Brad In Japan: Snow Sweet Satō
In which Brad sees snow in Tokyo, eats with friends, and laughs at Japanese
Heyyy Everyone!
I hope you are doing well amidst all the cold weather spells. Winter is in full swing and I know many are struggling with bills, jobs, and now the cold. Hopefully, this letter brings you a little warmth :)
Sato or Satō?
I had another company visit this week to a place called SATO who does all things "tagging" related. This shows up via the labels on packages, barcodes on water bottles, and even RFID tags on clothes. Lots of really fun uses and I enjoyed getting to see their demo.
The question though pertains to this week's Japanese! The word for Sugar in Japanese is 砂糖 (Satō) with a long oooo at the end. We had a good laugh at how "sweet" the team was, and how "sweet" their office view is. The long syllables is a pain point for many language learners but I suspect you can figure out quickly if you missheard when the words mean two very different things haha.
Warm Cooking
As a group, we all went to cook okonomiyaki. There's a shared grill where you cook it and then we split the food and the bill at the end. It's a really fun way to share and build community beyond just "dinner" as you actually have to make it.
We had some great laughs and even looked back on our childhood movies (anyone remember Sky High or MinuteMen??)
Japanese Learning
From last weeks good shows to this week's bad ones. I watched three this week that took me the whole week to make it through because I kept having to pause it out of cringing. Thankfully that left me with more time to study so yay! We're getting there :)
Wrap up
Lots happening but slowly and steadily. We are almost done with yet another round of classes and only have 2-3 more before we start our internship! Before you knowing spring will be here and summer in full swing! I hope you're taking care and as always,
Thanks for Reading!
