Stuff

Have been doing very little on the Japanese front in the second half of this year, though have occasionally been playing the tapes of OUP's Take Off In Japanese (published in 2000), which I picked up from a charity shop for about £2.  Listening to audio always taxes my patience but it's a habit I need to get into, and it's actually a nicely-prepared course.

Have also tried going back to Obenkyo on my Android phone to see if any of the kanji I crammed about a year ago have stuck.  Some of them have...

Also still dabbling with O'Neill and Yanada's An Introduction to Written Japanese, which I periodically start studying again, always running into difficulty around chapters 5 or 6 (of 20).  I suppose Japanese is a language that isn't really suited to a single-volume graded reader—you just can't drill and repeat all the kanji enough in a single book—but I ought to stick at it, and I'm sort of planning to throw myself at it yet again in spare moments over Christmas and the New Year.

Interglossa

What appears to be the full text of the long-out-of-print Penguin book by Lancelot Hogben on his proposed auxiliary language Interglossa is here.  It's what you'd expect from the editor of Frederick Bodmer's The Loom Of Language, a book that I'll have to write about some time: full of optimism for a post-war internationalist future that will be organized and planned by nice British chaps.  Both Bodmer and Hogben felt that it was reasonable for different languages to have different words for things, but for modern languages to have declensions and conjugations was just ridiculous and someone should do something about it.

All languages are Welsh

according to Hieroglyfic (1768) by Rowland Jones.  An attempt to trace all languages back to a few original primitive sounds, years and years before Nicholas Marr did the same and annoyed Stalin.

Visualizing Japanese Grammar

A collection of short Flash tutorials covering most of Japanese grammar.  The audio on some of these seemed to be a bit out of sync with the video, but although they're quite old and creaky (nothing dates faster than once-cutting-edge educational technology) they look pretty good at covering the essentials.

Benny has a book coming out in March...

on language learning (obviously).  It looks very interesting.

Haven't quite got into the swing of doing Japanese-related stuff yet this year.  More to follow soon, hopefully.