Yesterday at the Girl Scouts meeting, Natalia and her friend Anna Sofia were "Junior Aides" — they were in charge of teaching a class of Brownies about Girl Scouts around the world. One of the things they had to do was teach them a song or story from a different country, and a few days earlier she asked if I knew any. I told her that actually I did — there was a song about a bunny we learned in Japanese class called 'Usagi Usagi.' I agreed to come to the meeting and teach the girls the song, and Natalia brought a picture book I brought her from Japan that had pictures of bunnies in it. Mami came to help out, and she took some pictures while I taught them the song.

The kids picked up the song pretty fast, especially considering they're like six years old. They didn't really get the melody right, but it's difficult since it uses a scale that is uncommon in Western music. I remember my Japanese class practicing the song over and over before we got it down, so the fact that six-year-olds learned it at all is quite impressive. It was also very cute to see these tiny little kids singing about bunnies hopping.

In a reply to a previous entry of mine about a big list of obscure English words, Bryan said, "This is precisely what's wrong with the english language. It's getting rediculous. Take a hint from XHTML; Simple and clean is better." My reply got reasonably long, so I figured I'd post it as a new entry.

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