renaissance poisson

i can now read kana fast enough to keep up with all but the fastest songs in my current jpop rotation (and even if i could read those fast enough, i can't even SING them fast enough, *heh*). i also know enough kanji to read those as well for those songs that are fairly simple in vocabulary. that's pretty much all johnny groups; they're not very demanding compared to, say, bump of chicken who have very complex lyrics, and i cannot follow those. that doesn't really mean i KNOW those kanji (i don't know all the readings and meanings, especially not in combination), but i can read them in a common reading well enough to recognize the kanji at first glance and not lose my place in the song.

this makes me happy.

*whew*. どうもありがと, さよなら, romaji, it's been a slice.（thank you, and goodbye.)

there are several systems of romanisation for japanese; only 3 of which really matter these days. since i got my first "instruction" in it via manga and anime titles, my set is kinda fubared, because the people who romanise titles don't all use one system, and worse, many mix the systems.

i understand why they mix. the best-known romanisation for english speakers is hepburn (not after audrey or katherine; after a guy who published his dictionary in the late 19th century). at some point later that got revised, and the revised system is what pretty much all dictionaries and most modern instruction devised for english speakers is written in.

even revised hepburn unfortunately uses macrons to indicate syllabic n (n̄) and long vowels (ū, ō, ī). not a problem for printing books, but most people don't even know how to type these. and so hepburn gets modified -- but not just one way. some people write n', uu, oo, ii, some write n, uh, oh, ih, some write ou for ō, some i- for ī... it's a mess.

but it doesn't stop there, oh no! the japanese themselves weren't happy with hepburn; they wanted a system that more clearly indicates japanese sounds for japanese speakers. so they came up with their own: nihonshiki (日本式ローマ字), which has, of course, since also been revised as kunreishiki (訓令式ローマ字). it uses circumflexes for long vowels; a bit easier to type for europeans. but it also uses ti (chi in hepburn), syo (sho), tu (tsu), etc -- not exactly intuitive for english speakers, ergo it's not surprising that it hasn't really caught on over here. the japanese are sort of accepting that in international communications -- but not by adopting hepburn for themselves, no, by making certain explicitly allowed exceptions (such as "passport japanese").

for example, you can see 東京 (とうきょう) romanised like this:

Tokyo -- in most international references; this isn't any proper romanisation, and IMO sucks because it results in nobody pronouncing it properly (though i guess it beats Cologne for Köln.) US manga publishers also use this "method" for names. i can see why -- because english pronunciation is so fuxx0red, but i'm griping about it anyway.
Tōkyō -- original and revised hepburn, seen in dictionaries and english study materials
Tookyoo -- modified revised hepburn
Tôkyô -- nihonshiki and kunreishiki
Tohkyoh -- passport japanese, and germans use this (which is WHY it is passport japanese i bet)
Toukyou -- wa-puro, which corresponds well with kana spelling [1]

i've been considering adopting kunreishiki just to stick with the way the japanese do things (cause if i ever go over there, that's what i'll need to use). but for translating manga, that's not a good idea. at this point i am doing what everybody else seems to be doing -- rolling my own, which is an unholy mix of modified, revised hepburn, kunreishiki, and kana spelling, *sigh*.

don't even get me started on word separation or capitalisation in romanised japanese. or on reverse translation of katakana. i have opinions!

[1] since starting to type into apple's kotoeri (IME = input method editor), i can see that my unholy mix works well with wa-puro (ワープロローマ字). wa-puro stands for "word processor" and is the romanisation most people use to type japanese into computers these days (including the japanese, who are leaving their kana keyboards behind). it's quite forgiving in that it needs no macrons or circumflexes, and it accepts nihonshiki, kunreishiki, and most modified hepburn. adhering to kana spelling rules helps me with remembering vocab as well.

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i should have been in bed hours ago, but translating manga is fun. it's going rather a lot better this time around because i am much faster at finding kanji that i don't know.

hydrangea with a colour gradation that i especially like in plants. in japanese such plants often have "nishiki" in the cultivar name, which means "brocade".

today's good thing about dreamwidth: it respects lj-cut in RSS feeds: users can now set a new syndication level in addition to "full", "title", and "summary", and if the "ljcut" syndication level is selected, it will show full posts in that user's RSS feed unless that post is behind an lj-cut, in which case it'll only show the uncut portion with a link to read more.

today's gmail text ad is headed:

"Over 20 brands of Ukes"

*cackle*. ok, this is only funny to those of my fellow smut lovers who know that "uke" is the japanese term for the sexually receptive male in a homosexual coupling.

