Clever Girl

So, I don't have any big news to report, but I thought I'd share sort of an anecdote about something that happened today. It made me feel particularly clever.

For a while now I've had an interest in the math teacher at one of my schools. He sits across from me in the staff room, so every now and then when he doesn't look horribly busy I'll attempt to talk to him. I realized a while ago that I have no idea what his first name is. Because it's typical to call most people by their last names unless you're particularly close to them, I could go indefinitely without learning what his name is. So of course I became curious about it.

The fastest way to figure it out would've been to simply ask, but it seemed like a fairly odd thing to ask out of the blue. I'm guessing everyone else already knows what his name is, and it might be a bit surprising that I didn't know. I also wasn't sure how personal of a question it would be. As a work colleague, there's no particular reason for me to need to know his first name. There will probably never be a situation where I need to use it, in any case. But again with the curiosity.

Anyhow, today I was waiting in the entrance to the school for my taxi to come, and I started looking at the shoe boxes. By the front door, there are little cubbies where the students and teachers store their shoes. When they're at school, they take out their indoor shoes to wear and put their outdoor shoes in until it's time to leave again. Since I'm not regular staff, I don't have a permanent shoe box; I use one of the boxes that's there for visitors. But each of the regular teachers has their own designated shoe cubby.

Each of the boxes was marked with the name of the teacher it belonged to. It became sort of a game for me to look at the kanji and try to figure out whose name it was. Some of them were easy, but some names were made entirely of kanji I didn't know. I couldn't read any of the first names because those tend to contain more unusual kanji. I was pretty much just doing it to entertain myself, but then I came across a name ending in -oka. I don't know the meaning of that kanji, but I can read it because I take the Takaoka bus sometimes, and the bus displays are entirely in kanji. Then a light went on in my head: it must be the math teacher's name. Looking at the kanji that came before -oka, I recognized it as the one the English teacher had written on the seating chart. I couldn't read the first kanji, but I knew it was the right name.

So at this point I'm staring at the kanji as hard as I can, trying to think if I've ever seen them before. His first name was made of two kanji. It didn't take me long to recongize that I had no clue how to read them. But then it occurred to me that I could probably figure it out using my iPod. I have a Japanese dictionary application on it, and you can search for kanji by tracing them on the screen. I didn't think I had much time left until the taxi came, though, so I took a picture of the name sticker so I could look it up later.

Just a few minutes ago I remembered about the name, and decided to give it a go. I was able to find the first kanji using my iPod, but I wasn't able to get the second one, no matter how many times I drew it on the screen. So I decided to use the internet. I found a website where you can search for kanji by picking out the radicals (the separate pieces each kanji is made of), and after a few attempts I found the right character. The problem at this point is that each kanji can be read more than one way. For example, the kanji that means "mountain" can be read as either "yama" or "san". Given that I was very unfamiliar with these kanji, I didn't know which reading was the correct one. And that's where Google Translate comes in.

Google Translate is very useful in that not only will it give you the meaning of a word, it also shows the phonetic reading as well. It helped me a lot with my online conversations with Takashi because even if it couldn't translate a sentence into something comprehensible, I could often figure it out by looking at the phonetic transcription. Chances were I knew most of the words, I just couldn't recognize them when they were written in kanji. So I put the two name kanji into Google Translate, and it came up with one reading: Tatsuya.

For fun, I also looked at the meaning of the kanji. Assuming I understood correctly, these two kanji together meant something along the lines of "All the more accomplished". Japanese names are fun in that they always have a meaning, and so long as you can read kanji, you'll know what the meaning is just by looking at it. Although English names have meanings attached to them, most people have to look them up in a name dictionary to figure out what they are. I think "All the more accomplished" is kind of a heavy name to stick a child with, given the expectations that are implied. But I'm pretty sure "Tatsuya" is a fairly common name. The other meaning for it is "Dragon", I think.

Anyhow, it's not so much that I'm excited to know what the math teacher's name is, but figuring it out on my own made me feel incredibly clever. With one fairly obvious clue (the sticker on the shoebox) and various technology, I was able to solve a problem. This is the kind of ridiculously circuitous process you resort to when you can't read. But it was also a lot of fun. Now I think I'm actually more motivated to ask the math teacher what his name is, because I want to know if I got it right. So that's today's adventures in illiteracy.