obachan encouraged アイデアがポンポン浮かぶ/口だけ人間Utaco to follow through with her plans including this podcast which she listened to and gave feedback on.
Even though she’d known for a long time Obachan was moving, she somehow thought of it as happening in the distant future so was unprepared when she finally did move. Utaco & her husband helped them move and Utaco was happy to get to spend that time with them. Obachan moved to a place too far to keep up their frequent contact but Utaco will visit her & they’ll keep in contact through Line etc. Other friends have also moved away like a French friend, a Taiwanese couple and a close Russian friend who was born on the same day & year as Utaco. Even though she’s sad, Utaco comforts herself that the season of farewells, it’s also the season to meet new people.
Do you mind?: Here she talks about the difficulty of using and answering the English question “Do you mind if…” if you answer “yes”, it means you do mind. So if as a Japanese speaker you want to say いいですよ you need to say “no”, not “yes”. She notes that this is a common source of confusion for non-native speakers. Recently, she’s got into using “sure” as an answer to various questions (she think it sounds friendly, cool & native-like) but wonders whether she can use it to answer “do you mind” questions meaning she doesn’t mind. Researching the topic again for this podcast, she found that native speakers are divided on the issue and so are some friends she asks. “Didn’t you?Isn’t he?” Questions cause similar yes/no answer problems. She’d like them to disappear.
What I miss about Japan: Here she briefly revisits to subject of sushi from a previous podcast. Recently a friend recommended a very reasonably priced Chinese buffet restaurant and here Utaco had some fantastic sushi, the best she’s eaten in America.
She misses the quality of Japanese stationery items. American stationery is terrible especially erasers (she won’t use these at all!) in America, stationery is also incredibly expensive and the choice is limited.
America あるある: Here she complains about Americans using carpet for floors everywhere except kitchens and bathrooms especially since they wear their outside shoes within the house which really dirties the carpet. Families with children too would have a hard time keeping the carpets clean. If you want something soft under foot why not use a rug, she asks. Everyone has to get pro carpet cleaners. She wonders if carpets are a cheaper flooring option but finds that hard to believe. A friend has a new apartment & surprisingly Utaco doesn’t remember seeing any carpet there. She remembers that in Japan when she was a child you sometimes saw carpet in houses but this is no longer the case she thinks in Japan. Anyway, she wants Americans to cease using carpets in homes.
I’m so behind! I think I’m being a bit over-thorough in listening 2-3 times until I’ve properly understood an episode, but I am using it as listening practice for N2, so I’ll keep doing that for now.
Just finished episode 7! I’ve decided I really can’t allow myself to get more than 20 episodes behind. I’ll start episode 8 when I go to fetch my friend from the airport shortly.
Good luck with N2! When I did my N2 (which is as far as I’ve gone), podcasts for Japanese learners weren’t really a thing. I think they’re a fabulous resource.
I’ve still got a while to go, I’m not planning to sit it till December. But I remember a while ago someone saying this was one of their main resources for N2 listening 
Don’t worry, seems like we’re in this together 
Episode: 027
Time Count: 31:41
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Which episode are you up to?
I finished the 10th one a couple of days ago. Hoping to listen to the 11th one this weekend 
Ok my first goal is to catch up with you! I’m nearly finished with 8, will do a first listen to 9 tomorrow.
Lessgo! I’m sure I won’t make it hard for you :3
I always listen to this every week in the car and am usually done by Thursday, but I need to wait for @Lisaveeta’s summaries to comment bc I almost always forget what happened in the episode 
Just relistened to #27 and am posting the summary I did last year.
忍者 = Japan I once had an online Japanese class where the teacher asked me if I’d read a certain book. I didn’t recognise the title and suddenly nervous (because studying by myself, I had often not read the usual textbooks) I asked her if I should have read it. Somewhat smugly (she was the one teacher I wasn’t fond of) she told me that most foreigners had done so because it was about ninjas…A little offended by her attitude, I replied I had no interest in ninjas.
Also, in Australia we say “thongs” not flip flops - sometimes leads to some very funny misunderstandings.
