"There's another train / there always is / maybe the next one is yours / get up and climb aboard"

Some language instruction books are so careless in their proofreading. For example, The Handbook of Japanese Verbs by Taeko Kamiya, sample sentence 2.23.3 reads Kare ga atarashii kikai o hatsumei suru ka dô ka wakarimasen, meaning "I can't tell whether he will invent a new machine or not." Clearly, atarashii kikai ("new machine") was supposed to be jikikai ("time machine").

You'd think publishers would be more sensitive to the needs of time travelers -- even leaving aside the problems of including all the tenses.


While I'm on the subject of Japanese, an AKICOLJ question: Is there a simple rule, or even a complicated but memorizable one, for which pronounciation to give numbers in a given context? A way to predict that 七日 (seventh day) is nanoka but 七月 (seventh month) is shichigatsu?

(Leaving aside why nanoka instead of nanaka, as combinatorics is clearly an advanced topic.)

---L.

"There's another train / there always is / maybe the next one is yours / get up and climb aboard"

Some language instruction books are so careless in their proofreading. For example, The Handbook of Japanese Verbs by Taeko Kamiya, sample sentence 2.23.3 reads Kare ga atarashii kikai o hatsumei suru ka dô ka wakarimasen, meaning "I can't tell whether he will invent a new machine or not." Clearly, atarashii kikai ("new machine") was supposed to be jikikai ("time machine").

You'd think publishers would be more sensitive to the needs of time travelers -- even leaving aside the problems of including all the tenses.


While I'm on the subject of Japanese, an AKICOLJ question: Is there a simple rule, or even a complicated but memorizable one, for which pronounciation to give numbers in a given context? A way to predict that 七日 (seventh day) is nanoka but 七月 (seventh month) is shichigatsu?

(Leaving aside why nanoka instead of nanaka, as combinatorics is clearly an advanced topic.)

---L.