Konnichiwa from Japan again!

Fernando Rivadavia Lopes (ferndriv@usp.br)
Wed, 1 May 1996 07:26:14 -0400 (AST)

Hello to all!!

Sorry but I"m gonna have to be brief, I"m rushing a bit because I
just found out that my e-mail account in Brasil will close today and I
still don"t have one here in Japan. I haven"t had time to come to the lab
yet since the first 6 months I"ll be busy with the intensive
japanese-language course. And how busy! Today we were all aghast to find
out that in Japanese there are different endings for different things
when these things are being counted. The ending goes after the number of
things and there are different ones for people, big animals, small
animals, birds, round objects, flat objects, long objects, eletronic
equipment, newspapers, books, etc. !!! And the worse is that each of
these endings may vary depending on the number of objects, with no rule
to memorie !! It"s impossible!!
Anyways, I"m staying at a big foreign student dormitory with
350-400 people from more or less 64 nationalities! It"s quite a mess of
languages! I still haven"t had time to contact the local CPers though. I
just need to get a bit more organized with my routine, then it should be
OK. Sorry everyone for the silence, but I hope to have an e-mail account
here soon and then I promise to come to the lab more often and write to
everyone individually and get back into the discussions in the CP group.

Best Wishes,

Fernando Rivadavia
Tokyo, Japan