jmoiron.net

A lot has happened in the last month that I haven't been blogging about, but I've been kinda relaxing and taking things as they come. In order to not deny the past month's existence, I present to you this unordered list:

• Installed Tiger on the Mel1
• Learned Hiragana
• Saw Attack Haus et. al.
• Turned 23
• Still no girlfriend (is this an acomplishment?)
• Gained 10 lbs, Lost 10 lbs... again sighs : former glory?

That's a pretty short and depressing list! I have been having fun going home each weekend and hanging out with friends. This Friday The Flesh are dropping by The Knitting Factory; if there are still tickets come down and check them out! Thursday night is wings w/ Olger & Rudy! This week is only 3 days of work for me! Shit, I am so enthusiastic!

I was staring at the big billboard of the Manhattan Pharmacy a few (2? 3?) weeks ago thinking to myself: "If that were written in Japanese, I wouldn't be able to read it." I don't know why that thought popped into my head at that moment, staring up at the morning sun, suffering through 65% humidity, but I realized that I already knew how the kana system worked, and I might as well spend a few weeks or months learning them so I can read things; after all, there are plenty of things that I am interested in, and being able to even sound things out phonetically would probably help navigation immensely.

This thought kinda stewed for a day, and at night when I was wondering what to do that could possibly be constructive, I realized that all those past nights where my constructive thing was arranging my backgrounds or trying and failing to code could have been used to actually learn things. Cursing a missed opprotunity to easily become fluent in Portuguese or to learn how to read Japanese at a child's level, I began at once to copy kana's of different styles into a little book and learned them 5 by 5 (a i u e o [あいうえお], ka ki ku ke KO [かきくけこ], etc) until I had a very good grasp on the first bunch of sets and a decent grasp on the remaining 3 and a half sets. Trying to understand different pieces of linguistics (a field which is quite vast) really helped immensely; learning intuitively what voiced and unvoiced consonants are will cut down your work 50% since the Japanese "phonetic" (its not quite 100% but its very, very close) writing system has the concepts of voice built into it.

I realized before I started that learning kana and knowing how to read were completely different for a number of reasons (kanji, lack of word separation, etc), but I just wanted to be able to sound things out that I come across in my daily web exploits. If my practice leads to more fascination and eventually to a decent understanding of the language itself, I could only count that as a good thing, and if it doesn't then I'll have met my goal of learning kana. As it is now, my grammar and vocabulary are far too poor to be able to understand anything but the most basic exclamation.