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

[larryhammer]

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.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I still think The Intergalactic Traveler's Guide to [Language] would make an excellent series, especially if us earthies really could learn the languages in question from it, too.

The Time Traveler's Guide could maybe be a sequel, covering more tenses ...

[larryhammer]

"Keep in mind that Earthlings are viviparous, and this affects all their social structures."

---L.