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

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.

Hehe, I’m becoming rather obsessed with language at the moment. It can only be a good thing, considering my final year project is, after all, a language learning tool (well, a library with several prototype interfaces). I think I can allow myself to spend a day doing exactly what I want to do every once in a while, as long as I do my work eventually.

1. Read news (/., BBC News, OS News, etc.) for two hours
2. Shower, eat, etc.
3. Read some of Beginning Syntax
4. Go to the library to borrow The French Experience (BBC book on the subject of the French language) and Understanding Semantics
5. Read a chapter of The French Experience and a chapter of Beginning Syntax for about three hours (I’m thinking more and more about the similarities between human languages and computer languages - that is, languages designed as an interface between humans and machines - I’m not especially interested in assembly or byte-code)
6. Talk to Davina while mostly reading a resource I found today: Nihongoresources - grammar - an excellent book that teaches Japanese grammar using the Japanese terms (I still don’t know which verb group (I or II) corresponds to 一段 and 五段, and I don’t care to)
7. And now it’s nearly midnight. Bonne nuit!

This post I’m translating from English to Japanese.

このポストに英語から日本語に訳します。

I made a release of KLookup! The second release. Aptly named 0.2 (the first release was called 2006-11-26).

KLookupをリリースでしたよ！二番のリリースだから0.2と呼びます（一番は2006-11-26と呼びました）。

KLookup is my fabulous final year project. It’s coming along really well.

KLookupは俺のすばらしい最後の年のプロジェクトです。中々上達しています。

The easiest way to install it is (with RubyGems):

優しい方法は（RubyGemsで）：

gem install klookup

Also, you can check it out via Subversion:

だって、Subversionでもチェックオウトできます。

This release (このリリース): svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/klookup/tags/REL_0.2 klookup-0.2

The trunk (幹？トランク？胴体？分かりません！): svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/klookup/trunk klookup

KLookup comes up as the only result for kanji on RubyForge, which is somewhat interesting due to a slight Japanese focus of Ruby in general. It’s quite possible that this sort of tool just wouldn’t be particularly useful to the average Japanese person who’s completed twelve years of education and maybe university.

kanjiを探せばKLookupは只一つの答え。それは面白いとおもいます、Rubyはちょっと日本に中心するから。もしかしてこんな道具は役に立ちませんかな、なみの十二年間の学校や大学校を受けた日本人に。

Ugh. I really need to make a blog CMS myself soon…one that is language-aware.

ああ、もう早いに言語を気がついてるブログCMSを作らなければ成りませんなぁ。