small milestone

[piranha]

today i translated my first page of manga. and no, it wasn't one of the pages with a lot of "a...h" and "n...h". :) though it had only a minimum of kanji, since i know so few. i hadn't actually planned on it, but i got sucked into a story that has only had a chapter scanlated, whch ended on a cliffhanger, so i got my hands on the raw and tried to make sense of it. this bloody raw doesn't have furigana, so i am not planning to carry on with it; it'd frustrate me in no time. it took hours just to do three pages with very little actual text. but i resolved the cliffhanger and can now sleep well.

i'm glad i listened to so many drama CDs lately. knowing the sound of words even if i don't know how they're written really helps when translating -- i have to painstakingly sound out the kana syllable by syllable (yes, i move my lips), and then suddenly! it makes a phrase i know! なんでもない was the first one that gave me a "eureka" feeling.

this stage of foreign language acquisition is generally a royal pain because i don't recognize any patterns yet, and i am generally such a pattern matcher, and rely on it hugely for reading in all languages in which i am fluent, *sigh*. but to get the mere inkling of a pattern is a thrill.

i'm tickled a bright electric blue. :)

Comments

Re: language acquisition

[daev.livejournal.com]

but learning any language takes most of all a lot of practice, and the sort of monomaniacal immersion thing i do speeds that up.

Yeah. I remember once saying in frustration (while surrounded by linguistics polyglots), "I wish I could just learn to speak a language without having to get a crush on it and take it to bed!" There are people out there who can acquire the ability to communicate in Turkish, for instance, without turning themselves into fanatic Turkophiles for years.

Re: language acquisition

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i can learn languages that way; i did it with english and french. but aside from the factor that it keeps more of your life free for other obsessions, it's nowhere as much FUN. and it takes sooooo long.

funny that you said "take it to bed", *heh*. i currently have ... *goes to count* ... 7 books in my bed that deal with things japanese (only one is a manga). plus my mp3 player which has a japanese drama CD in it.