Intro: she wants to talk about the summer holidays that have almost finished
夏の振り返り: The holidays have passed quickly. Her husband is a school teacher so his holidays are the same as the school kids’ - around 2 months. Her college class summer holidays started a little earlier than her husband’s but her new term and his will start around the same time. They made lots of plans and wrote lists of what they wanted to do but she feels now there’s a lot more they could’ve done. Recently her memory isn’t good so she’s going to review her holidays with her notebook in one hand. The first weekend of the holidays they went to the coastal hippy hangout of Santa Cruz and participated in a Japanese Cultural Fair. For Utaco it was a great start to the holidays. In the 3rd week of June they went on a camping trip to Oregon and the north of the state where she lots of greenery and an unbelievably blue lake. Returning from Oregon they took the coast road back. She went to Redwood National Park which she’d always wanted to visit & followed the coastal drive to San Francisco. Along the way, they tried out their fill of breweries. When they got back from the camping trip she was busy organising the farewell party for a friend who was moving away as well hosting a friend who lives far away who came to visit for that farewell. Together with that friend, she went to Big Sur to a favourite beach and hoped to go there again before the end of the holidays but hasn’t , but during the hot month of September she’s hoping to get there. Then she spent sometime lounging round the house, not doing much - reading novels in Japanese she’d got from a friend, watching YouTube, cooking, eating, drinking beer. From the middle of July she got busy again - went to free craft class at the library with her husband - this was something on her to do list and she’s happy to have crossed it off. She also worked as a volunteer at a Buddhist O-bon festival. She’s not one to usually go to temples but a call went out for people to help with the ハチマキ booth - the ハチマキ were simple white cloth ones on which words such as 愛 ( a list was provided) could be written using a felt pen [マジック]. Utaco wondered if these simple cloths would sell but they did (to kids, to young people with an interest in Japan, middle aged couples who’d lived in Japan). She then asks her listeners to guess what the most popular word was? (Hint: from the distant past) Turns out it was 忍者🥷. Amused, she observes that Ninja = Japan. At the festival she got to eats lots of Japanese food - karaage, tempura, yakitori and for the first in a while Ichiban Shibori beer. Towards the end of July she met up with friends, went out to lunch, had some tap dancing lessons and went with her good friend Martha and her family to the beach. She also went to help a couple who always helps her with a clean-up. Once August begun, everything began to speed up. She would’ve liked to have read more - Japanese books are okay to read in bed but if she tries to read English books then, she soon falls asleep so maybe she should make another time to read? If it’s the morning, she’ll read non-fiction but novels are for the nighttime. When they return to their normal lives, she’s worried they won’t be able to get up early.
What I miss about Japan: she’s worried that the title she’s chosen for this section “what I miss about Japan” is too difficult for her to say…Anyway, she misses hot Japanese baths. She’s got a bathtub in her apartment but it’s not as deep as a Japanese one and it has the feel of a hotel one with an overhead shower. On days when you’re tired, have sore shoulders or it’s cold, you really want to have a bath. In Japan there’s also large public baths and onsen - actually it’s these she misses more than household baths. There are onsen in America and she has been to one in the south (2 & 1/2 hours away)at Paso Robles but it was more like a outdoors heated pool than an onsen & a bit suspicious, smelled like an onsen but was disappointingly tepid. Near where she lives, in Carmel, there’s a spa with different shaped pools/spas outside which she’d like to visit. She’d also like to try a mountain onsen she’s heard about in Big Sur but you can’t drive there - instead you have to walk along a trail for around 30kms. Sounds hard but maybe one time on a backpacking trip… in Japan onsen are so close by. When she goes back, she wants to visit Hakone and Atami which are close to both her and her husband’s hometowns. She’d also like to do spa-crawl in Japan and has a wish of staying in a slightly high-end onsen when she’s older…she’s suddenly remembers she wanted to say she went to an onsen in Oregon on her earlier camping trip - at Pawlina Lake, there is walking trail to a set of onsen pools with different temperatures. She would’ve have liked them to be a deeper but she did enjoy them. Anyway, she’s like to try some more American ones.
