Japan Related Video [Lagtrain]

My blog post this week is regarding a cover of a song I had found somewhat recently through tiktok, which I eventually had found the full cover on YouTube. The cover is by an artist, Rusui, of the song ラグトレイン「Lagtrain」, originally by the artist Inabakumori.

I chose this song for no particular reason outside of the fact that I find the vocals to be just incredible. When listening to music usually, I often like to listen for the sound itself, hence why I listen to a variety of languages even if I don't fully understand what's being said. Rusui just seems to have a great voice for this song and had it been released on Spotify, I'd be listening to it much more frequently. I can also appreciate how she kept the same music video style as the original with her own "persona" or character it seems:

Inabakumori is a rather popular artist it seems, while not being a vocaloid artist, I just found out they're considered a vocaloid producer, using software to sing their songs, with lagtrain and lost umbrella being their most popular songs. 

In the end, I think Rusui did a great job covering this song while not really changing the tone of it in any way. She doesn't seem to have many of her own original songs on spotify with the exception of a few, but she seems to do a lot of covers exclusively on YouTube (which i really wish she would upload to Spotify once again).

Katakana Expressions

After doing some research on katakana and its most common uses, I've found that it's mostly used in "foreign words, technical terms, scientific names, onomatopoeia, and sometimes for emphasis".

With the most common case that I've seen being foreign words, katakana adapts these foreign words to fit Japanese pronunciation rules. This isn't only applicable to english words, but any foreign word in general. For example, in the image below containing coffee shop terms, the katakana word パン translates to bread, but the pronunciation 'pan' is derived from Portuguese language as opposed to english: 

Sports too are often written in katakana due to the fact that a lot of sports were brought to Japan from other countries:

Technology too, given its rapid adaptation in the modern world, new words are coming out so frequently and the best way to adopt these terms is to represent them using katakana:

 Finally, scientific names for species and/or plants are often written in katakana as a form of "emphasis", something equivalent to how the english language uses Italics to indicate a scientific term. "Homo sapiens (ホモ・サピエンス Homo sapiensu), as a species, is written ヒト (hito), rather than its kanji 人."

Sources:

https://migaku.com/blog/japanese/katakana-words

http://japanese-name-generator.com/2013/11/03/about-japanse-katakana/ 

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