If your workplace is practically empty like mine, here’s a funny video to lighten up your Chinese studies, that is if you’re studying Chinese at all.
China’s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions About How Great The Chinese Government Is
Yearly Archives: 2008
The opposite of polite… rude? Not really.
As most of you know, Japanese has a separate way of speaking to show politeness. This way of speaking is called 「敬語」 as a whole and is split into two levels: 1) Polite – 丁寧語, and 2) Honorific/Humble – 尊敬語／謙譲語. However, I’ve never really seen a neat term to describe the non-polite way of speaking in English or Japanese. Some might think that the opposite of polite is rude but the level I’m looking for is between the two. Slang is a little different too. What I’m referring to is a neutral way of speaking with equals. I’ve usually just called it “casual” or “dictionary form”. However, 「普通の話し方」 is rather unwieldy and 「辞書形」 is a term for conjugation, not a politeness level. I’m not aware of any formal term in Japanese which is a pain when making Japanese lessons so I looked up 「丁寧語の反対」 in Google and found my exact question on Yahoo!知恵袋. Say what you want about Yahoo and it’s past blunders with Microsoft but Yahoo Answers is really cool and turns up useful answers all the time.
I’ve decided to use the term 「タメ口」 based on this rather confident answer.
普通に敬語の反対は「ため口」ですよね。
昔は「敬語」と「普通の言葉」だったのが、今は「敬語」と「タメ語」になっている。敬語とは上下関係を示すものではなく、相手との距離を示すものなのである。親しい関係かそうでないかを示すものである。
Any native speakers have any reservations with that term? Here’s a list of terms I tried to sort in order of politeness. Any additions, suggestions, or corrections appreciated.
尊敬語／謙譲語
丁寧語
タメ口
俗語
By the way, I hope to use a screen sharing app during my lessons to show how to do this type of research using Japanese and the internet on your own.
WordPress 2.7 First Impressions
Finally, threaded comments supported out of the box! The plugins available to do this were incredibly difficult to setup and changed the database more than I was comfortable with. Of course, my theme doesn’t work with this new feature so I’m back to the default theme for now. The default theme is horrible and really needs an update. This is important since your favorite themes are often unmaintained and will not support newer features. I’ll be hunting for another one in the coming days.
As for the new admin interface, it’s OK but I don’t really care too much as long as I can get stuff done. The old one worked and so does the new one. It’s more customizable, which is cool. I don’t like the bulk action dropdown since I’m forced to choose an action instead of just hitting the appropriate button. It adds two more clicks: 1 to click the dropdown and 1 to select the action.
Time will tell whether the automatic upgrading will work ok without having to fudge around with chmod and directory permissions.
Link: WordPress 2.7 Demo Site
Update: Couldn’t stand the default theme anymore. I don’t really much like this one either but it seems to work. I hate fixed-width, it’s such a waste of valuable screen space. The theme search continues…
Update 2: I’ve decided to drop the threaded comments stuff. Personally, I don’t like how it’s difficult to figure out which comments are new since it’s no longer sorted by oldest first. Can’t do much about the fixed-width. It seems to be all the rage with the better looking themes.
The crappiest video game ever
Yay, it’s analogy time!
Ok, let’s say you bought the hottest and coolest RGP such as Final Fantasy Millennium or Dragon Quest MMMCMXLIX but the game designers got a little too creative. The game is supposed to take 70-100 hours to beat but it’s networked and you play with 19 other people. The only catch is, you only get to play a couple minutes at a time. The rest of the time you’re watching the other 18 people take turns playing exactly same thing. Now, lets say the game was something else like Final Fantasy 8-2 and it’s not that much fun to begin with. And you don’t even get to play that much because 80% of the game is filled with cut scenes that are kind of boring and lecturing. To further spice it up, let’s say the game is supposed to take several years to finish. Congratulations, you’ve decided to take Japanese language classes!
Here’s another analogy. Let’s say you throw that game out the window and buy another one that lets you play all the time by yourself. Awesome! But you find out that the game has a critical bug of never saving your progress correctly. Every time you start playing, you start off at random parts of the game. So most of the time you either have to repeat what you did already or you’re completely lost. The gameplay is also really complicated and there’s no instructions anywhere of how to play. The only way to get any information is to meet up with experts that know the game backwards and forwards. The only problem is that these experts have been playing this game ever since they were a child. It’s so natural to them, they don’t really know how to explain it very well. Also, there’s so much new terminology, you can’t even understand what they’re saying half the time. Congratulations, you’ve decided to study Japanese on your own while meeting up with native speakers!
Why are you messing with that crap? Don’t you want a game that remembers how much you’ve progressed, challenges you at the right level, and can explain to you what required step-by-step as you go? That’s right, you want to partner with a private tutor that knows the language, how to learn the language, and how much you know. So go ahead and send me an email. 🙂
Overcoming obstacles in online colloboration
No responses yet for my tutoring services despite the ultra-low rate I set (on purpose). According to google analytics, I’ve only had about 50 visitors from Seattle in total to my website after the announcement so this is hardly surprising. Searching google for “seattle japanese private lessons” showed my site at #19 which means it might as well not even be there. You either want to be within the first 3 or #10 which is first on the second page.
