TMcG

Rosetta Stone has finally added Irish Gaelic as one of the languages it offers instruction in, and at all three levels, which is great. I did Italian Levels 1 and 2 online and Japanese Level 1 with the old-version CD-ROM, and it's a terrific and effective way to learn a new language.

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Up to Lesson 5-06 of the Rosetta Stone Japanese Level I software. Spent a couple of days going back over previous lessons. Was surprised how much I forgot, but happy with how much easier it is to say the sentences. Much is clarified in earlier lessons when you have examples and context from later lessons to draw on. I'm starting to get vague intuitive intimations of the workings of "wa" and "ga."

Learned katakana. Hah! I read them slower than Hiragana, but I can read them now. I can write them in the right stroke order (writing them is the only way to learn them, IMO), but I need a Japanese person to look at my writing and tell me whether it's legible or too American to live.

I still can't easily make sense of stories for first graders. The ones about real things like rabbits are easier than the ones about fantasy creatures. I have enough trouble with words for real things. Ogres throw me for a loop. Since I'm a fantasy writer, this is ironic.

I'm swimming in kanji flash cards and practicing with kanji quizzes online. Starting to learn the readings now. I do not know how anyone keeps all the readings straight. Verbs and nouns and adjectives, fine--but the monosyllabic combining forms blend into one another and are a pain to memorize. Examples help.

And: I hate RealAudio. I freaking hate it. A lot of sites offer RA files so you can hear the story you're trying to read, but right now I don't have it installed, because I got tired of battling it for control of my computer.

Midway through Lesson 4-06 in Rosetta Stone Japanese Level I. I started on December 13th (it logs your test results with dates), so I'm pretty happy with that speed. I can write a few kanji without aides to show me stroke order and direction. I can write complete simple sentences using kanji and hiragana. I can't read or write katakana, and I'm finally going to have to crack and learn to do that. I think my hiragana are solid enough now that learning (the similar but not directly analogous) katakana won't mess with my head too much. I'm not sure how many kanji I know. More than a hundred to say the meaning of in English; a much smaller number to associate a Japanese word I know with, so that I could actually use them in a sentence; and only a handful of simple ones with all their On, Kun, and Nanori readings.

I could not hold a simple conversation in Japanese. There's a written children's story online that I still can't make heads or tails of. And I couldn't figure out what akaspeedo 's kanji icon means, although it was an excuse for a fun foray through the kanji dictionary. {g}

The little starbursts of aural comprehension when I'm watching movies in Japanese are really cool.

(It just shows how in denial I am about katakana that I spelled it "katagana" before fixing it just now. Sigh. But I just found out that in addition to borrowed words, katakana are also used to spell rude words, which makes them seem much more fun. And sometimes they're used for emphasis. Interesting. I just watched Kurosawa's Scandal, and there were katakana all over the tabloids and ragsheets and advertising posters. And Western exclamation points!)

I'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.