go down from the mountain!

Hanna taught me a fascinating Korean idiom today. 하산해 - "ha san hey" - which literally means "go down from the mountain", in common speech is used by a teacher when a student has mastered something. In ages past, it was common for the old masters to live on mountains, and the students would come up to visit and learn from them for a while. When the master had nothing left to teach, he would say "go down from the mountain, go back to society!" Such a great image, in just three syllables! It comes from:
the Chinese 下, which in Korean is 하 (ha), meaning down,
Chinese 山, Korean 산 (san), meaning mountain,
and the Korean imperative verb ending 해 (hey) meaning to go, do, etc.

me gustas tu

This song has been in my head all day:



Me gustas Japón, me gustas tu. (that's Japan in Spanish!)

Today is Carrie and Ross's last day here in Yokohama College of Commerce, it's a beautiful cloudless sunny blue blue day, but man - a sad one. I've been carrying my camera around and filming at random moments, within the next few days I'll throw some of them up here so you guys can see what it's like to walk around my school. Two more weeks of makeup classes for me (for students who failed the term) and then -- back to Boston !!! :) I'm getting excited.

Today's Japanese word - いろいろ　-　iro-iro - means varieties. The word is two repeating syllables, and individually いろ (iro) means color. "Color-color" brings to mind a whole bunch of colorful things - a variety. Apparently Japanese has a lot of these double repeating syllable words, anyone know any more?

on English

Some languages borrow words from others. English chases them down dark alleyways, coshes them, and goes through their pockets for spare grammar.

A flower from the flower festival whose name sounds like "song-sa-hwa" (I'm butchering it, I know. The inner petals curve up when the longer and thinner ones emerge, and the name evokes something in Korean meaning "never meeting", in a kind of lost lovers sort of way.