Japanese Edition
ForeignLanguage and MotherTongue
I have English and Japanese websites. English is my only one understandable foreign language and Japanese is my mother tongue. I am afraid always the foreign visitors to my site cannot understand my broken English. At the same time I am hoping that a few of the visitors will be able to decipher my English. Of course I think Japanese people can easily understand my Japanese site.
From the first time, I am wanting to know the responses of the visitors to my sites. But about 20 years ago, a leader of lectures for senior citizens taught us "Don't tell your name on the personal computer communications." "If you tell your true name, you will be burnt by strangers." I am still continuing to keep this teaching of the leader in the age of the Internet.
Instead of telling my name on my sites, I search the sites which link to my sites or describe my URL and know the responses indirectly.
I found 72 foreign sites formerly in the English-speaking countries, the US and the UK, and in the other languages-speaking countries, Poland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, and Romania. On these foreign sites, my English site was introduced as a Japanese senior citizen's site, and was not introduced with the topic level in most cases.
The sites in Japan introduce my Japanese site with the topic level mostly. The topics "Living Things," "Cells and the Human," "Ancestors, Myself, and Descendants," "Blood Relationship," "Points of Contact with the Deceased," and "Mercy Killing" were introduced favorably. Surprisingly the topic "Heinous Crime" was introduced by the site of a section of the Metropolitan Police Department.
Recently I found my URL of the topic "Loanword" in the Taiwanese student's graduation thesis. (www.wtuc.edu.tw/japanese/thesis/95/2/95_team_2.pdf) The student was enrolled in the Japanese department of a foreign languages college in Taiwan.
I do not know whether my "Loanword" affected the thesis or not. But the student read my Loanword surely. It is a big surprise that a Taiwanese and a Japanese have the same interest in the small realm of "loanword used in Japan" though there is a little differences between our view-points. I am very glad.
Even if I consider Taiwan belongs to the Kanji (Chinese characters) bloc, I admire the student who has mastered foreign language, Japanese, in a few years.
I think it was a valuable experience that I was able to read Japanese written by the foreigner student from the standpoint of a native speaker of Japanese. Probably this experience will be useful to improve my foreign language, English.
uploaded February 1, 2010