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A POST ONLY A LINGUIST COULD CARE ABOUT.
I was going to bitch about how I still suck at Chinese, but instead I read an article about a presidential hopeful (now she's promising generic WE WILL CHANGE TAIWAN and GET YOUNG PEOPLE JOBS and blah blah blah, but personally I hope she wins even though another DPP presidency spells huge trouble with China) and I started studying for my exam tomorrow. Look at me and how mature I am.
I'm also spending like an hour or two on German a day (though I'LL BE FRANK that'll go way down as soon as I'm done with my midterm) and like, adding small amounts of Japanese input to my life. If I want to do international work in Asia—which is looking more and more what I'm likely going to try to do, even if that is like, a ridiculously ambitious career goal, there, and I am the laziest person on earth—if I want to do that then the fact that I used to speak the language of the most economically and politically powerful country in the region but THEN FORGOT IT it due to distractions and life and shit that is pretty much extremely stupid. Luckily it's coming back really fast, I only need to hear a lot of words once to relearn them. And Japanese grammar is MYSTERIOUSLY EASY TO ME even though I can't explain it at all. This makes me suspect I should've learned more languages through comic books.
The book I actually picked up to help is sort of cool, though. It is just example sentences of actual spoken Japanese with no other language on the tape, but the book has a translation of each sentence in both Chinese and English. But, English and Chinese are both dramatically different from Japanese, so like sometimes the English meaning just like, completely fails to capture what the Japanese really means at all. And sometimes? The Chinese translation is the sucky one. Reading them both though gives you a decent shot at comprehension. I wouldn't actually know this if I couldn't understand most of the sentences already, though, so YOU NEED TO SPEAK THREE LANGUAGES TO REALLY USE THIS BOOK MAN, I somehow guess this was not their intention. (We will not even get into the fact that modern Chinese and English basically have the same method of expressing formality—USE FANCY WORDS, TALK LIKE A BOOK WHENEVER POSSIBLE—which is completely inadequate in conveying Japanese's grammatically embedded politeness levels.)
I am such a cliche linguistics major, I swear to god. Whenever anybody ever goes GOD, WHY DOESN'T ANYBODY REALIZE THAT ALL LINGUISTS AREN'T [XYZ], I am actually the person they are trying to distance themselves from.
I'm also spending like an hour or two on German a day (though I'LL BE FRANK that'll go way down as soon as I'm done with my midterm) and like, adding small amounts of Japanese input to my life. If I want to do international work in Asia—which is looking more and more what I'm likely going to try to do, even if that is like, a ridiculously ambitious career goal, there, and I am the laziest person on earth—if I want to do that then the fact that I used to speak the language of the most economically and politically powerful country in the region but THEN FORGOT IT it due to distractions and life and shit that is pretty much extremely stupid. Luckily it's coming back really fast, I only need to hear a lot of words once to relearn them. And Japanese grammar is MYSTERIOUSLY EASY TO ME even though I can't explain it at all. This makes me suspect I should've learned more languages through comic books.
The book I actually picked up to help is sort of cool, though. It is just example sentences of actual spoken Japanese with no other language on the tape, but the book has a translation of each sentence in both Chinese and English. But, English and Chinese are both dramatically different from Japanese, so like sometimes the English meaning just like, completely fails to capture what the Japanese really means at all. And sometimes? The Chinese translation is the sucky one. Reading them both though gives you a decent shot at comprehension. I wouldn't actually know this if I couldn't understand most of the sentences already, though, so YOU NEED TO SPEAK THREE LANGUAGES TO REALLY USE THIS BOOK MAN, I somehow guess this was not their intention. (We will not even get into the fact that modern Chinese and English basically have the same method of expressing formality—USE FANCY WORDS, TALK LIKE A BOOK WHENEVER POSSIBLE—which is completely inadequate in conveying Japanese's grammatically embedded politeness levels.)
I am such a cliche linguistics major, I swear to god. Whenever anybody ever goes GOD, WHY DOESN'T ANYBODY REALIZE THAT ALL LINGUISTS AREN'T [XYZ], I am actually the person they are trying to distance themselves from.