Still around

Given that I've only managed four posts in the last two years, this blog is for practical purposes abandoned at the moment.  Still: I might start plugging away at Japanese seriously some time.  Maybe.

Having abandoned any pretense at serious study some time ago, it's interesting to see what I still remember, on the odd occasions when I see some Japanese text.  Most of the basic verbs; a few nouns; quite a few kanji and most of the kana though I still get a lot of the katakana mixed up (always found them harder than hiragana for some reason).  Enough to remind me that I was really interested in all this stuff a while ago, and that I ought to get back into it.

Instead of NaNoWriMo

Another of my periodic attempts to reboot my interest in Japanese: everyone else seems to be doing NaNoWriMo so instead I'm going to try (again) to work my way through the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese.  There are 30 lessons in it, and 30 days in the month.  I've done the first seven or so lessons several times but always got bogged down.

There are some good reasons not to keep banging my head against this book: it's rather dated, even in the early stages clearly tries to explain too much at once and gets into a muddle, and uses the old romanization.  But I still rather like it since it uses a large vocabulary and seems to cover most of the grammar.  I might have a go at the accompanying volume An Introduction To Written Japanese if I fancy something different (I tend to get about 5 or 6 lessons into this, then lose the thread).  I suppose I should fiddle with the Obenkyo kanji-flashcard app too when I have the time.

Motivation

There's actually not much point to my learning Japanese except that it interests me, and I'm increasingly finding myself making excuses not to bother studying it—that is, it isn't interesting me—so I might move on to some other language this year.  Before I do that I'd like to get to some definite level of competence in Japanese, but if I don't then I suppose I'll just abandon it for a year or two and maybe come back later.

I'd like to get somewhere with the language within the next few months (in the next five weeks it'll be nice to have something to distract me from the UK General Election campaign: burying myself in the books should stop me getting irritated with the Internet), but whether I do or don't, I'll probably try something else afterwards.  I've been half-heartedly mucking around with this for too long now.

Roy Andrew Miller's hatchet-jobs

I've mentioned before how it's sort of an ambition to work my way through Roy Andrew Miller's A Japanese Reader.  He died quite recently and his obituary quotes some of his reviews of hapless fellow-academics' work:

“The best that can be said of the authors’ treatment of ancient Chinese and Japanese texts is that it is brave and fearless. Armed with little more than a dictionary and a vivid imagination, they do not shrink from offering novel interpretations for texts that have already been studied at least a thousand years, with the consequent accumulation of a tremendous body of exegetical materials and secondary literature, all of which they are prepared to ignore, just as they are willing to overlook the existence of perfectly correct modern translations, that if consulted, would immediately show where they have gone wrong.”

 They (mostly) don't write them like that any more.  For more, go here.

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.