(the ad continues with: "UkuleleWorld2.Com - Fully Guaranteed or Money Back Uke Strings, Picks, Parts, Music".)

so i am on record about being willing to listen to the tokyo phonebook being read by some of my favourite seiyuu. or any other phonebook, for that matter, as long as it's thick.

today i found something that is even worse.

my favourite seiyuu counting sheep (200, i believe) so as to make it easier for fans to fall asleep.

hitsuji de oyasumi 4, suzuki chihiro and toriumi kousuke. no sex tonight for mr gayboy, we're counting sheep in japanese.

for a while now, since i've started listening to japanese drama CDs, it's been annoying me that the archive programs we have on the mac can't properly unzip them (keeping the original filenames intact). i understand the problem; the mac deals natively with unicode, which is a step up from ye olde windows crap of old. but most people who rip drama CDs in japan don't use unicode, they use Shift_JIS or EUC-JP.

today i got off my butt and in no time at all found an archive program that can detect those automatically, and unzip with the japanese filenames intact: the unarchiver. and if it can't detect it automatically, it'll stop and let you select. sweet. i am very happy (if a bit mad at myself for taking so long looking for something better). some of my donation budget will go to its makers.

(Midara na Kiss ni Midasarete: Morikawa Toshiyuki x Okiayu Ryoutarou! *squee*!)

since the paramour is now also learning japanese (when angband leaves time for that), and we now have conversations about grammar while walking (which is inconvenient, because i can't google while walking), i'm gonna write up bits and pieces when i think about how to explain them better afterwards.

so, verbs. to be or not to be. and what is a copula?

copula comes from latin for link/tie, something that connects. linguistically, a copula links the subject of a sentence with a predicate (that which makes an assertion about the subject); it equates or associates the subject with the predicate.

in english the verb "to be" is the main copula.

i am forever a student.
cats are felines.
the sky was blue again later on that afternoon.
boys will be boys.

"to be" is also used as an existential verb (i think therefore i am.), which isn't a copular use IIRC, but i doubt most people know or care about the difference. i do though, and it's important to know that in japanese these concepts are not expressed the same way.

in japanese the copula can't simply be translated as "to be", and most definitely not in its sense of existence. the japanese copula isn't even really a verb. it sometimes gets used like one (but sometimes not), it conjugates, but it doesn't conjugate quite like any other verb -- it's either the super-verb, or not a verb at all, depending on the specific usage. anyway. the japanese copula is formally である (de aru) -- this form seems rarely used in speech today, but it's still common in writing, and knowing it makes conjugating the copula clearer. students come across it first in its polite form of です (desu), and slummers like me hear a lot of plain だ (da) on drama CDs -- which is just a contraction of である (de aru).

the general, simple pattern of a sentence using the copula is X は (wa) Y です (desu), where X is the subject, the topic under discussion, は the topic marker, and Y the predicate, that which is being associated with the subject.

いちじです (ichi-ji desu)
it is one o'clock.

これわおいしいです (kore wa oishii desu)
this is tasty.

たなかさんわせんせいです (tanaka-san wa sensei desu)
mr/mrs/ms tanaka is a teacher.

ぼくはがくせいだ (boku wa gakusei da)
i am a student.

conjugating the copula, and forms that don't translate to "to be" next time.

just an example of what a sentence can look like, and why even being able to translate all the individual words doesn't dissipate the cloud of "HUH?" that forms around my head at times: 当然だ当こすりでつきあいはじめたようなものだから.

