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Just Say a Shitload
Dec. 16th, 2002 10:09 amI've been learning Japanese with the aid of some online sites and the Rosetta Stone Level I software. Rosetta Stone software is really cool. You look at pictures and learn to associate sounds (and, fairly quickly, concepts and sentences) with them, with no English aids at all. It makes you think in the foreign language right from the start. But it has its drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is that it's not always possible to deduce the similarities or differences between two pictures and their assigned phrases. I now know that there are different terms for one and more than one of the following: flowers, dogs, infants/children, eggs, eyes. So, okay--counting differs depending on what's counted. But what am I supposed to intuit here? Flora vs. fauna vs. human fauna vs. objects? But why are eggs different from eyes? Flowers are different from eggs, so it's not animate vs. inanimate, or stationary vs. motile. Without many more examples to work from, this is somewhat flummoxing. Worse, it's possible that the difference is between one egg and four eggs, one eye and two eyes, one dog and three dogs, one kid and five kids, etc. For all I know, the group terms are number-specific. Aiee!
At the magazine where I used to work, we had a set of communal bigass dictionaries in a nook on our shared hallway--"we" being the magazine's copyeditors. When we ran across usage questions we couldn't solve, we'd ask each other's advice. Someone was trying to decide whether it should be "myriad things," "a myriad things," or "a myriad of things." The dictionaries and usage manuals were unenlightening. People started coming out of their offices to join in the discussion. After a while, there were about eight of us there, poring over references and trying to work out the correct usage.
An acerbic editor walked by and asked what all the fuss was about.
We told him, "We're trying to decide if it should be 'myriad things,' 'a myriad things,' or 'a myriad of things.'"
He thought for a moment, replied, "Just say 'a shitload'!," and walked away.
Until further input, I am translating these flummoxing Japanese terms into "one" and "a shitload."
Probably not what the Rosetta Stone developers intended, but it works for me.
At the magazine where I used to work, we had a set of communal bigass dictionaries in a nook on our shared hallway--"we" being the magazine's copyeditors. When we ran across usage questions we couldn't solve, we'd ask each other's advice. Someone was trying to decide whether it should be "myriad things," "a myriad things," or "a myriad of things." The dictionaries and usage manuals were unenlightening. People started coming out of their offices to join in the discussion. After a while, there were about eight of us there, poring over references and trying to work out the correct usage.
An acerbic editor walked by and asked what all the fuss was about.
We told him, "We're trying to decide if it should be 'myriad things,' 'a myriad things,' or 'a myriad of things.'"
He thought for a moment, replied, "Just say 'a shitload'!," and walked away.
Until further input, I am translating these flummoxing Japanese terms into "one" and "a shitload."
Probably not what the Rosetta Stone developers intended, but it works for me.
