Japanese class starting

Very exciting because I am starting my online Japanese class today.

It's kind of curious the local learning center would offer Japanese at a time when supposedly university Japanese classes are thinning out AND not offer Chinese. I actually would have preferred to take Chinese because I've been reading so much about the country lately-even if I didn't specifically seek out books on it, they are all over the news. But, I don't have any serious intentions of learning hanzi (or kanji) so I don't have much in the way of expectations.

The NYT is writing an interesting series on the ongoing deflation cycle in Japan. Some economists say it is a harbinger of what could happen in the West following our recent economic peccadillo. Even in Tokyo, which is still doing relatively well compared to, say, Osaka, there is a growing trend of young people living in "microhouses" which the NYT describes as concrete houses on SUV-sized plots. The next generation can't even afford the cramped type of housing their parents lived in. It's hard to imagine that in 1991, economists were predicting the Japanese economy would overtake ours by 2010. And now of course China is the #2 economy in the world. The Japanese GDP apparently is essentially the same as it was in 1991 while ours has doubled.

I had some lingering questions over whether Japanese is, like Chinese, a tonal language. I talked to some pony-tailed dude years ago (who seemed to enjoy being an expert on many things more than he did actually researching those things) who insisted he had studied it and it was. I knew I had read something that said that it definitely was not thus I had a distressing data dissonance. After doing some further checking, it seems that Japanese only uses pitch accents and is indeed not tonal. But the distinction is subtle, at least to me. According to Wikipedia, "Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are only assigned to one syllable in a word, whereas tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word."  Multiple other sources confirm Japanese is not tonal although a lot of people seem to continue to argue about it. I am going to forgive that guy for passing on bad data (but not for wearing a ponytail.)