[DocSanae]

Well, I have been searching for a web site with decent info on "nori" but unfortunately, they are all in Japanese.
Here's the link to the web site sponsored by a commercial organization of "nori" manufacturers. It's pretty good, and I hope it turns out decent when you run it through an online translator.
I don't have the time right now to do so, but I'll try to put up some info on "nori" over the weekend.

[FemmeMode]

I tried to translate the site...but, of corse the free web tranlator is only "so" good. I'll try again later....
I bet it may be easier to find a japanese grocery somewhere here in NYC....

[DocSanae]

Talk about online translators.
Compare this with this.
Yup, I'm the one who did the Japanese from the original English.

[FemmeMode]

WOW....too cool DOC!!!!

結婚披露宴，レセプション，会社行事，ビジネス・ショー　，コンサート，どんな行事でも， Big-T のお陰で Sands での一夜に大変身！

It's sooo fun to see this on the computer...and amazing too. Isn't each line in a character a letter....making one character a word?? 会 - is this a word or a letter??

[DocSanae]

I have to say, I when I tried the online translator with my Japanese and the original English, the result was soooo hilarious, and soooo queer.


会 is "kanji", a Chinese character, and has a meaning as a letter, but forms words with several letters as well. By itself, it means "get together", while 会社 (kaisha) means "company" as in firm, not people. (BTW if it's spelled the other way around, 社会(shakai), it means "society".)
Quite often, it's easy to guess the general meaning of kanji, even if one doesn't know the exact letter, since many kanji are made up of particles that indicate a certain thing or meaning. 結婚(kekkon) is marriage, and the left part of 結 is the letter "thread" and the right part "good fortune". The right part can be further broken down into the top and the bottom, the top meaning person with standing or rank and the bottom part mouth. Likewise, with 婚, the left part is the letter "woman" (or female) and the right top, same family, the bottom letter day.


There are two types of alphabet in Japanese, "kata-kana" the square type, and "hira-gana(kana)" the round type. The kanas are phonetic letters, so there is only one way to pronounce these letters.

Kata-kana is used these days mostly for foreign words that have come into Japanese directly. レセプション is kata-kana, this is reception, and is pronounced the same as in English.


Hira-gana is どんな and in a curvacious form. The two dots on the right shoulder of ど indicates a change of pronounciation into "do" (short "o" as in "oh") from "to" (not to as in English, but as in Toto, Dorothy's dog) which is how the letter without the two dots is pronounced.
Incidentally, the small circle on the right shoulder of プ in レセプション indicates change of pronounciation to "pu" from the original "fu" without the circle.

Anyway, once you get the hang of it, Japanese pronounciation is pretty easy, and so long as you stick with the kana letters, easy to read, since there are only 45 letters to the alphabet, and there is only one sound for each letter.
However, close to 4000 kanji letters are in daily use, and of them the nearly 2000 that are designated for everyday use are taught by the end of 6th grade .

[FemmeMode]

THIS is soooo soooo interesting...
I can't even imagine what your key board of YOU computer looks like!!!
Thanks for this explaination...I was thinking that it was very complicated...
I took a painting class with mandarine letters....and that is how I learned about "stokes"....

WOW....about the 6th grade info...that is amazing...can you take a picture of your computer keyboard so we can see it??

Just curious!
Thanks DOC!!!

Hey...can you take these posts from this thread and transport them to a thread topic that corrolates??
Just curious again...

Thanks again,

[DocSanae]

Sorry to disappoint you but my keyboard is pretty much the same as any American keyboard.
CraigT can attest to that, I lent him my laptop while he was here last year.
The only difference is that both the English alphabet and the Japanese alphabet are assigned to the same keys, and we can choose which set of letters we want to use for input. Plus, we can input Japanese from the English sets as there is a method of writing out Japanese using the Western alphabet.

The configuration is a little bit complicated, so when we are typing in Japanese through the Western alphabet, we use a function that automatically transfers the typed alphabet into Japanese. The kanji characters come after this, after we type in the word in kana, (or we type it with the western alphabet which is automatically changed into kana) we hit the space key which brings up the choice of kanji that match the kana, choose the appropriate kanji and hit enter to finalize.

That's why the operating system for Japanese computers take up much more memory space than PCs that operate only with English, and our software gets expensive. There's also a time lag when new versions of software that are in use globally, as rearranging the programs to include the Japanese configuration (and check them out for bugs) takes time.

I learned to type in the US, so I use the western alphabet to Japanese feature, as do most people I know. Besides, this is easier than typing in directly in Japanese because of the number of characters, 45 for Japanese, and 26 for English, (though directly is faster, I'm told) because it allows us to type both Japanese and English, and also allows us to type both in Japanese and English simultaneously if needs be--which is often with science/medical papers.

[FemmeMode]

That is sooo hard for me to believe!! (I'm not saying that I don't believe you...I do! )

But b/c the Japanese letters/characters are sooo unique...it's sooo hard to think you are able to use an american keyboard!! WOW.....
So....on our keyboards it has the one letters....(Numbers are a little different... w/ double characters...) Does it also have a Japanese character....or do you have to have that memorized??

This is facinating....

[DocSanae]

The key has both an alphabet and a kana printed on it. The alphabet is larger, the kana in smaller print.
The numerals are the same, with !"#$%&'() for shift characters.
YOU can type Japanese with a PC that has Japanese integrated into it, even if you don't know Japanese characters. If you know how to spell Japanese phonetically using the English alphabet, then, the PC will change it automatically into Japanese.
Like, FemmeMode=femumo-do＝フェムモード
Deborah=debora=デボラ

[PeggySue]

My goodness, I had no idea.... very interesting, Deb, you are very good at decifering all this.... Doc, thanks for mnaking this world seem a lot smaller as I realize that I never consider computers to be any different than my own.. duh.... Peggy