Another Monday with Kouryou-chan

Well, after driving Omaha to her last day on her radio show (she's quitting to concentrate more on the business side; she likes production, but she can't do both), I headed home with a sleeping Kouryou-chan in her carseat. When we reached the house, she was still asleep ( Photo: Sleepy kidlet. )

and I couldn't wake her, but I also shouldn't let her sleep long when it's only a few hours until bedtime. So I left her on the uncomfortable floor rather than put her on the couch, and turned on NPR News. I cooked the usual, ravioli & sauce, and managed to get her roused enough so that while dinner was prepping she could go downstairs and play a new computer game she'd acquired, some Hamtaro video game.

We ate dinner upstairs together, and then huddled downstairs with ice cream cones and just enough time to watch one episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot. This time it was the episode "Tradeshow Showdown", complete with The Cluster Queen's first appearance. A good episode, all things considered. I made the mistake of blindly deleting another episode pair when I saw the first episode was "See No Evil"; unfortunately, the other episode in that block was "The Great Unwashed," which was one I wanted to see again. Oh, well. How come nobody's torrenting those?

Kouryou-chan got into the bathtub without a complaint. While she was finishing up brushing her teeth, she puffed her cheeks out. I pointed to a green plastic bathtoy lined up on the rim of the tub and said, "You're almost as cute as Frog."

"Dad," she said in an exasperated voice. "Frog is only a little cute. I'm a lot cute."

One must be cautious in what one repeats to a child, indeed. We read books (more Hamtaro... ugh! But she reads it, which is the point) and she was pretty good about getting to bed, just as Omaha got home.

Very Strange Speeds...

I just got back from lunch (500 words of hot man-to-man action! Bwahahaha!) and I noticed something a little weird. I put the latest lesson of my Japanese courses on my laptop in MP3 format to listen to them when I have a chance, and this one came out weird. I'm not sure what's different about the encoding, but instead of the usual 44100/128/2, this one reported itself as being 48000/128/2 and it sounded way too fast. So I ran it through a resampler, trying the difference between 44100 and 48000, or about 0.92. It still sounded too fast. Taking a stab in the dark, I wanted to know what it sounded like at 0.8. That sounded just barely too slow. After 20 lessons I know the narrator's voice.

Pattern recognition set in. 0.92, significantly too fast. 0.8, barely too slow. Slowing down the original stream by 0.844, or 0.92 squared... perfect. What the?

I'm sure there's some audio geek out there who can explain to me what I did wrong with the encode, and why the sound came out sounding too fast.

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Given that I'm more than halfway through the first semester of the audio lesson kit, I decided to take another stab at a written language kit. I have two to choose from, Japanese for Busy People, Kana Edition, which looks more mainstream, and Japanese in Mangaland, which promises to teach much with much more intensity since manga is kanji-heavy. The advantage to the latter is that I have a lot of manga, most of it without translations.

I'm not impressed with Japanese in Mangaland. Yes, the lessons are as intensive as promised. Yes, you do have to do the homework. But I've run into two typos already that make me think this was a rushed product into a crowding market.

The first typo: "A period is written with a small circle and the coma [sic] is written upside down."

The second typo is much more signficant. In a section on onomatopoeia, a woman's laughter is characterized as "ehahaha." But the hirigana is clearly "ahahahaha," and if they're going to use romaji they should be at laest as precise as a standard romaji text. Screwing up a reader's habits of pronounciation is generally a bad thing.

Worse yet, if you visit their website, the PDF file for "Corrections to Lesson 1" is the file for corrections to Lesson 2-- and so is the file "Corrections for Lesson 2"!

Frack. The technique looks worthwhile and the content interesting. But my confidence is shaken by these mistakes and problems.