丸 (Circles)

Mum and sister are going to read this, so I thought I'd try and write something intelligent. The above is the Japanese character (Kanji) for circle. I don't know why. 円 « This is also a kanji for circle and is also the kanji for en (or yen), the Japanese currency. I don't know why that is either. But at least it shows that kanji are interesting. 


Anyway, the point I was thinking about was about circles. I did a project for university on circles and while I don't remember too much of it, I do remember that it's an important symbol in the human brain. I'll try to remember more another time, but Freud (or maybe Jung) studied circles and got people to do the painting equivalent of automatic writing, which was to ask someone to paint and draw until they weren't really thinking about it and subconscious thoughts came out. The symbol of the circle was quite prominent from what I remember and, also, the brain likes to work on repetition (I think, in terms of both making us feel comfortable and also making us feel eerie), in line with the symbol of the circle. 

So, I found it interesting that when I was trying to teach students (I'm an English teacher to adults) pronunciation, the letter 'o' seemed to be really strong in Japanese peoples' heads. Japanese language has a few less sounds than English and Japanese is pronounce words phonetically (exactly how they're written). So, in words like 'cussion' and 'lemon', it's difficult to get some students to say 'lemern' rather than 'le/mon' or 'cushern' rather than 'cu/shon'. There's a lot of other examples of sounds that are difficult (f and h, s and sh, s and th, u and a etc) but I found that the hardest for a lot of students to shake out of their head (as oppose to just wrapping their tongue, or ears, around the sound) was 'o'. It even produced fits of laughter for a couple of students. We broke the words down and they could say the sounds separately, but when a word was put together again they couldn't stop themselves saying the letter o. One student in particular found it very funny. It wasn't every student (some found it easy) but it was quite a few and I might be talking rubbish but it was interesting to me that 'o' seemed to be really heavily fixed in their brains. That is all. Now I'm going to bed.