Army Language School

Interesting documentary here (various formats) about US Army language training, circa 1953 (date guessed from the reference to the Korean War peace talks at Panmunjom).  I felt relieved for the class that had had the good fortune to be selected for Korean, which at least has a very rational writing system... but then we see them later down the line writing hanja, which were not as officially defunct then as they are now.  Armies know what they want from linguist-soldiers, and are good at getting it; and since learning a language is better than square-bashing or being shot at, the students tend to be well-motivated against the threat of having to drop out.  Forty-something weeks to full fluency is pretty impressive.

Anthony Burgess in one of his books on language debunks the myth that the British are rubbish at foreign languages: we can be good at them when there's a specific financial imperative, such as a proficiency bar in the old Colonial Service.  He inevitably claimed to have been brilliant: I passed my Standard One at distinction level after three months of instruction.  This did not make me popular among my fellow-expatriates.  I went on to pass my Standard Two in less than a year, a Federation record.  This made me hated.  Before leaving Malaya I took the optional Standard Three examination, all hard Arabic and Sanskrit loanwords and scrawled Jawi, which conferred a bonus.  This made me worse hated, but I did not care.  (From the not-always-believable "Little Wilson and Big God").  Memoirs and biographies of old Colonial characters such as George Orwell (who mastered several local languages when out in Burma) show that as a country we're not inherently rubbish at languages.

Benny interviewed in Irish

here - interesting for me to try to match up the audio with the English subtitles.

The only Irish textbook I have to hand is Teach Yourself Irish by Myles Dillon and Donncha Ó Cróinín, 1992 reprint of 1961 edition.  The exercises fully support Benny's contention that although Irish is certainly not a dead language, it can often be taught as though it were one.  A pall of hard-working gloom hangs over far too many of the sentences.  "We had six barrels of herring to bring home".  "Four sevens are twenty-eight, two shillings and fourpence".  "We shall all die, but we do not know when or where".  "It is a great pity that she is so tall".  Ireland comes across as a land of turf, death and rain.  Of course, with vocabulary you have to start somewhere, and it's depressing to come across language primers that try too hard to be trendy and yoof-oriented, but it's a good job that it's possible to tune into stations like Raidió na Life and hear something that sounds encouragingly like real life, like fun, but in the target language.

The issue of school language courses that take you, over a period of several years, pretty much nowhere towards fluency or even bare usefulness, is something else that I'll address another day.

Obenkyo for Android

Just installed it on my phone and it looks like a nice little tool for learning and drilling kanji, kana and vocabulary.  I had browsed the Android store for Japanese-learning stuff but had overlooked this for some reason; was finally directed to it by a comment on this thread on Charles Stross's blog.  Chances are of course that it'll turn out to be just another very useful thing that I don't actually use.  We shall see.

One thing my Android phone is useful for is listening to interesting radio while out and about; I frequently listen to Ban Ban Radio (Kakogawa) or FM West Tokyo when I'm going somewhere.  I rarely understand much but can at least make out syllables and particles, which is a start.

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.)