Drills

[tmcg]

It's the freaking touch drills that get me every time. The last time I hurt a finger enough to worry me was at the longsword workshop--not from getting whacked by a sword, but during the warmups where we used outstretched arms as surrogate swords to work on moves. Tonight, owing to new security procedures where Krav Maga class is held (I now have yet another Gloriously Spastic ID photo), I was too late to get wrapped, but after much punching my hands were fine. Then we do a touch drill at the very end and I bang up a finger. Feh. If I'm gonna get injured, it oughta be in battle. I wear the Klingon Pajamas of Shame.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to learn some kanji. I got kanji flash cards. They're really cool. But daunting. There are 440 of them in the first set. And these 440 are what you learn in first through third grades in Japan. And I gather you're learning the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries at the same time. We had to learn 26 letters (albeit in increasingly bizarre, unphonetic, and illogical combinations). It's one thing to be a beginner in a language, but a whole nother thing to realize you're 1,945 characters away from basic literacy. Okay, maybe 1,930; I've picked up a few kanji by osmosis. But still. Jeez.

This evening's venting is now complete.

Comments

Re: Kanji fun

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

See, you're the kind of person I wish I were--you've got at least two languages (that I know of) with beautiful fluency, and on top of that you took a third in school, and each of the three is from a different linguistic group and has a different writing system. That is *so cool*. It's such a delicious, luxurious stretch for the mind to work in a different language group. I'm jealous of your brain! {g} Not to mention that I think mine would explode if I tried to learn 10 new kanji a day for any length of time.

It's interesting the way some characters come back to you--and it's so neat that you can still understand snatches of Mandarin. I'm grateful that Japanese doesn't have the tonalities of Chinese--that was my insurmountable obstacle with learning Chinese from tapes, plus I didn't really have the motivation. Something about Japanese just calls to me. It's beautiful, and no matter how strange it gets to my Anglo-Saxon ear, it makes intuitive sense. Luckily, they intersperse phonetic characters in with their kanji, which I suspect makes reading it easier than reading Chinese--you can tell what part of speech the character is, and what verb form, etc.

Watch out--one of these years I'm going to tackle some Russian, and you're going to get very sick of me! {g}

Re: Kanji fun

[(Anonymous)]

Ti,

You are gonna love it getting farther along in Japanese. In many ways I am more scared of its complexity than Chinese, since it has all these flavors of formal and informal, etc, and Chinese just has Kanji and tones. So I chickened out of starting Japanese!

And hey, the only reason I got English down pretty well was because -- well, being a refugee it was kind of what we had to do, coming to this country and all that. Besides, I loved reading when the only language I knew was Russian, and no little thing such as a language barrier was gonna stop me when I ran out of Russian books! LOL! It's called desperation.

:-)

Vi

Re: Kanji fun

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

I'm a little worried by the levels of politeness in Japanese, too. The good thing is that unless I'm brave enough to try to speak Japanese with the staff at my favorite local Japanese restaurant, I probably won't have to worry about accidentally being rude to anyone in that language. If the Japanese Worldcon bid (http://homepage2.nifty.com/Nippon2007/) wins, I'll go to Japan in 2007, but not before.

The other good thing is that there's one set of verb forms (the first they teach, of course) that's safe to use in pretty much any situation.

But I love Japanese more the more I get into it, that's for sure.

I envy you your enforced immersion-learning of English. Sure, you *had* to. But you did it! And you got to do it! Plus, you became a critically acclaimed writer in your second language. That's nothing to sneeze at. :)