当然 (touzen)
natural; as a matter of course;
だ (da)
plain copula
当こすり (atekosuri)
snide remark, insinuation, innuendo, cynicism, sarcasm
で
particle location of action; at; in; or time of action; or means of action; cause of effect; by;
つきあい (tsukiai)
association; socialising; fellowship;
はじめた (hajimeta)
started; began;
ようなもの (you na mono)
those kind of; this sort of
だから
therefore; so;

i translate it as "therefore, i naturally began our kind of association due to my own cynicism", and in context would modify it to be more explicit about what that "association" consists of, and try to make the sentence less stiff in combination with the surrounding text. but man, no wonder babelfish totally fails on japanese, and why so many manga translations are unwieldy; one really has to have a good feel for japanese and the target language, and can't fake it.

also, y'all should have a chance to listen to bump of chicken's supernova and only lonely glory. 11:03 minutes of happiness, thanks to aja. *squee*.

copied from a reply to a survey; i wrote bits and pieces here before, but this is a good summary.

what got me interested in yaoi was, many many years ago, zetsuai, which is pretty much THE classic of the genre. a gay friend showed it to me (there goes yer theory that gay men don't like yaoi). i thought the art was fantastic, and i thought it was way cool that this sort of thing existed. but that was that. i didn't seek out more yaoi at the time.

then fairly recently, in need of wank material because my own fantasies were falling short, i went looking for something different. and i found that het porn is boring and artificial when it's not plain disgusting, and that gay porn is boring when it's not plain disgusting (but at least it has no plasticky women in it who could learn something about faking orgasms from meg ryan) -- real people porn just doesn't turn my crank. hentai is eye-rollingly disgusting and has even more annoying female characters than RP porn. ah, i remembered, what was that, yaoi? and i searched, and saw, and fell in love. it is awesome, and turns me on like nothing else. impossibly beautiful men, no annoying women, angst, crazy passionate romance, forbidden lust, love against all odds, sex everywhere one can imagine (and some places i hadn't imagined), beautifully drawn sex at that -- mmmh-mmh. and the best thing? drama CDs one can listen to while reading, or, uh, falling asleep. japanese BL seiyuus are love.

in the category of "the personal is political" one aspect that i especially like is that yaoi is so far outside the hetero-normative world in which we live. in much yaoi, homosexuality is perfectly accepted, it's what's normal, every man even if he starts out straight will become gay by simply having a bit of a french kiss with a gay man (or another straight one, for that matter, should he accidentally, uh, fall on him). something in me just delights at how this turns the real world upside down. mind, i also like the stories in which society's judgment provides a major source of angst, but even in those our beloved fags win in the end. being as i am an active supporter of gay rights, and disgusted with many of my fellow human beings for their horrible gay bashing, it makes me happy to live in a fantasy world in which teh gay wins all the time.

and, the art. let's not forget the art. and i don't mean that like "i read playboy for the articles". i really dig the art. some of the art is stunningly beautiful, and more generally so than in shoujo, for example.

mind, there is plenty of yaoi i don't like. keep shota away from me, and i don't like S&M any better drawn than in real-life. i don't like girly uke -- the more "feminine" the uke, the more helpless with copious tears, the less i'll like him. and when a mangaka starts dressing the uke up in maid outfits, i throw the book against the wall. i roll my eyes at the "uke who falls in love with his rapist without much ado" device (i think yaoi could do with a complete moratorium on raping). i like both men to be strong men (they can be sensitive and quiet, but not weepy); i prefer reverses/switches over very clearly typed seme/uke. i want story with my porn; PWP rarely does anything for me (i'm looking at you, chitose piyoko). too much fluid turns me off too (points at the queen of splooge, murakami maki).

for the record, i do not often identify with either character, i just watch them. when i do identify, it's more likely with the seme if the boys are typed that way. i wish for more internal dialogues from seme, dear kami of yaoi. we always hear from the uke. i know, it's easier. ganbatte.

i read some yaoi (mostly of the shounen-ai variant, but also low-smex content like kusatta kyounshi no hoteishiki) just for the story, not for the porn at all. that's sort of separate, i feel; it's more like i read hikaru no go for the story too, not to slash hikaru and akira.

mangaka whose work i seek out: oki mamiya, kouga yun, minami ozaki, abe miyuki, kozuma kodaka, kawai touko, yumeka sumomo, koide mieko, yamakami riyu, takashima kazusa (yo! finish more stuff!), yamane ayano, nitta youka, maruya kae, minase masara, kujyou aoi, sakuragi yaya, toujou asami, sugiura shiho, takanaga hinako, kunieda saiko, naono boura, nishida higashi.