back from hiatus

[piranha]

after taking a break for a while, i am going to be reading LJ again, but i think i've finally got to start using filters for groups of people, because it now regularly becomes too much, and then i have to stop entirely for a while. damn.

of course it doesn't help when i decide to look at my profile (which i only do once in a blue moon when i think i should change something) and discover i've been friended by new-to-LJ snigglers, and then trawl their profiles and find more snigglers that i didn't notice before. so now there's more people to read: betonica and offcenter_wc and masaiwarrior and owned_by_2_cats and la_penguinita (who friended me ages ago, but whom i didn't then recognize because I AM A RETARD -- the paramour recognized her handle right away). the paramour, who is unfortunately much more easily missed here than on usenet, is mayaknife, in case anyone wants to read zir obnoxious posts.

i still can't figure out who lynn_massa is. is that just more evidence of my retardation, or does she post-date my ssm participation?

*moves snigglers to default daily filter*.

my life remains very quiet, which is a good thing. this june has been the nicest i can remember for a long time; warm enough to wear tshirts but never too hot, and lots and lots of rain or just overcast days. the hermit is happy. i am not growing any new annuals this year, so no vegetables either -- the landlord said he'd bring a backhoe in to dig a ditch at the property line, and that carries a high risk of destroying my small vegetable beds, so i am sparing myself potential grief by not even getting started. everything in the front, and the memorial gardenlet is well-established perennial or self-seeding annual, so i've not done anything but weed. yay. the fruits of hard labour in prior years finally -- i've moved so much before living here that this rarely happened, so it's cool to enjoy it now. i've convinced the landlord not to take the apple tree down; i hope that works with the back hoe. it'll probably lose some branches, but i don't care as long as the main shade remains.

i've been sleeping better since banning the cats from my room, but it's still not good; i remain tired pretty much all the time. i am sorta dreading summer because heat will make it worse. but then i've also told myself that it's not really predictable, so maybe this time i'll sleep great when it's hot outside. *snrk*.

still monomaniacal about japanese. it's fun to rewatch anime now that i had watched before starting to seriously learn japanese; i do actually understand significantly more now, even though it's still mostly single words and sentence fragments instead of entire sentences. learning how to conjugate verbs has made a huge difference. i am very slow to acquire vocabulary due to the depression-related memory dysfunction; i have to look up a word many times before it sinks in, but i am determined not to let that stop me even though it frustrates me to the point of tears at times. i'm going to try and write vocab down by hand as well as typing it into my own dictionary list; that might help anchor it better.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Zorinth is also learning Japanese -- well, mostly just the alphabet so far.

learning japanese

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

syllabary. :) (two of them, or really three if one counts the romanization many seem to learn as well for wordprocessing). good for him! i am having a total blast; i hope he's having as much fun with it. has he found the IME yet? (that's microsoft's input editor for funky foreign languages; it's actually pretty neat.)

[firecat]

it's fun to rewatch anime now that i had watched before starting to seriously learn japanese; i do actually understand significantly more now, even though it's still mostly single words and sentence fragments instead of entire sentences.

Isn't that fun? I'm so glad I took the time to work through the full set of Pimsleur tapes (although the verb forms in them bear no resemblance to the verb forms used in most anime)

verb forms

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh yeah? i've never listened to pimsleur. maybe it's because formal education hugely stresses polite language, while most anime/drama (at least what i am watching and listening to) features people who're on more intimate terms; they're at least friends (or possibly enemies, which also changes the language), or even lovers. and they speak in the vernacular, which features more contractions than formal language. i really notice when polite language is used because it's rare in my smut study materials.

but i do recognize the basic verb forms for the most part. some are a little harder to hear, especially if there's a lot of -nakereba (conditional negative), -aseru (causative), -rareru ("can do X" or passive), because those contract. i love the -te form; it's what makes it easiest for me to derive the dictionary form to look up the verb, heck, to even hear instantly that something is a verb, now that i've learned how it is formed for all verbs. oh yeah, -te iru also contracts often.

of course i get totally thrown when somebody speaks in dialect. damn yakuza! :)

i think i'll look back on this as the easiest-peasiest part of japanese. :) every time i conjugate a new verb for practice i am admiring how beautifully regular it all is.

Re: verb forms

[firecat]

Yeah, the polite verb forms still help me understand what's being said in vernacular, but it's not the most direct way to understand most anime. Probably what Pimsleur helped me the most at was hearing the sounds of the language properly (when they introduce a new word, they repeat it several times starting from the last syllable - e.g., sen, masen, rimasen, karimasen, wakarimasen). I'm not skilled at picking up languages, so that was important to me.

Re: verb forms

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

cool that that works for you some at least. there should be a course specific to listening to anime and reading manga -- there are some materials (the now defunct magazine "mangajin" was really fun), but nothing spoken that i've found, and mangajin never struck me as useful for beginners; i get much more out of it now than when i first picked it up.

that pimsleur method would drive me nuts; it's exactly the wrong way around to how i learn to sound out words. i guess they must have found that it works for a lot of people though. interesting.

i've got myself a transcription program last week -- it's meant for dictation, but i use it to slow down sections of drama cds with which i have trouble. it doesn't change the pitch, and has variable speed adjustment, which is really great. i wish i had had some of these tools when i learned previous languages.

Re: verb forms

[firecat]

I have a book called Japanese the Manga Way, which I like, and Amazon pairs it with something that might be vaguely similar

[michaelsullivan.livejournal.com]

lynn_massa under that name postdates your presence on ssm.

But she has recently said she's been around a lot longer either as a lurker or under another name and has met some of us at boinks. Beyond that she's not saying. I have a guess.

[dr-brat.livejournal.com]

I first met her at a boink before I met either of you.

[michaelsullivan.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure that sinks my guess, which I wasn't all that confident in anyway.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ah, i see it's sort of a secret then. ok, that means it's not somebody really obvious, and i can stop torturing my poor brain, *whew*.

[dr-brat.livejournal.com]

I only figured it out because I heard people speculating at a recent boink and one of the speculations made me go, O duh! But yes, I think that it is meant to be a secret.