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.

Japanese biscuit ads from the 70s

A charming vision of what English (I presume) life was thought to be like.

The gender of the TARDIS

Via, a glorious video of the construction of a foldable and transportable TARDIS by a talented young German lady.  She refers to the TARDIS as 'she', for which there is extensive precedent in the series (I remember Fourth Doctor calling the TARDIS 'old girl' early in the Ian Marter novelization of The Ribos Operation, just after Romana had cut a hole in the console).  And the TARDIS is a ship, and ships are female.  Still, this was enough to send me to the Wikipedia entry to see what gender the TARDIS has in languages other than English.  A few of the languages that have TARDIS articles:

•     Català - El TARDIS (M)
•     Česky - "Byla ukradena z Gallifrey" means 'it was stolen from Gallifrey', I think, with 'byla' having a feminine preterite ending; hence (F)
•     Deutsch - Die TARDIS (F)
•     Español - La TARDIS (F)
•     Français - Le TARDIS (M)
•     Italiano - Il TARDIS (M)
•     Русский - " ТАРДИС вернулась" is 'the TARDIS returned', I think, with feminine preterite reflexive-verb ending.  (F)

I've always vaguely wondered how newly-coined or newly-imported words get assigned a gender in those languages where gender can't be inferred from the word's ending...  Interesting how Spanish has TARDIS as M whereas Catalan, French and Italian have it as F.

Polyglottery

Interesting article here.  (Via).  Always good to see that there are others whose primary interest in languages is being able to read them rather than to speak them.  This may be The Wrong Way To Look At Language Learning but it's my attitude, mostly.

Immersion and insanity

Total immersion in the target language right from the start; according to many successful learners, that's the thing.  Throw yourself right in at the deep end and don't read, watch, listen to, anything in English at all.  Make yourself a native by changing your desktop language and locale to the target language, and read web pages only in the target language.

It's a seductive idea and I wish I were able to try it out, but the fact is that I love being able to read and even though I want very much to be able to read in Japanese and various other foreign languages, I'm not able to sacrifice the pleasure of reading English.  Looking at a wall of text that I can't comprehend at all is so immensely frustrating as to be a definite turn-off for the learning process: I'd rather be reading a textbook, in English, about the conjugation of adjectives or sentence-final particles.  I'd rather be doing anything else than immersion: I can't stick at it at all.

Something similar applies to languages where I have an intermediate reading ability: I can read French and Russian after a fashion, but it's so much slower and more frustrating than reading in English that my attention wanders.  If I force myself I can continue doing it, but it's still work, in a way that reading English has never been for me.

Clearly for foreign-language reading there's for every learner a productive level of frustration, a sweet spot where you're having to work at reading but not hard enough that it becomes a tedious slog.  The stuff about tadoku that I read last year comes to mind... perhaps I need to just immerse myself in pitifully easy stuff for a month or two.  Or do I need to just grow a thicker skin and be resigned to the fact that reading Japanese will be very frustrating for a long time, and learn to live with it? We shall see.

As for non-written media: I can listen to audio that I don't understand quite happily; I feel that it's instructive for getting the sounds and rhythms of the language but I'm pessimistic about the chances of actually gaining comprehension ability that way.  I've always been poor at listening to foreign languages.  Subtitled films are a pleasure; again, the incomprehensible audio isn't a problem and perhaps it's useful but it's not going to give me useful comphrehension any time soon.