trading postage stamps

No big happenings in my stamp world lately, just moving forward slowly.

I continue to slowly expand the scope of the collection. I am not ready to focus on a single topic or country yet.

Many people have already told me it is time (it is past time!) to narrow my focus, but for now I just want to gather stamps and trade stamps.

Any readers interested in trading, please leave a comment with your email ( I will not publish your email address on the blog, of course).

collect lots of stamps

The English alphabet has 26 characters. Learning those is tough for little kids – remember how you used to make the letter “s” backwards all the time, or how you had trouble with “b” and “d”?

Actually, there are 52 characters, because we have both capital letters (upper case) and lower case letters. Note: right now I am only talking about writing the letters in English, not spelling the words.

Learning to write characters in Japanese is about double that, because there are two sets of phonetic characters which represent sounds, hiragana and katakana, with 56 (?) characters each.

Oh, yeah, then there are the kanji characters which represent words or ideas. There are a few more of those, maybe 20,000 or so – though most people use only about 2000 kanji in everyday life.

Learning so many characters requires a lot of time and practice. So, from the first year of elementary school, Japanese children practice writing kanji every day in class and at home. And it is not enough just to write the characters – they must be written correctly, with each stroke made in a particular order and direction. All of that means lots of writing practice.

Here is a page from one of my daughter’s notebooks (she is in second grade, by the way). The character is 切, which can be read in two different ways (oh, yes, most kanji have multiple readings and meanings, complicating the situation even further, but that is a different topic).

One of them is “setsu” as in “shinsetsu” 親切, being nice to someone. Or, from her notebook, “Be nice to elderly people”. By the way, next week we have a national holiday for 敬老の日: Be nice to elderly people day.

Another reading is “ki” as in “kitte” 切手, or postage stamp. Or, as in her example, “Collect lots of stamps”.

日本語 hints:
-- characters = 文字
-- backward character =鏡文字
-- capital letters = 大文字 = upper case letters
-- lower case letters = 小文字
-- phonetic characters = 音声文字 (?)
-- kanji = Japanese characters (for English users). Chinese characters are hanzi, 汉字 and these are usually different from the kanji characters used in Japan.

Laos stamps

Recently a friend left Japan and moved to Laos, where he seems much more content. We have exchanged postcards and I have thus begun a small collection of recent stamps from Laos (more on those later).

The stamp above is not from my collection but was on display at the Tokyo Stamp Museum, part of an exhibition on animal stamps.

日本語 hints:
- content: has two meanings. In this sentence, it is an adjective meaning satisfied, 満足している. It can also be a noun, as in 内容、中身.

- exhibition: 展覧会、展示会, like a show or display

apologies and promises

Sorry for the long delays between posts recently, will be working hard to get back on track soon.

places you don't expect to find stamps

This week is dedicated to a visit to Tokyo (from Beijing) by my Chinese martial arts teacher, Liu Jing Ru.

You can read more about him and Chinese martial arts at my other blog.

Anyway, after today's practice (ba gua zhang), I noticed something in the lobby - a poster with enlarged pictures of stamps on it, all about dancing. It could have come straight from the stamp museum, but it was in fact an advertisement promoting a dance event here in Tokyo.

kirie, art made from cutting stamps

Yes, another kirie 切り絵 post....We visited the stamp museum again last weekend. Every third Sunday, they have a free session of kiri-e, so we tried it out and my daughter was surprisingly interested. Of course these are all stamps which are heavily over-stocked at the museum, hundreds or thousands of spares of each one.

catching up

Sorry for no posts lately....you've heard THAT before.

Work, work and work. But also some occasional good late-night work on my stamp collection.

One problem with the blog - I am getting a lot of comments, all in Chinese. And they often don't seem to match the content of the blog posts....then I noticed that one of them comes from an address with a link to a rather...unsavory....website in Taiwan.

To any legitimate posters of comments - please give me some time to verify the content before I put the comments on the blog to be seen by all.

Finally, while comments in Chinese are OK, how about some comments in English as well?