Holizz versus the Web

今日、先生とアクセントの練習した。成功だった。やっとアクセントが聞いて繰り返せる！このアクセントと言うページで聞いて繰り返してすぐに覚えた。

嬉しい。やっと聞こえてきた。

I’m blogging more and more in Japanese because it’s a fun and creative way to improve my Japanese. We get far too little homework in Japanese classes, and I’m taking two years/levels at once. If you can’t read it and want to, either recommend a good WordPress plugin that allows for translations (jLanguage doesn’t appear to work), recommend another free CMS that handles language better, or learn Japanese. (I’d recommend learning Japanese, it’s fun).

Which reminds me, I have a recipe to finish translating (it’s quite tricky) for year three tonight - I may stick it and the original in my bilingual /food/ section when I’m done. And all my homework for Tuesday’s lesson is done, but for a letter we had to get the gist of and answer two questions on I’ve composed a draft reply (which contains a small discussion on an interesting essay I read on the topic of cute culture entitled Cuties in Japan) which I may finish off and copy out. And the other piece of homework for Tuesday was a letter to a newspaper promoting my town, for which I chose to write about London instead. It was rather interesting, and I composed the whole thing on paper with only a few bits of crossing out (much better than what happens when I compose English essays on paper - I still don’t know how to compose long pieces of text without moving large sections around).

I started out apologising for not using enough English and ended up talking all about Japanese. Ah well. Can’t be helped, eh?

I just realised that I spelt recipe correctly in the paragraph before last, without noticing. I wonder if the sky would fall if English were written using the IPA. It would certainly make things easier from one perspective, but perhaps it would end up being as difficult to read as Japanese written using only kana.

ノード・ユア・ホームワーク

Write a short letter to the newspaper to promote your town.

訳：新聞へのあなたの町の首唱の短い手紙を書け。

私の町だとうー？ロンドンの方は良いと思うから今の町の変わりにしょ来の都市を説明したら悪くないでしょう。じゃ、行くよ…

ロンドンは英国の首都ですからとても大きいです。実はロンドン市は2.6km²ですけど大ロンドンは1580km²です。大好きです。なぜなら、すごい広いし、かなり込んでいるし（込んでいる方が良いと思いますよ）、店が一杯あるし、博物館も一杯あります。日本の店がありますから日本語の本や新聞の買う事が出来ます。日本語の勉強のために読める本や読めない本が必要です。所で、ロンドンのジャパンイーズミートアップは毎週だし百人位が行くらしいです。つまりブラッドフォードは最悪でロンドンは最高です。

富夢

Time for an English lesson from Doctor Tom!

1. BBC News: Woman shot dead by police
2. In my head: They’re always shooting dead people
3. In my head: I mean, they’re always shooting people dead

Let’s look at some phrases:

I just thought of an interesting phrase with two parsings: The tyres were shot - the tyres were (past tense, active voice) in the state of being “shot” (in poor condition), or - somebody shot the tyres (past tense, passive voice).

What fun!

ん、ロンドンへ行った。楽しかった。よく迷っちゃった。

ロンドンへ引っ越すつもりなので仕事や家を探しに行った。

火曜日は…忙しかった。Guardian Summer Graduate Fairに行って会社の人と話した。楽しかったといくことでもなく詰まらなかったといくこどでもない。会社の情報を一杯集めた。晩に二つ家にみに行った。一つ目は安くて駅から遠かった。二つ目は一つ目より高くて駅から近くてハウスメートが優しかった。

水曜日はひまだった。まずはピカディリーのJapan Centre。レストランの新装のようだった、二階の本屋も変わった、でも地下の食品の店はあまり変わらなかった。本屋で以下を買った：

何買ったって？もちろん、日本語の本を一杯買った。

• 風の谷のナウシカ１（漫画！）・好きな映画だもの漫画を読みたかった
• 昨日の朝日新聞
• まんが日本昔ばなし／Once Upon a Time in Japan（対訳）
• インストール・ソフトのインストールの小説のようだがまだ読んでない、電子計算機の術語は得意だし読み難そうし

読み難いと読みやすい本を一杯買った。大成功！私、帰る時に家を出る時より本があると成功だと思う。

そして、Waterstonesで和英英和辞書（Oxford Japanese Minidictionary）を買った。ローマ字がないし、かなと漢字があるし、コンサイスだし、常用の言葉が一杯あるし（そう言えば調ぶと「concise」がなかった）。それより小さいからかばんに入れる。これで旅行をしながら勉強できる。

勉強の本を買いたくなかった。すげぇ高かったから。でも普通な本を読むとすぐ読みやすくなるはずだ。

ある時、電車のドアが閉まりながら電車に乗って刺さってしまった。ドアがああという間に強かった。結局無事で乗った。一度やったからもうやる気が無い。

I am slowly becoming literate in Japanese. It’s great fun, because I can put what I use to use straight away by reading news stories and comics.

