Anime, Language, Gaming, Writing
Nov. 15th, 2004 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIf you can't tell, I'm a bit like ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jenkitty today: busy at work, but not so busy that I don't verge on tedium and boredom. I've got a nice project underway, pulling out all the generational cruft from a piece of code and prettying it up to current standards, but it's not much.
I watched episode 6 of Mai HiME, and that show just keeps getting sillier and more fun as time goes on. I'm really starting to enjoy it more now that I've gotten used to the character names and settings and things. It's just silly as all get-out, steals shamelessly from everything around it, and relentlessly but gently makes fun of every anime tope there is.
And it's a fabulous vocabulary builder. Alongside the absoutely wondeful Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar by Rita Lampkin, it has been adding to my store of useful (and useless) words left and right. Today I even found myself arguing with the translator: when Mikoto says, "Gotta pee," one of the other girls says, "The bathroom's this way." At least, that's what the translator put. But there's a word in the sentence he didn't translate; it means "scatterbrain," which is a good word to describe Mikoto.
I've reached Lesson 48 of my Japanese classes. 48 down, 42 to go. Not too shabby. Halfway and more. I'm sticking with it.
Along with the Lampkin book and the Pimsleur course on tape, for anyone else who wants to do this, I recommend Japenese for Busy People, Kana edition. It's more business-like than the others, duh, but it'll help you get used to reading the language as well. The Lampkin book is amazing. Apparently, most Japanese courses start on vocabulary and teach the grammar later, but not Lampkin's Verbs & Essential Grammar. It teaches you the rules first, and now suddenly all the random things I've been hearing in Pimsleur suddenly make sense. Funny, though, because my first reaction was to get a little pissed off; it's not that mysterious a language after all. But all the textbooks treat it like some black box and your only hope is to memorize a ton of stuff and the grammar will "just seep in." It doesn't work that way. After reading just a little of the Lampkin book, tons of dialogue now makes sense to me.
I was thrilled to hear that there was a new edition of Tron 2.0 coming out. A radio show on computers was talking about Tron 2.0: Killer App. And then I was disappointed to learn that it's just the game I've already played, repackaged for the X-Box. Dammit, when is Halo 2 coming out for the PC already?
And, sad to say, I've given up on NaNoWriMo. I got about 15,000 words in and lost all interest. I've had too much to do: work has been demanding six-day weeks, and there was the election and Kouryou-chan's birthday party and... The real truth is that other stories kept getting in the way. I have more stories that are begging me to write them, and I'm really an episodic writer and an S/F writer. Fantasy is hard and annoying. Maybe I should read Charlie Stross's new book and see how he does it.
jenkitty today: busy at work, but not so busy that I don't verge on tedium and boredom. I've got a nice project underway, pulling out all the generational cruft from a piece of code and prettying it up to current standards, but it's not much.I watched episode 6 of Mai HiME, and that show just keeps getting sillier and more fun as time goes on. I'm really starting to enjoy it more now that I've gotten used to the character names and settings and things. It's just silly as all get-out, steals shamelessly from everything around it, and relentlessly but gently makes fun of every anime tope there is.
And it's a fabulous vocabulary builder. Alongside the absoutely wondeful Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar by Rita Lampkin, it has been adding to my store of useful (and useless) words left and right. Today I even found myself arguing with the translator: when Mikoto says, "Gotta pee," one of the other girls says, "The bathroom's this way." At least, that's what the translator put. But there's a word in the sentence he didn't translate; it means "scatterbrain," which is a good word to describe Mikoto.
I've reached Lesson 48 of my Japanese classes. 48 down, 42 to go. Not too shabby. Halfway and more. I'm sticking with it.
Along with the Lampkin book and the Pimsleur course on tape, for anyone else who wants to do this, I recommend Japenese for Busy People, Kana edition. It's more business-like than the others, duh, but it'll help you get used to reading the language as well. The Lampkin book is amazing. Apparently, most Japanese courses start on vocabulary and teach the grammar later, but not Lampkin's Verbs & Essential Grammar. It teaches you the rules first, and now suddenly all the random things I've been hearing in Pimsleur suddenly make sense. Funny, though, because my first reaction was to get a little pissed off; it's not that mysterious a language after all. But all the textbooks treat it like some black box and your only hope is to memorize a ton of stuff and the grammar will "just seep in." It doesn't work that way. After reading just a little of the Lampkin book, tons of dialogue now makes sense to me.
I was thrilled to hear that there was a new edition of Tron 2.0 coming out. A radio show on computers was talking about Tron 2.0: Killer App. And then I was disappointed to learn that it's just the game I've already played, repackaged for the X-Box. Dammit, when is Halo 2 coming out for the PC already?
And, sad to say, I've given up on NaNoWriMo. I got about 15,000 words in and lost all interest. I've had too much to do: work has been demanding six-day weeks, and there was the election and Kouryou-chan's birthday party and... The real truth is that other stories kept getting in the way. I have more stories that are begging me to write them, and I'm really an episodic writer and an S/F writer. Fantasy is hard and annoying. Maybe I should read Charlie Stross's new book and see how he does it.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-16 04:28 am (UTC)B) If you haven't played the copy of System Shock 2 you borrowed at the same time yet, you should.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-16 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-16 08:10 am (UTC)Bullshit, I sez. I've been there, done that, learned 7 languages through various methods. The above-mentioned system works more or less for English, because it's so flexible. But I can tell you it's not good for German. I can still remember my relief when the teacher relented and, despite the prevailing dogma, gave us a few rules to go by when using adjectives. After a month of parrotting tapes and answering exercises at random, at last, I knew what I was doing.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-19 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-19 11:24 pm (UTC)