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Sore and achy and no longer able to understand the *Japanese* of Gankutsu-ou, let alone the French. All those people on AMLA who said you can't learn a language after 17 unless you're a linguistic genius from Brazil who can follow conversations at machine gun speed? They were right. I give them best. A gaijin can never learn Japanese so there's no use trying. Ditch your kanji dictionaries, throw away your Japanese for Busy People, abandon your plans to move to Japan. You won't learn it here and you won't learn it there because you can't. Period. Full stop. OK?
So I spent a couple of hours with the Chinese poetry collection![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kickinpants sent me, the one that has the hanzi printed beside the translation, and a pen and a notebook, writing out the hanzi and looking up the ones I don't know in the hanzi dictionary mvrdrk sent me and trying to figure out what these utterly gnomic utterances might mean before looking at the translation. Because if I'm going to not-learn a language, I might as well aim high and not-learn Chinese instead.
And my does it take me back a dozen years to when I was doing this in Japanese. What's the radical of this fershlugginer thing? Fire? Lid? Christ, sun? It's not under the fire radicals-- or the lid radicals-- or the sun radicals. OK OK, let's count strokes and then go squint at the list of all ten-stroke hanzi, not that not that not that notthat notthat notthat notthat (repeat 60 times) THERE it is no.5762 flip-flip-flip and its radical is... fire. But it wasn't listed under the fire radicals!!! see see see oh uh there it is. Twelve years ago I didn't need to wear glasses to do this but now I do. A magnifying glass might help as well.
Especially when I find a hanzi that the dictionary says means 'military commander, general' in the middle of a poem about wine, and the translator renders it as 'think,' and try as I might I can't find a similar-looking hanzi that means anything of the sort. Doesn't mean it's not there; just that 90 minutes of this exercise makes the eyes go round. Or maybe it's similar to what happened to the Old English disig, which meant foolish, and selig, which meant holy, that have now become dizzy and silly. Only in this case it's umm meliorative drift, yes? to go from military to intelligence?
So I spent a couple of hours with the Chinese poetry collection
kickinpants sent me, the one that has the hanzi printed beside the translation, and a pen and a notebook, writing out the hanzi and looking up the ones I don't know in the hanzi dictionary mvrdrk sent me and trying to figure out what these utterly gnomic utterances might mean before looking at the translation. Because if I'm going to not-learn a language, I might as well aim high and not-learn Chinese instead.And my does it take me back a dozen years to when I was doing this in Japanese. What's the radical of this fershlugginer thing? Fire? Lid? Christ, sun? It's not under the fire radicals-- or the lid radicals-- or the sun radicals. OK OK, let's count strokes and then go squint at the list of all ten-stroke hanzi, not that not that not that notthat notthat notthat notthat (repeat 60 times) THERE it is no.5762 flip-flip-flip and its radical is... fire. But it wasn't listed under the fire radicals!!! see see see oh uh there it is. Twelve years ago I didn't need to wear glasses to do this but now I do. A magnifying glass might help as well.
Especially when I find a hanzi that the dictionary says means 'military commander, general' in the middle of a poem about wine, and the translator renders it as 'think,' and try as I might I can't find a similar-looking hanzi that means anything of the sort. Doesn't mean it's not there; just that 90 minutes of this exercise makes the eyes go round. Or maybe it's similar to what happened to the Old English disig, which meant foolish, and selig, which meant holy, that have now become dizzy and silly. Only in this case it's umm meliorative drift, yes? to go from military to intelligence?
no subject
no subject
The poem goeｓ (and I hope this prints)
知有前期在
難分此夜中
無將故人酒
不及石尤風
I picked it at random so I can't find who wrote it without leafing through several hundred pages. And yes, it's a perfect coincidence that only one hanzi in it isn't a familiar Japanese one ^_^-- though place names are the death of me.
no subject
You do aim high. =) I googled a phrase, and this here thing is Tang dynasty, by Sikong Shu (司空曙). It's mostly pretty stylized, and quite condensed to fit the form. Is your book 300 Tang Poems?
Just in case you run into this name "Du Kang" (likely in Li Bai's verse) - it's sometimes used as an euphemism for wine. Purported inventor of wine and all that.
no subject
The anthology is called Poems of the Masters in English, 千家詩, the classic collection I-am-told of classic poetry.
no subject
^_^ Truthfully? I do that a lot when I read that language too. I can recognize the words but don't remember the sounds, or I know the sounds but can't reproduce the characters without seeing them. Pity, that, because it's easier to search them in a dictionary by pinyin.
Ranty
Re: Ranty
Re: Ranty
(Does double take. There was a time when Russia and China were on good terms? They've hated each other from the time that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary-- which is the rather neat English common-law-is-it? way of saying for as long as anyone can remember.)
Re: Ranty
For greater fun with wtf-does-that-sound-like, my mother would prefer the traditional phonetic system, another set of symbols which look like runes or something. Which is frankly terrifying even in concept for me.
Re: Ranty