my friend って言う? Today she wants to talk about some doubts she has - as most of the people around her are Hispanic and these are the people she speaks with in English she sometimes wonders if the English they use is standard American English or Hispanic English. Apparently she’s sometimes learned non-standard English from the people around her. For example Mexicans add “my friend” to everything as in “ Good morning my friend” whether people are actual friends or not. At first Utaco thought that this was just the friendliness of Americans she’d heard about but then after a few years she noticed that other Americans and people who’d come from elsewhere didn’t seem to use this phrase, only Mexicans and she thinks it might be a translation from Spanish. Her next question is about the use of “And you?” after having replied to the question “How are you?”. Hispanic people seem to use it a lot but she doesn’t think other Americans generally do. They respond (she thinks) “how about you” or “how are you”. She remembers that when she was in school in Japan she was taught to answer “I’m fine. And you” . She thinks this too is wrong as most Americans would say “good” not “fine”
my favourite: she’s into Old Navy flip flops (people with more refined tastes might prefer Havaianas but they’re too expensive for Utaco). Ever since she came to America she started wearing flip flops when she goes out, even inside instead of slippers, in gym showers. You can get Old Navy flip flops in Japan too. What does she like about them - firstly the range of colours and their cheapness. She only buys them on sale ($2!) so she can’t tell her listeners their regular price. She recommends not buying them from the 1 dollar shop as she did that once and they were uncomfortable to wear.
I don’t know if this is a generational or regional thing (I’m the only person in my family born and raised in California) but I definitely heard thongs when I was young, but I’ve always used flip flops. It’s possible the undergarment was becoming popular around that time, which necessitated the differentiation.
We lived in London for a few years and were out with our engagement photographer doing a shoot around the city. It was evening for golden hour, and it was getting a little chilly since it was probably May (and London’s summer is about 2 weeks long every other year). He was saying that we only had two more stops, but a little worried bc I was wearing a tank dresss. I told him that it was ok, I had pants to change into. Saw his face and then we both remembered about the same time that pants in America and pants in the UK are different things
It’s one of the few words I was never really able to code switch correctly. I definitely was saying trainers, jumper, cutlery, queue just fine, but my brain rejects “trousers” as an everyday word choice
Other random thoughts from the episode:
I’ve never even lived in Japan and I miss Japanese baths pretty regularly. So that I get
“My friend” strikes me as a perfectly grammatical but incredibly non-native turn of phrase. I think she’s exactly right that amigo/a gets used in Spanish and then people simply import that into their English language speech.
I wanted to know the most frequent words per episode and in the podcast as a whole, so I scraped all the transcripts up to episode 326 and ran them through a segmentation tool. It yielded the following frequency lists.
First tab is frequency list across episode 89-326 on the whole; second tab is frequency lists per episode.
There are a LOT of words in there. I didn’t want to be the judge of what vocabulary is too simple to include, so short of taking out basic grammar words like だ etc. I left it all in. You’ll probably want to make your own copy of the spreadsheet and use the filters to whittle it down. You could filter by:
* slight caveat: I determined the JLPT level of vocab by running JLPT vocab lists through the same segmentation tool as I used for segmenting the transcripts. Some words may be misparsed. I noticed there was a lot of 古参 in this podcast, for example, and once I looked into how it was used I noticed it was actually part of 〇〇こさん-style names wherever it was used 
But on the whole I think it’s 95%+ useful 
I know y’all are nowhere near episode 89 yet, but I hope this is useful to others as well when the time comes 
Wow! Amazing! Thanks
For me, “trousers” are more something men wear and “pants” are what women wear (even as I write these words, I wonder is this so), but definitely “trousers” isn’t a common word choice for me either….
Episode: 028
Time Count: 30:13
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Here, trousers is more often about specifically male clothing, pants is more gender neutral here. Also trousers is like… slacks, jeans, suit pants, etc. Sweat pants, shorts or tracksuit pants wouldn’t get called trousers but would get called pants. Underwear gets called by more specific categories (panties, briefs, boxers, etc.) or underwear/underpants.
love that!
I have a similar story from when I first moved to the UK and I was cycling with a colleague and as we were chatting I asked him for a recommendation for a dry cleaner because I needed to get my black pants cleaned he was a pretty straight-laced fellow, I’ve never seen such a shade of red on a face. I didn’t know what pants meant there but he explained after he regained composure
I lived there more than a decade and never became friends with the word trousers. I just couldn’t do it somehow, and noticed I formulated sentences to avoid needing to ever refer to my lower garments 
For me, only old men wear trousers
epic, thank you 