So, I finally went down to Clark to register for the Japanese class next year. It really isn’t easy to make progress while self-studying; I look forward to the opportunity to take the formal class. Still, after registering, I was put into a position I hadn’t been in since freshman year: wandering a foreign campus [...]
A while ago I wrote about the postfix nature of the japanese language. Basically, this means that a whole lot of information is conveyed through suffixes, postpositions, and such… and the verb goes at the end. Now. One of the first things I learned is that to identify a person’s nationality, add the suffix -jin [...]
Last night I had a dream in Japanese. It was kind of funny, because I had no idea what was going on; I’m not nearly fluent enough to handle that yet. Eventually it devolved into a cacophony of disjointed phrases, some of which I understood, but the vast majority of which I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’m [...]
Gah. Prefix notation is very easy to parse. Infix notation is a little wonky, but english-speaking people are used to it. Postfix isn’t theoretically any more difficult to parse than prefix, but you have to maintain a memory buffer into which the components are put until the whole structure parses out properly; as the operator [...]
So. I’ve got flashcards, with the hiragana and katakana on them. I’ve got tapes with exercises, and I’ve got two textbooks. I seem to be pretty well set up, in terms of beginning the self-study of Japanese. On the other hand, both of the textbooks use roumaji, which I’ve heard is the horrible, in terms [...]