Democracy is a wonderful invention, for if you gather enough stupid people in the same place, they will end up making so many dumb decisions that they eventually destroy themselves. It is the extension of Darwinism from nature into society.

I grabbed a japanese TV show that someone recommended called “14-sai no haha” (”14 year old mother” — I know, scary name) the other day, despite the fact I couldn’t find it with english sub-titles. I tend to watch stuff “raw” (without subtitles) from time to time, but it always tends to be stuff that I do have subtitles for, or that I can obtain subtitles for. Most often, if not in every case, I have watched stuff after seeing it with subtitles, or I watch episode 10 of a show and I’ve seen episodes 1-9 already, with subtitles… in short, I always come with “baggage”, and it always makes it a lot harder than it really is.

If you’ve ever tried to learn another language and you’ve watched some show or movie or whatever, in that language, without subtitles, you inevitably think: “I am missing a lot of the subtle aspects of this show.”

If you really like it, you will refuse to miss those subtle aspects and do everything in your power to be able to get those as well. That in my case would mean some digging around for the show in question, with subtitles. In this case, it’s not out there. At least not as far as I know.

So I watched the first couple of episodes without subtitles, and aside from a few rapid-speaking-or-overly-complex moments, I didn’t miss anything of what was going on. In fact, I can without feeling guilty say that I understood everything. That may not sound too spectacular to you….

It made me realize something very important. When you read subtitles, and you listen to what they say, and you try to match the subtitles with what is being said, you will inevitably end up confusing the living shit out of yourself. Because what is happening is, your brain is trying to convince itself that “A” is synonymous with “B”, but as is the case with subtitling, especially with a language like Japanese, which differs tremendously from English, is that…

• The translators will not translate word-by-word. That if-do english into become-not. It would be a nice collection of words, and only the people who had been studying Japanese for awhile would even know what on earth was going on. The rest would go “these damn people don’t know english, and still they translate stuff…!”
• The translators will try to bridge the cultural gaps which are very much present in languages. For example, one translation I saw turned (Japanese) “Kalle-san…!” into (English) “Are you all right?” — now, that’s okay, cause even the freshest of language students will realize that “Kalle-san” doesn’t mean “Are you all right?”, but it serves as a good example for “conversions” that translators do. Conversions that you become so used to that you forget about them.

In my case, I get a lot of what I hear, as long as it’s easy and not complex and not too rapidly spoken and not too heavily dialected… and at this point, I sort of watch something, with subtitles, and listen to what is being said, and mostly, I can sort of agree with the subtitles. I compromise. My brain does. It gets some sentence, reads the subtitles, and after I think for a bit, I nod and say “Ah, yes. That’s true.” I kept thinking this was me simply not being, you know, fluent. I have to think for awhile before I can conclude that the translation matches. But it’s not so. I realized this when I sat back and let English and Swedish be something separate from Japanese. Listening, the meaning of what was spoken was clear to me. The translation into Swedish or English was not.

I’ve spoken a lot about this now, and I thought I’d repeat myself a bit. Back in the days (i.e. a year and some months ago) I wrote on this blog, saying I was going to “document” my developments in learning a language. I think I’ve done a pretty good job at it, so far, with the risk of boring the living shit out of those of you who don’t care about it. I’ve a lot left to go.

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Lovely. I wish they’d inform me about these things?

One thing you start noticing when you’re learning a new language, after awhile, is that things you presumed had to be a certain way can be a completely different way, or things you thought were necessary were in fact not.

One example of this is the case of ‘when’ and ‘if’, which especially interests me as they happen to be programming language keywords as well (at least ‘if’, not so much ‘when’).

So, what is the difference between ‘when’ and ‘if’? Initially I thought they were inseparable but I realized they’re only subtly different. ‘When’ has an air of presuming that it’s not a matter of if, but when (…oh!) something is going to happen, or alternatively, it is used to apply attributes to a condition that happens occasionally.

“When it rains it pours.”

