Tai otoshi

Watched a little bit of the Olympic Judo on iPlayer yesterday; the commentator mentioned a Tai otoshi.  I haven't heard anyone mention that throw since I stopped my very brief experiment with Judo 30 years ago.  Odd to think that I used to have a vocabulary of Japanese Judo terms in my head, almost all of which I've now forgotten.

Pictures from China, and Russian books

Listening to this programme featuring Robert Bickers whose Empire Made Me is a fascinating look at Shanghai in the 20s and 30s.  It's a very BBC thing to do, to make a radio programme about old photographs, but it works very well.  I'll have to have another proper crack at Chinese some time, but at the moment I've got distracted with reading Russian again.  Having returned to it after a long break I find that I'm much more confident at ploughing through texts and trying to guess meanings from context.  I've been looking at this archive of inter-war emigré magazines and journals, some of which is in the pre-1918 spelling (not at all difficult once you get used to it).  On the Russian Wikisource site there's this nice old encyclopaedia (transliterated into the new spelling, but there are links to page images in the old spelling on the Russian State Library website).  I'm not short of stuff to read.  Plan for the near future: keep reading, keep flicking through lists of vocabulary too (particularly verbs, which have always been my weak point: I'll remember one aspect and not the other), and try to get fluent.  I'll still listen to Russian radio occasionally but it's good reading comprehension that I most want.

Lists of kanji, and draw-and-recognise sites

Soon after posting yesterday I wondered why on earth I'd forgotten that there's a precomposed a-with-tilde at U+00E3, which reminded me to mention:

• Shapecatcher which lets you draw a Unicode character (not a Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyph, unfortunately), and it will try to match it to the right code point;
• Mouse Chinese Input Method - draw a Chinese character and it will try to recognize it and give translation/pronunciation;
• List of Jooyoo Kanji on Wikipedia: very useful if you remember characters by their Heisig names; you can click on a table heading to alter display order to by-number-of-strokes, which is useful for looking up unfamiliar kanji;
• Kanji Information on Jim Breen's site: lists of Heisig keywords, all 3007 Heisig kanji, old and new kanji shapes;
• Detexify, which allows you to draw anything and it will try to match it to a LaTeX symbol.

 

Men In Black

I had seen James Heisig, creator of the famous kanji-memorization technique, referred to a few times on the web with 'Fr' before his name, and a bit of digging confirms that he is indeed a Catholic priest, ordained in 1969 if this document is anything to go by, and a member of the Divine Word Missionaries (hence the SVD that sometimes appears after his name).  Given that the Heisig technique is one of the most-discussed learning methods for the Japanese language, it's odd that I've gone a few years mucking around with the language before discovering this rather basic biographical fact about the man.

On my to-read list at the moment is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, the story of the encounter between the author (a missionary) and the Pirahã, an Amazonian people with a language and worldview that have been argued about a hell of a lot over the years.  (See the tilde over the 'a' at the end there?  I went to the effort of finding out the Unicode point for a combining tilde, just to get the tribe's name right.  Don't say I never give you anything.)

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.