Holizz versus the Web

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.

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!

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.

I just found the worst kind of bug one can find while unit testing: a caterpillar. In my bowl.

Then I looked through the broccoli to make sure there weren’t any more… and ewwwwww!

Two boiled caterpillars in one bowl is too much for me. Eww. Really, just eww. I don’t feel like eating so much anymore.

P.S.: Firefox’s dictionary didn’t seem to include the word “anymore”, so I Googled it, and found that ocurrances of “anymore” are almost twice that of “any more”. I also found an interesting article on the subject which notes differences in usage between British and American English.