Combining Interests: Japanese, Wrestling, Baseball, and Compassionate Understanding
Here’s an example of combining my specific interests. I’ve been learning Japanese on Duolingo because I love Japanese wrestling and Japanese baseball. All Elite Wrestling (AEW), my favorite wrestling company, features a number of native Japanese wrestlers. One such wrestler is named Kazuchika Okada. I really like him a lot. He’s an excellent wrestler - one of the very best of the modern era. He’s been very funny in AEW and he was very serious in Japan. He is one of my favorite people in the world. I’m learning his language so I can understand him better. He is learning English with his face and I am learning Japanese with my face. That’s extremely interesting to me.
There’s a native Japanese baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Shohei Ohtani. Even if you don’t follow baseball, you may have heard about him. Hopefully you heard that he is a starting pitcher (SP), a designated hitter (DH), and that he is extremely good at both. It is possible you heard about a gambling scandal his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara was involved in. The latter was less fun to learn about with my face.
There’s a Japanese wrestler I remember from my youth named Shinjiro Otani. Ohtani and Otani are pronounced the same. I believe I saw Shohei when he was in Japan with a jersey that said “Otani” on the back. In Japanese they use characters, so the Latin characters you see with your face in this post are to help English speakers say the name right. Why are they spelled different? In Japanese hiragana script, I would spell it with the characters that are pronounced “o” “ta” and “ni”. My guess is that the “h” after the “o” in Ohtani is to help English speakers say it as a monophthong (one vowel quality) versus a diphthong (two vowel qualities). Many American regional accents would pronounce it more like “owner”, but it is pronounced by just holding the first sound in that word. I’m interested in why they’re spelled differently and I’d like to find out more. I’m speaking to people who have insight and trying to learn more. Hopefully my journey with Japanese, pro wrestling, and baseball brings me more answers.
Do you know Japanese and/or like baseball or wrestling? Please reach out to me!
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