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... when two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth.
One thing about textbooks of classical Japanese is that instead of making up their examples, they take sentences from the voluminous public-domain corpus, thus making the people who inhabit them doubly foreign* but not from some alternate reality. This does not reduce the amusement factor, however, as the corpus includes Heike Monogatari, the home of such snippets as Shinaba issho de shinan ("If we are going to die, let us die in one place") and Yoritomo ga kubi o hanete, waga haka no mae ni kakubeshi ("Cut off Yoritomo's head and hang it in front of my grave") and Yoroi yokereba urakakazu ("Because the armor was good, it did not pierce through to the back").
<pauses to admire a language that has a verb meaning "to pierce through to the back">
Now if they'd only used sentences like these in, say, my 8th grade Spanish textbook ...
Another bonus to using real examples: sometimes you get explications of thorny sentences from things you're trying to learn how to read.**
* The past being a foreign country, the past of a foreign country is doubly foreign.
** Not Heike, in this case, but the easier*** Kokinshu.
*** The language of poetry may be compressed, but it (almost) completely lacks honorific forms, which were even more complicated a thousand years ago. This is very much FTW here.
---L.
One thing about textbooks of classical Japanese is that instead of making up their examples, they take sentences from the voluminous public-domain corpus, thus making the people who inhabit them doubly foreign* but not from some alternate reality. This does not reduce the amusement factor, however, as the corpus includes Heike Monogatari, the home of such snippets as Shinaba issho de shinan ("If we are going to die, let us die in one place") and Yoritomo ga kubi o hanete, waga haka no mae ni kakubeshi ("Cut off Yoritomo's head and hang it in front of my grave") and Yoroi yokereba urakakazu ("Because the armor was good, it did not pierce through to the back").
<pauses to admire a language that has a verb meaning "to pierce through to the back">
Now if they'd only used sentences like these in, say, my 8th grade Spanish textbook ...
Another bonus to using real examples: sometimes you get explications of thorny sentences from things you're trying to learn how to read.**
* The past being a foreign country, the past of a foreign country is doubly foreign.
** Not Heike, in this case, but the easier*** Kokinshu.
*** The language of poetry may be compressed, but it (almost) completely lacks honorific forms, which were even more complicated a thousand years ago. This is very much FTW here.
---L.