Ensoku

We went on an ensoku today. That's a school field trip. They're quite different here. Your typical ensoku is a walk to nowhere in particular, stop for lunch, then walk back. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit we took a nice walk through the mountains and stopped at a place that is supposed to be a lookout point it's not much of lookout point now though, unless you want to see a mountain being raped. They're building a new ski course, so it's all ripped up earth and heavy machinery pushing it around. I've heard of other schools walking to the zoo or to a park. In any case, the walk itself is a big part of the outing, not just a way to get there. Also, lunch is more than just getting fed. One teacher asked me if the correct translation for 'ensoku' was 'hike' or 'picnic'. I chose neither and suggested 'field trip'. The trusty Japanese-English dictionary agreed with me.

That brings up a related thought. Japanese-English dictionaries are so bad. An example I came across yesterday (this is just what comes to mind, they happen all the time) is aisatsu, which gets translated as "greeting". Well, 'hello', 'good morning', and such are aisatsu, but so are 'good bye', 'excuse me', 'thank you', and many other phrases that certainly aren't greetings. Do we have a word for this in English? Sometimes I think the dictionaries are bad because the two languages are just so different. Is this because we mentally carve up the world in fundamentally different ways? Is this because meaning is use (Wittgenstein, somewhere) and in two languages so different syntactically it is uncommon to words to have really similar uses. We don't even have the same number of fundamental classes as them if you ask me. I feel like there is a spectrum from noun to verb that we divide into three classes (noun, adjective, verb) that Japanese divides into four (noun, na-adjective, i-adjective verb). So not only are all the rules very different (claim that it stems from a high level SOV vs. SVO choice if you like, Chomskians) but the pieces being played with are different. My best attempt at a single word translation for aisatsu is 'salutation'. Sorry for the linguistics diversion. Tell me if you think of a better translation.