….I’d also love to wear these clothes!  That is just so cool…

Oh well….

Now, if only I lived in anime world.  Ha!

In Saiunkoku Monogatari Shurei brews a special flowering tea for Seiran.  I thought it might be fun to see if such a thing exists and it does.  Now I’d love to try some!  I went to Amazon and picked out a nice blooming tea gift set there to add to my humongous wishlist.  It has nine different kinds and a tiny pot to steep them in.  It’s kind of a silly thing I’ll probably never get, but it’s neat to know it’s real.  The kind I really want to try I also added to my wishlist at Amazon, but it’s not an Amazon product so it won’t show on my little box there in the sidebar.  Lately that stupid sidebar widget thing hasn’t been working at all anyway.

Anyway, it’s cool to find things you didn’t know existed.  Maybe the rest of the world knew, but I didn’t, so…

This is what the name “Bonnie” looks like in Japanese:

It is pronounced “BONII“. (Consonants are pronounced more or less the same way as in English. “I” sounds like ee in meet, but shorter. “O” sounds like o in old. Double vowels like “II” are held for twice the duration of single vowels.)

I have this little box on my sidebar there that shows first grade Kanji and every time I come to the site I click to see what it means.  And very very slowly, without much trying, I’m starting to recognize these characters.  (For instance, I saw “forest” today and realized it looks like three “tree” characters together, and “woods” looks like two of the same characters together.)    I also read a very interesting site about the differences between Japanese and English and how monumentally difficult learning each vastly different language really is.  I would have to have been born there or learned it as I grew up to be able to understand it it’s so vastly complex.  I realize even using proper English is shockingly more casual than the honorific or formal Japanese is.  (And exalted Japanese is even more polite and strict!)   There’s no way I’ll ever absorb all of that and be able to use it, so I guess I’ll stick with just learning a little Kanji.

I thought learning German was hard.

I actually failed German class back in the day, but some of it I still say today just for fun.  We actually say a little Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish and German in this house because we all learned different languages in school.  Ian: French, Cliff: Spanish, Me: German, I forget if Marjorie learned French or Spanish, and we all picked up a tiny bit of Chinese and Japanese over the years too.  It’s fun if you know a word in a different language that fits what’s you’re about to say.  I count in German or Spanish a lot just for fun. Marjorie answers the phone “konichiwa”, and I’ve been known to say “ni hao” and “xie xie” around the house.

Anyway, I’m off to watch more anime.  I’m on episode 18 of Kurokami.

(I got the name translation from this site: http://japanesetranslator.co.uk/your-name-in-japanese/)

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And from this site: http://www.kanjizone.com/

My name:

ボニー In Katakana

菩仁 In Kanji  (Dubious…  I don’t think my name can be represented in kanji.)

ぼにー In Hiragana

bo-ni-i In Romaji

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Here’s a website I found that’s pretty cool on this stuff:  Stockkanji.com.  And they brought up an interesting point, my name actually means “pretty” or “beautiful” and the kanji for that would probably be treated more as a word than a name…  That’s why I find the info from the site above dubious.