So, that's written Chinese sorted out, then

A Californian lady's very own phonetic Chinese script (a modification of Pitman shorthand) from the late 19th century.  Well, it was a nice try, and her heart was in the right place.

The unreasonable difficulty of Chinese characters

An old Language Log post here about how difficult even native speakers of Chinese find it to write characters correctly.  Is the writing of Chinese by hand so intolerably difficult (and unnecessary, now, given that Pinyin input is so easy) that the writing of characters will inevitably die out?  There's a lot of cultural capital invested in the writing system, but that doesn't necessarily settle the matter—Turkey switched from Arabic to Roman script pretty quickly, after all.  Vietnamese is now romanized, albeit with some alarming diacritics.  I'd be sorry if the characters disappeared as it's one of the things that first got me interested in Chinese and Japanese... but ultimately it's up to the native speakers.

Benny on the train

here as he travels through China.  Entertaining and well-made video.  Impressive given that he's only been learning Chinese for a few months.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

And so the Britannica print edition is dead.  I didn't actually use it much in the pre-Internet days; I was into radio, electronics, computing, maths and science, which EB never seemed good at.  I remember (I must have been about 15) looking up the definition of a tensor in the EB and being disappointed with the gnomic, incomprehensible little article there.  This would have been the fifteenth edition, a staple when I was a kid of any biggish library; this was the edition that notoriously mucked the reader around with its Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia sections that kept on telling you that better information might be available in a volume different to the one you'd just lugged off the shelf.

David Bellamy used always to be in the newspaper ads for the EB, testifying that his reading of it at home made up for his not getting much out of school.  Ads presumably aimed at well-off, benevolent parents; the advertising always talked up the educational benefits so as to convince prospective buyers that the volumes would be good value at any price.  One gathered from this that the price was actually very high.  In the mid-90s I was at an agricultural fair, of all places, where there were lots of tents full of people trying to sell stuff.  There was a Britannica salesman there.  He had a little flip-chart on his table, consisting of about half-a-dozen cardboard rectangles attached to a dinky triangular frame.  This was in the days before PowerPoint had conquered the world.  'Have You Considered The Benefits Of Owning A Great Encyclopaedia?' or something like that was on the first page, and probably the second page said something similarly-capitalized about how much my hypothetical kids would get out of my owning A Great Encyclopaedia, and etc etc etc.  He read out each little page, running his finger under the words as he (slowly) said them, as though addressing a cretin who needed reinforcement of the concepts via multiple channels.  Is this an actual sales technique that they're told to do, I asked myself?  If so it wasn't working.  I eventually interrupted his flip-chart usage to try to ask flat-out how much it cost, and I didn't get a straight answer, though he did imply that I probably wouldn't be able to afford it.

How times change.  I now own a nice 1950 edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 15 alphabetical volumes plus World Survey volume, which I picked up from a charity shop for the price of a large round of drinks.  It looks good on the shelf and smells nice and leathery but I have to admit it doesn't get read very much.  I love the idea of books that set out to do something very specific; with language textbooks I'm always keen to see that the author has a specific end in mind, whether it be conversational confidence, fluent reading ability, or just tourist-level survival level in the language.  I want some evidence that the author has thought about what he's going to achieve.  With encyclopaedias, I like to see how much of the world the editors have set out to encompass.  I have a three-volume German set of Duden volumes from the 60s that betray fascination with machinery, processes, things that work; the Larousse French volumes are full of technical terms for old-fashioned things such as the sails of three-masted ships and bits of steam engines.  Reading an encyclopaedia from cover to cover is a routine sort of stunt but reading one in a foreign language would probably be very educational, and would leave you with a hell of a lot of arcane vocabulary at the end of it.  I've never done this, of course.

The famous 1911 Britannica is online now at various places, and I spent an hour or two today looking at the volumes that were available at OpenLibrary.  I do worry about the digitization of knowledge and the danger that everything we know might get clobbered by a Carrington Event, but there's no going back to the old days, and I wouldn't really want to anyway.

A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley (Google Tech Talk)

An interesting talk by Thomas S. Mullaney.  If you've ever wondered how characters were arranged in the traybed of a Chinese typewriter, here's the answer.  There's more to it than you might think.

Dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna Batman!

Picked up this delightful book for next to nothing from a remainder shop today.  Japanese Batman!  The lettering (kanaing?  Kanjiing?) has of course been Englished, but there are plenty of reproductions of covers and adverts and miscellanea from the 60s Batman boom in Japan to amuse me.

Poor Robin, he looks unhappy.

I like the spare, simple look of this.

299 days to go to the JLPT.  (I'm not going to be counting backwards every bloody day from now on, but I do want to keep track of how many days I have left if I am going to seriously target the December exam.)

JLPT again

The December JLPT didn't happen last year.  Well, it happened, but not for me: the planned concerted throwing-myself-at-the-books never really got going.  I might have a go at it this year; I notice that today is day 38 of the year and Sunday December 2nd this year is day 337, so I have 300 days, if I include what's left of today, to prepare for it.

I haven't been totally idle recently; been doing quite a lot of listening to Japanese radio stations and am starting to be able to spot verb endings and postpositions.  There's a hell of a lot more to listening comprehension than that, but it's a start.  If there's any one thing I'm likely to screw up in a language exam it's listening comprehension, so I know I really need to get cracking on this.

For all that I 'want' to learn Japanese intensively, I find myself not getting very much study done.  Thinking about what a fine thing it would be to have studied the language to a high level turns out to be more fun than actually doing the studying.  I know the ends that I want but the means are too much like hard work.  Khatz, of the excellent AJATT site, has a lot of useful stuff to say about this sort of thing.