Madison Rambles #13: We're Finally Talking About China!

Hello, everyone!

Today, I'm going to announce that I'm doing these posts a little differently from now on. You see, the previous posts were long, talking about all of the previous sections and how I feel about them.

I'm not going to be talking about all the sections anymore. It took up to two hours to do, and honestly, that's not the kind of homework I want to do after a 30+ page reading.

So now, I'm going to make these blog posts more accurate to the title: I'm going to ramble. I'm just going to talk about my thoughts, regardless of section. Here I go...

By the way, I'm talking about Chapter 8.

Did you know that China did foot binding? The Chinese people would break a girl's foot, let it heal, and then break it again, going through the cycle until the girl's foot was small enough. It's very painful, and I'm glad it's not as popular anymore.

There was also the concept of "becoming Chinese," similar to the concept of "becoming American." That's because China was like the America of its time period! Even nowadays, China is starting to catch up to the United States. I wonder when it will overtake it...?

そして、中国の文化を覚えたかったので、日本人は中国に行きました。だから、日本語で書く時、漢字を使います！いいですね。しかし、漢字はすごく難しいので、漢検も難しいです。大変ですね…

(Also, because Japan wanted to learn about Chinese culture, Japanese people went to China. Because of that, when writing in Japanese, you use kanji (borrowed Chinese characters used in Japanese)! Isn't that great? However, because kanji are very difficult, the Kanken (a famous Japanese kanji test) is also very difficult. It's terrible, isn't it?)

Finally, let's talk about gunpowder, because China accidentally made it when they were making an elixir of life. It's great for fireworks... but it also helped to invent guns. And while that might have helped us in warfare, it also killed millions, if not billions of people. So it's really an ironic double-edged sword. And before anyone says that I'm using ironic wrong, an elixir of life that kills people is situational irony. There's no arguing that.




Sorry for the short blog post, but do you like my Japanese? You might not be able to read it, but at least I had the translation at the bottom. And I was really excited to read about China, so I'm glad the post is finally here.

Until next time!