So I can either be patient or expand my audience. As I briefly mentioned, I really prefer live meetings over online for a variety of reasons. And by “live” I don’t mean some kind of lame marketing term (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) but the technology platform often referred to in layman terms as “real life”.
Learning language is an interactive process. Personally, I think there’s a huge problem if the speaking ratio between the teacher and student is not near 50%. Unfortunately, almost all language classes consist of the teacher speaking 80%+ percent of the time depending on the class size which is partly the reason why they are so ineffective. So in order to interact with the student, I need a medium where communication can easily flow both ways.
Let’s see if modern technology can work out something for me. I prefer meeting face-to-face because seeing a person’s face and body language is important in language and communication. This is especially important for teaching languages for obvious reasons and is very important to the learning process in conversation practice.
Well, while I haven’t tried it yet, I’ve got a webcam on my monitor so I guess that’s a potentially reasonable solution. I look crazy when I see myself via the webcam but maybe that’s just how I always look. (A scary thought.) So I’ve significantly increased my audience to anybody in the world with a fast internet connection and a webcam of reasonable quality.
Another advantage of real life is that it’s trivially easy to show and share information. All you need is a pen and paper and you could easily write things out, point at them as you explain, and have the other person interact with it in kind. You can even bring your laptop and easily share websites and all sorts of stuff with virtually no hassle.
While I would prefer we write things by hand for kanji and kana writing exercise, I’m willing to compromise with the keyboard if I can share my computer screen somehow with the other person. I know Skype has built-in chat but I really need something where I can point to other stuff to show what I’m talking about and have the other person do the same while adding their own input. While I prefer my hands, I guess a mouse cursor can work. I don’t mind installing an app but would prefer the other person not have to do the same. Hopefully something integrated with the browser.
If I can find such a solution, I’m willing to open up my services to anybody with a webcam and fast internet connection. I might have to beef up my internet connection as well. And I suppose I’ll need to figure something out with Paypal, Google Checkout, or some service of that nature.
Hacked and mangled but still standing
Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog but what you haven’t seen (or maybe you did briefly) is all the stuff I had to do just to keep it the same.
Some of you may have briefly seen the navigation menu oddly placed. That was because of countless invisible spam links inserted into one of my posts. Since my WordPress installation is always up-to-date, I’m thinking it’s probably a sql injection vulnerability in one of my plugins. I’ve been reactivating them one by one and now I’m reasonably sure which one was the culprit. I might reactivate it and combine it with the bad behavior plugin to see what kind of shady logs I get. Maybe later.
Or maybe it was a mysql security hole. I haven’t had any more attacks since my provider recently applied a security update to the database. But that somehow managed to mangle all my non-English text so I had to rebuild the blog from scratch with an export from the old database. As a result, you might have experienced a brief period of complete 文字化け.
So I’m finally in the last week of my online class for Project Management and assuming that I pass the final, I’ll be free at last to pursue other interests! I have a special project in mind which I’ll write about very soon.
Juggling Language and Life
With working on a fairly large project and team (at least for me), moving to a new place, and taking online classes, these last few months have been quite hectic indeed. I’ve moved all my stuff over to the new place (though there’s still unopened boxes everywhere), the project is slowing down, and my online class ends in December, so hopefully in a month or so I’ll finally have some time to devote to Japanese, Chinese, and maybe even relax a little.
If any of you played Sims 2, the accuracy of the game in simulating real life is amazing (and maybe depressing depending on which way you look at it). Depending on your personality and interests, you have a bunch of needs shown in bars that have to be balanced and maintained given a finite amount of time. You also have to maintain your relationships with the people in your life and meet their needs. In these last few months, due to the increasing demand of some of my other bars, my language study, personal projects, diet, and exercise bars have been sorely neglected.
My beer belly, which I just reduced to reasonable levels has come back with a vengeance. In regards to my Chinese and Japanese, while there was certainly no improvement in the least bit, I managed to at least maintain my skills without forgetting too much. Japanese comes back with a little bit of practice and it’s hard to know even less Chinese than what little I started with.
I can appreciate why learning a new language is so difficult for working adults. The basic problem isn’t that the language is hard, it’s just the volume of everything you have to learn (basically, how to express everything you know and understand everybody else). I can conclude from personal experience that the biggest single difficulty of learning a new language for adults with a career, bills, relationships, and responsibilities is the lack of time. I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be if I had kids and a family to care for.
I didn’t know how good I had it in college. I didn’t have to go grocery shopping, run errands, and spend 40 hours a week sitting in a cubicle. I also had easy access to native speakers and teachers on campus without having to drive around and several months a year with absolutely nothing to do. Nothing motivates studying like being bored out of your mind.