It’s not a matter of whether or not it rains, or whether it will rain, it’s a matter of it pouring when it does. That could be rewritten as the title of this post, but that of course sounds odd.

Subtly different are also things like “If you come here I’ll give you coffee” versus “When you come here I’ll give you coffee”. Both have about the same meaning but the former is expressing an uncertainty about whether the listener will actually come or not. The latter expresses a presumption that, well, it’s not if, it’s when.

In Japanese, ‘when’ and ‘if’ are the same. This sort of makes sense, though, because when you speak Japanese, you in a way describe a state and then you affirm or deny the existence of that state. So saying things like “Oh. A cat.” would literally be done by saying “Oh. A cat exists.[1]” A lot trickier to grasp for a non-native is that things like “I have never gone to Japan” becomes “The concept of having gone to Japan does not exist.[2]”

Thus, minor details such as when versus if become less important. Consider the following:

“If class ends, I’ll hurry back home.[3]”

It’s not really a matter of whether class will go on for infinity. We’re sure it won’t. So when it ends, my hurrying back home will happen. If and when are nearly synonymous when used in this manner. We’ve already covered the difference between “if you come I’ll give you coffee” versus “when …”. It’s a nuance difference, not a difference in meaning.

—

1. 「あ。。猫がいる。」
2. 「日本に行った事がない。」
3. 「授業が終わったら、急いで帰る。」

There are three ways of understanding something that is spoken or written:

1. You can understand it through the ability to separate words in a sentence, by being able to correctly guess the spelling of the words, and by having a dictionary in which the words can be looked up. And the rest. “X Y Z”, where X means “I”, Y means “am”, Z means “hungry” becomes “I am hungry”.
2. You can understand it by knowing the words beforehand, and by “puzzling” the meaning of the sentence together. This basically means converting “X Y Z” into “I am hungry” in one’s head. In other words, the sentence is translated into one’s native language, and thus understood. Like #1, except without a dictionary, and generally much faster. Sometimes so fast it appears as if you didn’t do that translation.
3. You can understand the sentence “as is”, meaning no translation occurs. Instead, the individual words are associated with the stuff that makes up the meaning of the word, in the same fashion words in our native language have been given their meaning. “X Y Z” has a meaning all of its own. “X”, “Y”, and “Z” are the building blocks of the sentence.

Intriguing stuff. Speculations only, though am I wrong?

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

By Gwendolyn Brooks

One of the things that I had the least bit of a clue about when it comes to Japanese was how to locate a kanji (a “word”, of sorts) you don’t know, and as far as I can tell, there aren’t very many good descriptions out there explaining this process. From reading, I figured that it had to do with radicals. I found out that radicals were commonly reoccuring “parts” of a kanji, and that you could somehow look for a kanji in a dictionary based on the stroke count in the radical/kanji.

For you to actually understand what’s going on here, you need to know about stroke count. Briefly put, stroke count is the number of strokes to paint a character. This sounds simple. For example this “character” has 4 stroke counts, right?

Three horizontal plus one vertical. Except it’s not that simple. Look at this, for example:

The blue line is “stroke #1″ and the black line is “stroke #2″. The first stroke looks like two strokes, but it is done in a single motion, despite the abrupt curve. Now that we know that, we can look at actual kanji. As I said before, a kanji is usually divided into several, commonly reoccuring radicals. The image above with the blue and black? That’s a radical. Most radicals are actual kanji characters as well, but not all kanji are radicals.

