“November” is the hardest month for Japanese
This survey from iShare was educational for me, and I hope it will be educational for some of my readers who may be unaware of the Japanese names in this look at month names, in both English and classical Japanese.
Demographics
Between the 24th and 29th of September 2010 461 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 28.6% in their twenties, 30.6% in their thirties, and 40.8% in their forties.
In modern Japanese, the months are ridiculously easy to remember, being basically “Month 1″, “Month 2″, and so on up to “Month 12″, but before they adopted the Gregorian calendar there was a completely different set of names which I rarely see and could not name any of them at all. Note that although in Q1SQ I mention the English month, there’s not really a direct one-to-one correspondence as the old Japanese calendar was lunar-based, so they tended to repeat months here and there to stop things getting horrendously out of sync.
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