Hi, my name is Chihiro Fukazawa, a computer engineer, a technical translater, an writer, and a blogger in Japan.
Please find my four books in Amazon at the left sided bar.
They are books about Perl and Unicode.
The books are very easy so you can read it very fast if you can read Japanese :-D

Usually I write this blog in Japanese.
But today, I want to try to write it in English.
If you find any question / suggestion, please post it in comment box.
(English correction is welcome! :-D)


I have been studying English for many years.
But still I cannot speak it so fluently.
I suppose this is not only because I'm nuts, but also because the English is too difficult.

For example, the month's name are January, February, March and so on.
I don't know why the first month of an year is called as January.
I heard it is from the name of a Greek god or goddess, but I forgot about it.
(To tell the truth I'm not so curious about it :-D)
Even after I heard about it, I cannot understand why a particular God's name is mapped to the month's name.

In Japan, we used the similar naming like 睦月 (Mutsuki), 如月 (Kisaragi), and so on.
But we abondoned the naming.
Now we are using the naming like 一月 (Ichigatsu = the month one), 二月 (Nigatsu = the month two), 三月 (Sangatsu = the month three) and so on.

I'm happy we had abondoned the old naming.
Because the old naming seems to be illogical.
It's not logical so you have to remember them.
So you have to use your brain's memory area to keep the twelve names without any clue.

To call the grade of university studant as Freshman, Sophomore, and... something (sorry I forgot) is too complecated.
Japanese call it 一年生 (Ichinensei = the year one student), 二年生 (Ninensei = the year two student) and so on.

It is not only easy for your brain, but also for computers.
If you sort it with character code, the Japanese words will be sorted as you expected.

The 漢字 (Kanji for Japanese, Hanzi for Chinese) seems to be thought the difficult character system by westerners.
But in my opinion, it's very easy.
It's much easier than the alphabets from one aspect.

For example, the verb "burn" is "燃える" in Japanese.
The verb "grill" is "焼く".
The noun "light" is "灯".
The noun "flame" is "炎".

In the four Kanjis 炎, 灯, 焼, and 燃, you can see the same part 火.
And, surprise, 火 is the character which means "fire"!
So you can guess 炎, 灯, 焼, and 燃 are all related to 火, so you see those Kanjis are meaning something warm, light, or hot.

But in comparison, are there any common points among the words burn, grill, flame, and fire?
Nothing.
So you cannot guess the words easily and you got to remember the four word's mappings of each spelling and meaning.

This is why I think the English is difficult.
I think it's too difficult --- more difficult than it's necessary.
What do you think?

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