"You are only coming through in waves / your lips move but I cannot hear what you're saying"

[larryhammer]

Six things about studying Japanese -- another installment in an occasional series. Feel free to skip these if they bore you. Feel free also to correct what get wrong.

1. As I come across useful words, I like using them to try translating classic dialogue: "Nanseki kyuujosen ka?" "Aranai." "Kazoeta ka?" "Nido." Which is probably an unidiomatic if not outright ungrammatical rendering of "How many lifeboats are there?" "None." "Did you count them?" "Twice."* But it still amuses me.
   
   
2. It's also fun to imagine the alternate universe in which sample sentences from language textbooks are normal and natural statements to make. Head 'splody, for it would be as weird a universe to live in as one where, say, phlogiston theory is correct, but fun.
   
   
3. Speaking of sentences from textbooks, this one has me puzzled: Fuyu wa kono heya wa samukarou. ("This room is probably cold in winter") I thought you could have only have one topic marker per simple sentence. What's happening here that I'm not grasping? Or should the second wa be ga, marking "room" as the subject?
   
   
4. My local megausedbookstore has a nicely large case of Japanese language books. Because of this, I now know it currently takes me several minutes with dictionary in hand to work through a page of a dumb shounen battle manga. This is a vast, if slow, improvement over a few months ago, when it would have taken me several more milliseconds to work out that, oh look, there's pictures.
   
   
5. OTOH, I've progressed enough to even think about attempting to write this. Lame and ungrammatical, but I wrote it.
   
   
6. As for those without-relative-pronouns-piled-up-in-front-like-a-phrasal-adjective relative clauses, I need to practice parsing. A lot of practice.

Also, I'll be at WFC this weekend. If I don't already know you'll be there too, give a holler and we can try to get together.


* For one thing, surely Zaphod would use a more emphatic particle than ka, though I don't know what's available -- ka zo maybe?

** Volume two of a Medabots spinoff that's unlicensed for a reason, if you really want to know. I have what appears to be a standard-issue one-volume older shoujo romance waiting in the wings when I run out of patience with this.

---L.