An Introduction To Written Japanese by PG O'Neill and S Yanada

A charity-shop bargain at £2.49.  O'Neill and Yanada were both at the School of Oriental and African Studies: O'Neill was responsible for the still-famous A Reader of Handwritten Japanese (reproductions of letters sent to him over the years, of varying linguistic difficulty and readability, with translations and in some cases Hepburn romanizations), and Yanada was the co-author of the kunrei-siki romanized 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese that I've got 10 chapters, out of 30, into on a few occasions.

The current volume was first published in 1963 and I have the fifth printing from 1990.  It's a nice little paperback the same dimensions as the little hardback Teach Yourself Japanese, and actually it's a companion volume to that: it contains 20 lessons that are supposed to be used in conjunction with the romanized text.  The kana are dealt with at the very start, then each lesson introduces you to some characters with specified readings, then there are some example sentences (vertical handwriting, which is doubly unusual for a beginners' text), a kunrei-siki romanization, and grammatical notes.  English translations are at the back.  There's not much grammar explanation so Teach Yourself Japanese, or an acceptable substitute, really is necessary.

Looks as though this is now out of print, presumably since almost everyone now uses Hepburn.  I'm fond of the old Teach Yourself Japanese in spite of my many failures to get through it and its antiquated romanization: I might well have a go at it again in conjunction with this book, which is quite an ambitious volume (it gets as far as introducing the old kana usage, which I suppose was less of an historical curio 50 years ago than it is today).  On completing it, the beginner should be able to "... meet with success in most encounters with the written language".  Which is nice if true.  I like books that tell you they're going to get you to a useful level in finite time; it's what you're probably looking for, after all.

In other news: an augmented-reality app for Japanese youngsters to let them get something out of newspapers that they can't read.  Must be frustrating to be a young person barred by a complicated writing system from reading above one's level.

Eulingu

I idly clicked on the little-noticed 'Next Blog' link at the top of this blog (reminds me of the days of webrings; remember those?) and it took me here.  Eulingu is an conlang of the eclectic auxlang variety, a melange of lots of European languages.  As such it's pretty easy to read if you have a smattering of a few languages.  There's a short account of its background here.

All the modern Euro-conlangs (Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua etc) look pretty much the same to me, though if my Romance and Germanic languages were better no doubt I'd have a better eye for how they differ in what they've borrowed and what they've jettisoned.

Great New Yorker article on a conlang

spotted here on Metafilter.

Hyperpolyglot videos

Nice Canadian news item here on hyperpolyglots, with quite a few faces familiar from the language blogroll (Richard Simcott, Steve Kaufmann).  Also: Benny gets the polyglots singing.

Stopping and starting

Have been stopping and starting a lot of things this year without actually completing very much.  Japanese, Chinese, French, German.  All stuff that I've tinkered with many times in the past.  It's a destructive habit as it means I'm surrounded with reminders of unfinished projects, and re-starting is always a dismal reminder of a previous failure.  I get very enthusiastic about things for about three days—I'm a classic three-day monk—then it tails off rather rapidly.  I was really keen on getting my French up to scratch a week or two ago, wasn't I?

Jana Fadness has recently posted on the subject of Just Do Something; ie, don't be paralysed by choices.  Paralysis by choices seems a particular danger for Japanese learners, as there are several different and apparently legitimate ways to go about it.  Work through a romanised introductory book, or use a kana text?  Learn all the kanji first of all using Heisig?  Perhaps go further and even do the readings of the kanji too before doing anything else?  Stick to audio until the conversational language is mastered?  Try to do everything at once?  A lot of choices.

Le Figaro

Bought a copy of Le Figaro yesterday and read about 75% of it with about 75% understanding, which isn't bad; didn't bother with a dictionary, just ploughed on.  I tend to feel daftly guilty when skipping bits I don't understand in a foreign-language text, as though I'm wasting a resource.  I have to try to remember that I'm never actually going to run out of foreign stuff to read!  The Internet exists now!

I linked the other day to that Helen DeWitt article on reading Proust in French; it's something I wouldn't mind trying if my French got good enough - I'd want to read it in English first, but it'd be interesting to reread it in the original, trying to cling on but using the English as a crib when necessary.  A long-term goal.

Documentary on the Michel Thomas method

That documentary I linked to yesterday, in three parts starting here, is worth watching - 1997 (it seems) BBC documentary on his method.  None of it will be surprising to anyone who has tried using the Michel Thomas Method CDs that came out afterwards, but apparently the Method was very much a secret back then.  Startled to see Leo Marks, cryptographic maven for the wartime Special Operations Executive, chipping in with praise.  (Marks's memoir Between Silk And Cyanide is one of the very best books I've ever read).  Thomas is pickier than most British teachers would be on the matter of pronunciation, but then he has to be - nobody's writing anything down so the sounds are all that anyone has.  I'm embarrassed that I've tried and failed a few times to learn the IPA and understand that two-dimensional chart you put the vowels on, but to me languages really means books, not sounds.  And avoiding French orthography saves you a lot of time and worry; far too much of my school French was taken up with getting verb endings right that in fact all sound the same; they're just spelling rules of no interest if you're trying to get to conversational competence.

Someone will eventually 'gamify' language learning successfully and make a fortune out of it.  As someone who loves maths but dislikes combinatorics it always astonishes me that people who 'hate numbers' (their own words) can get pleasurably addicted to hardest-possible Sudoku.  There's a lot of psychology about challenge and feedback and sense of achievement that's only being uncovered right now in the games industry.