So don’t tell me I can master a language by working on it 24×7 and surrounding myself with the language all day because some of us have a life that demands our attention. Also just as impractical is the suggestion to pick up, leave everything I have built up here, and move to that country. Finding a job in a foreign country to learn the native language is one huge Catch-22. You can’t get a good job if you can’t speak the language and you can’t move there to learn the language if you can’t find a good job. And I’m not keen on taking a 2/3 pay cut to switch from my current job to teaching English.
All of those suggestions are great when you’re a student or just starting out as a fresh graduate and I did exactly that with Japanese. However, as I approach 27(!!!), that window of opportunity is closing and I don’t have a similar route for learning Chinese. And once I have kids to take care of, that window can be considered officially closed, locked, and bolted on both sides.
By the way, this is my way of saying to those of you still young to not squander your chance. Learn a foreign language and live abroad while you still can! It’s really going to change your life and mostly all in a good way!
So what’s the solution for learning a language while juggling all the other stuff going on? I don’t know but I’m just going to take it a little-by-little. I know how much work is involved from learning Japanese so I don’t get easily discouraged and take pride in every little improvement. And even though my Chinese is still unusable in a regular conversation, it’s still vastly improved from a year or two ago and I’m happy with that. I think that’s the most important ingredient. Be persistent and don’t worry about when you’re going to “master” everything. That’s a relatively loose term anyway since nobody ever completely “masters” a language. So don’t stress about why it’s taking so long and feel discouraged by what seems like a lack of progress. Just enjoy the journey and the people you’ll meet along the way, however long the road may be. And if you persevere and keep on the lookout, you’ll eventually find some new opportunities opening for you. At least I’m hoping that’s the case for me.
Election Day
It’s election day. If you’re not rich like most of us, you should be voting for Obama. But I’m guessing most US citizens who read this blog will vote for Obama anyhow so I guess I’m preaching to the choir.
Personally, I wish Ron Paul could have been president. Oh well…
Peculiar properties of 「多い」 and 「少ない」
An interesting post I read recently about 「多い」 and 「少ない」 got me thinking (probably a bit too much). The post is also all in Japanese, so it’s good reading practice as well.
As Minako Okamoto points out, you can’t directly modify a noun with 「多い」 and 「少ない」 in the manner below.
東京に
多いレストランがある
I believe this is due to the idiosyncrasy of having adjectives that indicate multiple objects in a language that has no singular/plural distinction. (I have another post that explores this theme in depth that has been in my draft folder forever.) In addition, other words that indicates multiple objects such as 「少数」 and 「多数」 are almost always used as nouns despite the fact that they are descriptive and would normally be thought of as adjectives. (I have no idea whether they are officially classified as just nouns or as both nouns and na-adjectives.)
The easy way
There are many ways to get around this problem of not being able to directly modify the noun with adjectives indicating amounts. For instance, you can make the adjective a predicate or use adverbs such as 「たくさん」 and 「少し」 instead as Minako demonstrates.
東京にレストランが多い。
東京にレストランがたくさんある。
The not-as-easy way
While this works fine for elementary Japanese, more complicated sentences might call for a direct noun modification. This is especially the case when the main focus of the sentence is something else and the fact that it’s numerous or few in number is extraneous information. In order to do this, all you have to do is modify as a noun using 「の」 instead of the traditional adjective-noun modification. For i-adjectives, you have to convert it to an adverb first by replacing 「い」 with 「く」.
東京では、多くのレストランが完全禁煙の制度を実施し始めている。
(I completely made this example up so I have no idea if this is true and I would guess probably not.)
Oddly enough, I have never seen the opposite 「少なくの」. I guess every language has its quirks. You can however, use 「少数の」 instead.
80対20の法則によると、少数のバグが大多数の問題の原因となる。
KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!)
Some people might look down on what I called “elementary” earlier but in languages, simpler is always better. So in most cases and especially in conversational Japanese, you should just stick to the simpler method of using words like 「たくさん」 and 「少し」 without mucking around with what is more of a formal written style using 「多くの」, etc.
I should also note that there is a big difference between a direct noun modification and a subordinate clause modification as the two examples below show.
１） 東京に
多いレストランがある。
２） レストランが多い東京が好きだ。
Unlike the first sentence where 「多い」 is directly modifying 「レストラン」, the second sentence is perfectly fine because 「多い」 is the predicate in the clause 「レストランが多い」 and is not directly modifying the noun 「東京」 by itself.
So in most cases, if you stick to the basics, there should be no problem at all. In fact, I have personally never noticed this peculiar problem until I consciously thought about it. In conclusion, remember that “brevity is the soul of wit”!
Can anybody think of any other adjectives that have similar issues?
Holidays get deadly with Death Note
Life continues to be hectic and updates to this blog will be sparse probably till the end of this year.
I had wanted to write a post with a comprehensive review of the Death Note comic book series with transcribed excerpts but since that takes time, I’ll just leave you with a hilarious comic strip from VG Cats. Lots of funny stuff there including references to どうぶつの森.
In any case, the short version of my review is to definitely check it out as a resource for studying Japanese. There’s a lot of text compared to most comic books and the story is very complex. Definitely a good read for people at an intermediate to advanced levels.
Image from VG Cats:
