History

So when I was talking to one of the students whom I do exchange diary with and one of my JTEs, the topic of world history came up, since the student was studying for a test. So naturally, I asked about what kind of world history they were studying, and the student replied that he was studying Chinese history.

As someone who took loads of Chinese history courses, naturally, I was interested to find out what period they were studying. But when I asked what time period they were studying, he told me "gi" and I was like "...what?"

I've never heard of that dynasty, and they were confused because they were like "well, but that's the kanji for the period and kanji is Chinese writing, right?" to which I replied "yeah but well, we used romanized versions of the words using the pinyin system. They mentioned that they were studying the three kingdoms period, and I was like "oh yeah, the Wei, Wu, and Shu" since a) it's a pretty famous period and b) there are like, over 7 games made about this time period.

They had no idea what I was talking about, even when I tried to pronounce their names with a more Chinese accent.

Later, I found out that the "gi" they were talking about was actually the Wei kingdom, I think, since I was looking through a chinese history site for something that matched a kanji that was pronounced "gi" (the state of Wèi 魏, I found). So yeaaaaaah they don't really sound the same. The Japanese might use the kanji, but I feel like we use the pronunciation. They were going off the on-yomi reading, which generally is the Chinese reading of it, but I have the feeling that wasn't actually how it was pronounced anyways.

From what I've noticed too, the Japanese don't exactly have a good track record for pronouncing things the correct way all the time either when they katakana-ize certain words like "coffee" or "sandwich."

They also asked me what I studied about Japanese history, and I told them I knew woefully little. Basically, there's the Edo period. It happened. Lots of stuff happened then. Stuff happened during the Meiji Era, and also Commodor Perry and WWII. And that was about the extent of my knowledge on Japanese history (short, I know, but I studied China in college). They were kind of surprised that we didn't learn more about Japan in world history and stuff.... and I told them that we learned mostly European/Middle Eastern history, the history of the Americas, and China since China's history is really long. We don't actually learn much about the rest of Asia, India, or Africa in world history in high school (or if I did, I was asleep).

Yay history!