Japan Related Video: Kazari Janai no yo namida wa

こんにちは! I decided to include this song by the artist, Ado, as a part of my blog post. The song, linked below, is called Kazari Janai no yo namida wa (飾りじゃないのよ涙は) which translates to My Tears, They’re Not Just for Decoration. 

I had selected this song because I ran into Ado as an artist give or take a year back, and proceeded to look into her discography. The album that this song comes from is called Ado's Utattemita Album, where the term "Utattemita" refers to the term "Utaite", where an Utaite is ultimately someone who performs covers of other songs. 

Given this, I looked into it and found the original as well. A song from the 80s by a very popular artist named Akina Nakamori:

The 80s feel to the song remained consistent in my opinion which is what I can certainly appreciate from Ado as that carries over decades later. That being said, you can still differentiate between the two songs and how between now and then, certain decisions were made on each track, I think the biggest difference being the synthesizer on the voice it seems during the chorus which I'm certain was more popular in the 80s. Overall, I would say I like both versions with that 80s "vibe" I mentioned before, but mostly within the instrumentals and the vocals too.

In addition to this, I also play a game called Beat Saber, a rhythm game in virtual reality, and I was able to play this song in the game and thought I would include that as well :) 

Why Japanese?

こんにちは! My name's David DiPietro. I'm a Junior studying computer engineering who transferred here to Notre Dame from Stonehill College out in Massachusetts! 

I chose Japanese because I've expressed interest in some topics in Japanese culture in previous years, most notably anime and J-pop artists. I had started to pick up on some of the characters from hiragana and katakana; however, I noticed that I could only read them with no rhyme or reason behind it. I wouldn't know what I was saying so I was hoping that given the chance to take a course or two in Japanese, I could start to learn actual phrases and put together meaningful sentences. I've been able to learn a good bit of Spanish over quite a few years and the process of getting to learn a new language is fun in my opinion, so I hope that with this class, I'll just be able to enjoy the process of learning a new language.