At this very moment I am at the 42nd character of the characters one would learn in the fourth year of Japanese middle school (教育漢字の第四学年). I’m still using my great tool, and occasionally adding improvements. I’ve nearly finished my fifty characters for today, which I will later go over again, and probably add the ones I’ve forgotten to a file, which I can then stick in the list/ directory in my tool and I can revise them at a later date.

I started the fifty-a-day policy on Wednesday (the day after my final exam), and I’ve kept to it. I finished the third year in four days. Of the 200 characters I only stuck 25 into a file for more practice (and some of those I can read in context). Not bad, eh? I’m really pleased with myself. Who cares about humility (遠慮《えんりょ》) when you’re learning things, I covered 200 characters in four days and I’m proud. According to my diary, I will have finished the middle school characters by the sixth of the sixth (that’s June). Then that’ll be 1,006 characters. Maybe I’ll have to set my sights on something higher than 日本語能力試験 (JLPT) level 3, because I’ve well surpassed the 300 characters needed for that level. Once I’ve done the upper school kanji, and perhaps the people name kanji, I should be on track for level 1, at least in terms of kanji.

Doing rough calculations, I should be able to learn 9,000 characters before the JLPT exam, which is well above the number of characters covered in any Japanese national coded character set (6,349 in JIS X 0208:1997), and approximately half the number of characters in China’s GBK (source: CJKV Information Processing, Ken Lunde, aka 小林剣 - I want a copy of that book). And apparently, I could learn all the Chinese characters in the Universal Character Set, (Unicode Version 4.0 and ISO 10646-1:2000, that’s 70,207), it would take me just under 4 years (and a further 1.5 years to learn the remainder of the UCS, 96,382 characters).

English month name gaiden [外伝 (がいでん) (n) supplementary biography; anecdote;]:

I only have to count the months on my fingers (that’s BSL - one-handed counting) if it’s five or greater and the month in question isn’t next month or the month after. Sometimes I make mistakes and end up with December as the eleventh month, and I have to start again. I’ve never gotten on with the month names in English, especially since I discovered that there used to be ten or something - thus October and December being plus two their root numerals.

ほら：漢字表ツールで〜す！

これで簡単に漢字を勉強出来ます。昨日、このようのソフトで一杯勉強しました。今日、この新しいソフトで一杯勉強しました。

これはPythonなのでこのサーバで出来ます。

どう？便利？使いました？バグありました？メールしてくれませんか？

Look: Kanji Display Tool!

With this, you can easily study kanji. Yesterday I used something like this to study a lot. Today, I used this new tool to do a load of studying.

This is Python, so it works on this server.

So? Useful? Used it? Found a bug? Won’t you email me?

With one and a half hours until my final year project viva (presentation/demonstration/Q&A - I hadn’t heard the word before this project), I’ve just created a new study tool (in about ten minutes).

It takes a file of characters as input, and prints the meanings, which you then ponder about, and then you hopefully write the correct character down. Then if you want to check, you can uncomment the line that prints the character itself.

require 'rubygems'
require 'klookup'

include KLookup::Lookup

list = []

open('kyouiku3') { |f|
  f.read.each_char { |c|
    if Kanji.exist?(c)
      list << Kanji.new(c)
    end
  }
}

list.each {|k|
  20.times { print '-' }
  puts
#  print k
  puts "t" + k.meaning.join("nt")
}

You’ll need the KLookup library (gem install klookup). And some kanji: try Wikipedia’s 学年別漢字配当表 (kanji lists separated by school year).

I wrote the above before my viva. Now it’s after my viva.

I feel it went well, but my project tutor had to be very supportive and he showed the other lecturer a lot of things, like the ChangeLog (1179 lines, wow), and auxiliary code like the Rakefile, and such. The general impression I got was that I didn’t communicate well enough in the report, and I completely neglected to mention a lot of work I’d done. But it’s all over now. No more university in the immediate future.

I read an interesting article by the BBC on proposed changes to the language curriculum (i.e. starting foreign languages in primary school).

Some of the comments noted that after a GCSE in a foreign language most kids can’t even have a conversation. That was certainly true in my case. I spent a couple of pre-GCSE years studying French, and one year pre-GCSE and two GCSE years studying German and I didn’t have anything to show for it (yet I still came out with a C in German). I certainly didn’t have the confidence to use German at all when I had a trip to Berlin right after my GCSEs (but that was possibly due to shyness, not lack of proficiency).

And after one year of Japanese at evening classes (and a little more studying over the Summer holidays) I started the Tandem Learning Scheme (language exchange) and I was able to hold short conversations. Also note that I’m maybe six years older than when I took my GCSEs so my capacity for learning back then was immeasurably larger than it is now.