Flat3D

懐かしい (Nostaliga)

懐かしい。。。(natsukashii)
is what a Japanese person says when something from their past tickles their nostalgia bone.
In English we tend not to have these little outbursts with such coherence. Either we don’t say anything and keep these little experiences for ourself, we make some kind of a noise that signifies our emotion or feeling without saying an actual word and sometimes we have actually turned that noise into a word for this very situation… But life with the Japanese is filled with little personal narrations that let the world at large know what the individual is experiencing… おいしい (oishii – tasty), 眠い (nemui – sleepy), 寒い (samui – cold), 厚い (atsui – hot), 痛い (itai – painful), 気持ちいい (kimochi ii – feels good), 気持ち悪い (kimochi warui – feels bad, the first time I actually heard this I actually laughed out loud, it was someone expressing their feelings over seeing a rather portly chap in latex or something doing aerobics in a commercial) and the list goes on and on…
Now it isn’t that we don’t have these words in English… We do, they are mostly just plain old adjectives, but we tend not to use them in quite the same way… We tend to form sentences and only exlaim things that are useful to those around us. Perhaps expressing something expressly useful to others around us. But in Japanese they are going on all the time, often simply to give expression to the wider world of what you are currently experience.

But to go back to the top, 懐かしい (natsukashii) or “nostalgic.” I experienced this very feeling this evening as I was having a jeffries in iTunes and came across Today FM’s Ray D’Arcy show podcast. Now those of a similar ilk to me will remember Ray presenting Den TV on Network 2 (RTE) every afternoon after school, like RTE’s CBBC, featuring young stars such as Zig and Zag and Dustin the Turkey…
Well of course I signed up to see what the guy was up to these days and to my suprise (and delight) I was joining in just after a whole show devoted to Den TV!
If you remember Den TV and all the stuff on it, you might want to head over to Today FM’s pages and check out the episode…