there can be only one

japanese alphabet song (info) [lyrics]

Just like the first CD, I wanted the final track on this album to be kind of a joke, something hard to take seriously. This song came about because of a discussion with Haido-san in after Japanese class one day. We were talking about how difficult it would be to condense an alphabet with 100+ sounds into a short, mnemonic song like we have here in the 'states.

I took it as a challenge.

Tsurui sensei liked it the one time I played it in class, and I think a few other people enjoyed it. Jean definitely did not, but I can't figure out why. Guess you can't please everyone.

There's an old version of this song on the second Nicotine Fist CD, but the panning is all screwed up and makes it sound fuzzy. I brought the tempo down a bit when I re-tracked it so that you can actually hear the lyrics.

I decided to put the mora on the lyrics page in katakana because it's more legible at 9pt font size, even though one could argue that hiragana is more representative of Japanese words and katakana is mainly onomatopoeia and foreign words. Regardless, in the actual song they represent the same sounds, so it probably doesn't matter.

I'm in the process of working on a 2-minute song explaining the pronunciation and stroke order of the 1,945 Jouyou kanji. It's proving to be a little more challenging than I anticipated, especially trying to reconcile both the Chinese and Japanese readings of each kanji.