I won't waste too much of your time, let's just get into it.

It's been a few months since the last one, hasn't it? To be honest, not a whole lot interesting has happened since then. I'm really only posting this to meet the requirements for the class I mentioned in the last post. I have learned a few new words, however, so I'll go over what I remember at the moment and what I found interesting as well.

So, you may be wondering why I put that image as the image for this post. If you don't know about Pokémon, just Google it. I'll go over a couple of their names here, though.

Most of their names are puns, like for example the Pokémon called Maractus that's supposed to be a maraca-cactus, I think. Seems simple enough, right?

These two that are pictured are called Koraidon (red, frilly dinosaur-looking dragon from the distant past) and Miraidon (purple robotic dragon from the distant future), and there doesn't seem to be a pun in those, right? Well, this is where the Japanese comes in.

Two words I learned over this time were:

古来 (pronounced "korai") --> from ancient times, age-old

未来 (pronounced "mirai") --> distant future

I also assume the "don" part means dragon in some sort of way, but that's total speculation on my part.

Nerding about Pokémon aside, I also learned a certain rule about Kanji a bit better. I could go on and on about it, but I'll just give you all the condensed version to save both of us time. If you have any questions or feel like I got anything wrong, feel free to comment and I'd be happy to nerd out about it some more XD

In Kanji there's a rule called "rendaku" where (SOMETIMES) a specific pronunciation changes to a different one to make a word more clear.

That probably makes absolutely no sense on its own so let's give an example to try helping.

The word 人々 (or in other words 人人, that special 々 just means to repeat the last Kanji) you'd think would just be pronounced 人 (or "hito") twice, right?

Nope.

Since they come together to make a single idea, in this case "person" and "person" coming together to make "people", the first sound of the second one is changed from "hito" to "bito" instead. So it's pronounced "hitobito". Since "bito" isn't a word by itself like "hito" would be, people listening to you say it just immediately assume that it modifies the word before it, making "person" into "people" rather than you just saying "person person"

Does that make any sense? It's midnight as a write this and I don't know if I'm awake enough to be explaining this to be honest.

Anyway, I suppose that's all for what I've been up to. Again, not much, but it's fun to learn new words and do a little bit of independent study on this, in my opinion.

Hope you have a good one, and I'll see you in the next one! Whenever that'll be.