Studying

Hey there. The school year is wrapping up, so I've been finalizing tests and marking at work. In my free time I've been studying for the JLPT or Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which I'll take tomorrow (July 5th). This boils down to spending most of the Fourth of July inside organizing my notes and cramming some more kanji into my head, listening to my sizeable J-Pop playlist on repeat. It's actually a good day to stay inside, because the rainy season is in full force this week. The forecast is nothing but rainstorms, even if today is turning out to be more of a steady drizzle day.

Well, I just wanted to check in with y'all. And this is a practical and timed study break!

Update: I just learned that the kanji for America is 米国 which is pronounced beikoku and literally means rice country. This struck me as incredibly strange, so I looked it up. Turns out that back when, before using katakana (the writing system for foreign loan words), countries' names were often written with kanji, using the Chinese readings for pronunciation. So, America was written as 亜米利加 and pronounced amerika. The 2nd kanji (米, me) was picked as a shortened form of the word, because the 1st (亜, a) was already used as the shortened form of Asia. The pronunciation was eventually changed from the Chinese, me, to the Japanese, bei, but I couldn't find a reason for it. This has been your Japanese language history lesson for the day. It is appropriately America related.