Teaching Tokyo South: 12 February 2017

Hello.

I am now in Machida. And like always, I start out my new location with sickness. Not me, as usual, but my poor dōryō. He is pretty sick.

榮長老 (Sakae Chōrō) is a cool guy though. He was Cuff 長老s (who was in my district in the MTC. Also know as my 同期(douki) or the group of missionaries I came to Japan with) dōryō last two transfers.

He is a super amazing cook. It's pretty crazy to watch him work in the kitchen. He made a cheesecake the other day as well. His English is probably a little better than my Japanese so communicating is a done in half English and half Japanese. He's a quiet guy too so communicating is... interesting. Haha. He's awesome and I can't wait to get into the Machida game with this guy. Wow, that sounded like Cuff 長老... Anyways. This is Sakae 長老s fourth transfer here so he knows the ward and the area well.

I don't have a whole lot to say (yeah, big surprise) this week. But I'm looking forward to having many stories to share about this transfer.

I decided to tell you some funny language/culture stuff for fun. So. First of all, Japanese is a very.. declarative language. An example of this is that about nine times out of ten people have to say "I'm going to pray now" or "I will pray" right before they actually pray. This is even in sacrament and meetings and always. The funny thing is that gaijin missionaries pick it up as well. Not everyone, but some of the older missionaries cannot pray, even in English without stating that they "are going to pray now".

Also, I'll tell you about some of the ridiculousness of Japanese. Assuming I have this correct because I don't know if I'm 100% correct on this one. But as far as I understand it..

Inoru, is "to pray". Inori, which is conjugated (this is actually conjugated into "base 2") makes it a noun "prayer". To politely say, "I will pray", you use Inoru conjugated into base 2 (sorry don't worry about that) and add "masu", which makes it Inorimasu. Which of course is the correct way to say "I will pray". If you want to make it more polite, you use "o" in front of Inoru to make it more "honorific" kind of. So that would make it o-inorimasu, which is still just "I will pray" but now you're just being more honorific towards prayer. If you want to make it more humble, and in being humble, more polite, you say "o-inori suru". O-inori is honorific prayer, and suru is the verb "to do". However, suru is an irregular verb and base 2 conjugation means it is now "shi". So to say "I will humbly do the honorific thing of prayer" it's o-inori shimasu. But you can make it MORE humble by using a different version of suru which is itasu (which conjugated into base 2 is itashi). So NOW it's o-inori itashimasu. And I'm sure there are more way to do that. But there you go.

Japanese is great but it couldn't be more different than English sometimes.

That by itself is a correct sentence in Japanese because you don't need a subject at all because it's all implied.