Heavy...

I'm studying the adjectives from the JLPT 4 list that I'm not solid on yet. One of them is 重い (omoi) which means "heavy." It's kind of similar to 遅い (osoi) which means "slow" and 面白い (omoshiroi) which means "interesting." There are a lot of adjectives in this list like short, weak, thin, light, etc., and almost all of them end in "~い", which makes them easily confused.

In order to study for the JLPT 3, I've started going through and making sure I understand everything on JLPT 4 (which is included - the lower the number, the higher the level). I found a list of the vocabulary for the test online and I used TextWrangler to strip out the HTML and replace table cell tags with pipes | so I could then import the whole thing into Excel as a spreadsheet. Basically, I created a very simple database. Within Excel, it's pretty easy to sort by column (I have hiragana, kanji, English, part of speech, and number in the list).

I added a column and then spent about an hour or 2 going through and marking all the words I already know from the list. Out of the 728 words on the list, I feel confident about 500 of them, so now I'm going through the remaining 228 words. I made flashcards for about 35 of them today, and I'll continue like this through the rest of the month. I hope to have all the vocab and kanji for JLPT 4 down, cold, by the end of July.

I added 4 more columns to my list of words I don't know. These columns are examples using the word in Japanese and the corresponding English in the next column. I included 2 examples (for the total 4 columns) for each of the words I was struggling to memorize. This has been really helpful for grammar and context, but also just for memorization.

Which brings me back to "heavy." I found a great way to say "He's lazy" in Japanese. Usually, I'd just say "彼は怠け者です。" - He is a lazy person. But this is much more interesting:

彼の尻が重い。

"His ass is heavy."

Sometimes I really love Japanese.

further on the "ideo-" issue...

So, real issue is that the symbols mean WORDS rather than IDEAS.

Um, ok. Sure. Yes. Fair enough. So perhaps "logographic" or "lexigraphic" might be better than "ideographic." Certainly.

I think this starts to beg the question about the difference between an "idea" and a "word." Seems also really easy to end up down a road that ends in Plato's Cave, too.

The real question this raises for me, though, is compound kanji that are made up of radicals - smaller versions of stand-alone kanji that, when combined, create a new kanji - therefore, a new word. A good one is "mori" 森　which is made up of three small versions of "ki"　木. Ki means tree, and mori means forest. This makes some sense. And I would argue that that's more than just a "word" - it's a word made from other words to convey a more complex idea involving the first word. So, OK, maybe I'm falling into the whole "simple early learner" trap mentioned before. But at some point we have to acknowledge that WORDS exist for the explicit purpose of communicating IDEAS, and are, in fact, representations of ideas, no matter the language. Obviously, where the early theorists went wrong was overstating the issue. But this guy feels sort of overcorrective, and that can totally cause problems, too.

Another fun example of compound kanji: "noisy" - 姦　"woman" - 女　(this is a bit unfair, though. that symbol is also part of the words for "adultery" and "rape" as well as "crafty" and "scheme" and "villain." So it's not necessarily good to be with many women, and the multiple women thing can express several ideas. However, there's also this proverb: 女三人寄れば姦しい - "Wherever women gather it will be noisy."

Visualizing Sounds

The following quote sums up something I've been kicking around in my head for the last few years, really:

"I am interested in how to give form to something that is formless. Formless things have many qualities, among them sound, movement, atmosphere, taste, light and shadow, and I am particularly interested in sound, There are many ways to interpret sound, My first step being to translate the sound [into] an onomatopoeic word. My own country of Japan has many onomatopoeic words.

Furthermore, the Japanese katakana alphabet is used to communicate foreign words by breaking them down into their constituent syllables. These translated foreign words are unique to the Japanese language.

I believe there is a universal communicative quality to sound as opposed to language. In Japanese, onomatopoeic words are often used to describe events which have no sound, thereby creating an imaginative link between language and reality. I am interested in investigating ways of communicating to as many people as possible through sound, In the visual language this would be akin to road signs, traffic signals, toilet signs, and hazard patterns. I am also interested in describing sound through visual language. For example, in Japanese manga comics a loud sound is often signified by larger, bolder letters. I am currently exploring this idea further."

YES. Hell yes. This is part of what I've been struggling with in dealing with academic disdain for graphic novels/comics, film, etc. It's also something that drives me nuts about academic English study and "writing." I wish I could find a quotation from Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book - Ewan Macgregor plays an author who meets an Asian woman of mixed heritage. She is a calligrapher, and asks his job. He answers "writer." She tells him to write something for her, and he is confused, then writes one word on a piece of paper. She becomes angry and tells him that he is no writer, and there is no beauty in his word.

This exchange is telling. I need more time and focus to articulate this more, but I'll return to it here soon. But one thing that keeps striking me so much about living in Japan and learning Japanese is the way that the language is so phonetic and yet so visual. One character can be a whole concept, but it has a specific set of pronunciations that don't really deviate. But the roman alphabet is so far removed from its pictographic origins that we don't at all associate (for example) the letter A with a bull's head anymore, and we've even abandoned characters like thorn that are at least pseudo-representative visually. One telling aspect of the differences between Japanese and English is a notion I have that we, American English speakers, tend to think in words and ideas. When we write, we're not very often transcribing sounds directly. Instead, when we speak we are rendering into sound symbols that stand for ideas. This transition happens when we become literate, obviously (if it's real) -- but think about the way you speak. How often do you say the terminal "g" in a word ending in "ng," like "ring" or "ding" or "thing." I'm not talking about if you say it now, thinking about it - I'm talking about in normal speech. We tend to say "reen" and "deen" and "theen" -- those are horrible transliterations, but since I'm not sure if I can even render the International Phonetic Alphabet online, they're gonna have to do. "Gonna" is a great example. So is "kinda" and "sorta." Those words are renderings of ways people actually pronounce things.

In Japanese, spelling changes to match pronunciation, and this is just seen (and treated) as accuracy. There are still "wrong" ways to write, say, and do things, but there's a much greater sense of proper rendering in writing "se ya na" to mean the Kansai dialect version of "sou desu ne" even though "se" is actually a corruption and quick way to say "sou." The same goes for "sugei" and "yabei" which are really just masculine informal ways to say "sugoi" and "yabai." They are rendered as pronounced, every time, even though they come from these other words. This is seen as merely informal, rather than as "wrong" or "incorrect."

It's too easy right now to get off on too many tangents. Meanwhile, I'll eventually bring this all back to subtitles on Japanese TV, the ABC show Heroes, and comic books. Oh, and literature and desktop publishing.

more on "Yabai"

If you look at the "title" area of this blog (and you can read Japanese, I guess), you can see that it says "Yabai Oyodo." I chose that because of the duality of the word, as I mentioned in the previous post.

Well.

It really IS a dualistic word. For example, I was watching an American TV show here, and it was subtitled. On the show, a driver nearly hits someone with his car and says "Jesus!" This was translated in the subtitles as "Yabai!"

So "yabai" means, sort of, "damn." In a way. Like, "Damn! I nearly killed that guy!" or "Damn! She's fine!"

Weird.

Damn Oyodo, indeed. Or Damn! Oyodo!