IrishOboe

Congratulations Janet!!! I'm very excited for you both!!

And I thought Spanish was going to be my next Pimsleur purchase! I wonder if this one would be even close to what our grandkids are going to speak, "Swiss German" being such a broad term. I don't see the HIPPO folks adding that to their collection any time soon.

Oh, did I mention that we're very happy for you and for all of our family? We're looking forward to adding another son-in-law to the mix!

Hip, Hip Hooray for Janet and Stephan!

The Pimsleur isn't bad, but I think it's the Zurich dialect. Don't worry, Zurich and Basel understand each other well enough to have a rivalry going.

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素敵�二人�　�父�ん�一緒�感激�����。

二人�も本当��れ������も幸�����

���逢�る��を願����。

素敵�明る�家庭を作���������

Omedeto!!!

Sutekina gutarini otosan to issho ni kangeki siteimasu.

Futaritomo hontouni ureshisoude watashitachimo shiawase desu!!

Itsuka aerukoto wo negatteimasu.

Sutekide akarui katei wo tukutte kudasaine!!

I'll attempt a translation, with the help of my trusty WWWJDIC. Both posts are by Yoshiko Takata, my host mother in Kanazawa. When I lived in their home, she was Okaasan (mother) and her husband Otousan (father). If you want to see the original in Japanese, change the page encoding to UTF-8.

"Congratulations!!! Otousan and I share the impression that you make a great couple. Both of you really look happy, which also makes us happy!! I hope sometime we can meet you. Make sure to create a beautiful and bright home/household!!"

Okaasan arigatou! Dekirudake ai ni kuru youni shimasu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!

Nihongo ga wasureta. Demo, sukoshi wakarimasu. Arigato gozaimashita. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu. -Janet

And I only had a dozen or so Japanese words to forget, but for the rest of the family, and for the fun of the puzzle, I'll attempt a translation of Janet's comment: I've forgotten Japanese. However, I understand a little. Thank you very much. It's nice to meet you. [Said in a way that sounds much more polite than my translation.]

In the spirit of the puzzle, note that Stephan said the same thing that you translated as "nice to meet you." Since he calls them 'Mom' and 'Dad' it seems hardly appropriate for him to say this. A better translation would be "your favor be upon me in the future." Yes, they also use it when meeting people for the first time and in this sense it can be loosely translated "nice to meet you" but I don't find it a very satisfying paraphrase.

Thanks for the UTF-8 hint, Stephan. I didn't think I needed it, because I could see the Japanese characters just fine. Then I refreshed the page and they all changed! I changed the encoding to UTF-8; there they were again. Refreshed the page -- encoding changed back to Western. Set the default encoding to UTF-8 (this is in Firefox, under Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & Colors/Advanced) but it seemed to have no effect -- encoding still reverts to Western on a refresh. Oh, well, at least I know how to get the Japanese when I need to.

I've added the pictures from Stephan's camera. Remember you click on the photo to see the full-sized image.

I just realized that UM and K were the really prescient ones in the family, at least as far as foreign languages go.

This blog is setup to use the iso-8859-1 character set, so that is why it resets when you reload the page. It apparently is a monstrous task to convert all of the languages to UTF-8, so LifeType hasn't done that yet, but we'll get there at some point.

Hi Janet--

just got to check out the page...Congratulations!

Very exciting!

Heather

Yea!!!!! How very exciting :)

That opal ring is *gorgeous*!!