I’ve talked about this for a while now but you still don’t even know what the problem is, unless you know something about Japanese (e.g. you are not Kalle’s friend, you are a student of Japanese). The problem is basically this: in the alphabet, you can just look at a word and read it out, hopefully pronouncing it somewhat correctly, but most importantly, you can take a dictionary for the appropriate language and find the word. Easily. A-Z Ea-z Eaa-z Easa-z Easia-z Easila-z Easily. And that doesn’t work in Japanese, unless you have the pronunciation for the word:

The above is a kanji character. That’s all you know at this point, and our goal is to figure out what it means. It’s an image, so you can’t copy-paste it into lookup’s edict dictionary (or its web equivalent) and get the answer handed to you. Instead, you need to do some puzzling. If you happen to be extra bright today, you’ll notice that the radical we talked about earlier is actually in the above kanji character. Lookit:

So why do we care? Because the way to figure out a kanji without knowing its pronunciation is to do a multi-radical search. It is also possible to use a dictionary (you know, one you hold in your hand), but frankly I don’t have one, and frankly I don’t care. So, back to radicals. The image actually contains two more radicals. One is a little tricky, because it includes the red-colored radical above (Eureka moment: a kanji can contain the same radical twice, if the radical has a simpler or a more complex variant, and searching on the simpler one works fine). So what other radicals are there?

This one! And…

… this one. As you see, the second one does have the little cross-shaped radical inside of it.

Sometimes you just don’t find that damn radical though. In those cases, you use the total stroke count for the entire kanji to see a list of alternatives. If you only say, it has this kanij:

… you will find 240 alternatives. In fact, it won’t even let you pick&choose. However, looking at the kanji itself again …

We can count the number of strokes. Which in this case happens to be 8. Adding ‘8′ to the stroke count and searching on that, we will find 24 alternatives. If we find both of:

And we search on those two, without stroke count, we get 4 alternatives. That’s nice. If we include stroke count we get 2 alternatives. If we’re unsure of the number of strokes (sometimes it’s hard to tell and you easily over-count), we can put in a range instead, e.g. 7-9, which would display the kanji with 7, 8, or 9 total strokes.

Okay. Just look at this picture:

Friend of mine threw the movie at me a couple weeks ago and I sort of forgot about it. Saw it just now. That movie scared the shit out of me. I’m not a christian myself, but that radio guy worded it very nicely. “God is watching. And he has a very special place for people who manipulate children for their own agendas. It’s not a nice place.” If you’re an evangelist christian, you need to see this movie. Or better yet, you need to get a fucking grip and stop it. You’re scaring me!

I’m a packrat. Especially when it comes to email and logs from conversations, I’m obsessive. I’m like a Gareth on steroids when it comes to these things. I have no idea why, but for instance, my email right now takes 613 megabytes. I have email dating back to July, 2001 (I did have email dating back to the 1900’s but unfortunately I lost it). In fact, here are the subject lines and dates of the 10 oldest emails I have — by topic (i.e. I’ve excluded all the replies and replies-to-replies on some of the entries):

1. [Tue July 31, 2001]: Re: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: SV: Historia.
2. [Sat October 20, 2001]: Welcome to Skotos! (No, that email was actually for a second account I created, because I’d forgotten my first account’s login info)
3. [Mon October 22, 2001]: XYZ account
4. [Mon October 22, 2001]: test banner
5. [Tue October 23, 2001]: Prelim rooms
6. [Wed October 24, 2001]: marble texture
7. [Thu October 25, 2001]: loki_update-full-… issue
8. [Thu October 25, 2001]: SV: And the hunt goes on…
9. [Fri October 26, 2001]: TWiki - Registration for SerConvoitise
10. [Wed October 31, 2001]: Your login details for Skotos Forums

Phew. Some of those seriously made me twitch. Let’s see if anyone can beat me (I bet Nino can, maybe, but not sure).

So, I possibly saw the coolest show ever, recently, but I’m going to make you work a bit if you want to figure out its name. Here are a few hints — if you can guess the show, well, then you’re a geek. *nods*

• It is 14 episodes long.
• You can watch it in two different ways, by episode, or in chronological order (which is made apparent in the show at each ending, because two different episode numbers are called out).
• If you watch it the episode-count way, it ends very dramatically and you think “Oh my, this was a great ending.”
• If you watch it the chronological order, it ends very softly/quietly and pensively, and you (or I did anyway) realize that that works too.
• It’s gotten a fan following unlike anything, and people have even started calling themselves [main character's name]ists.