OOOOOOHHHHHHH Fortress Blog. How do I love thee. Let me count the ways.
Ok.
So now that we actually have some dispersia, disappearia, etc whatever going on, now the blog is cool again. I actually thought for a while that something had died inside fortress blog, because apparently its not hosted on sammich anymore. Or something like that. The internet is a very wierd and scary and strange place, and no place for any one with a rating of 3 or less on the Rubenburg-Goldschwagger Vector Personality Quotient Ratio Inquisition Test. Or R-GVPQRIT, naturally. Now, I can hear you people out there, the ones that say "But what about the Melkenschatz-Hurkel-Schwazwurski Quantifier for Mental Capacity To Not Be Dumb? Hasnt that been clinicly proven to be 8.3% more accurrate in cases involving severe stage fright and hypothermia?" Of course, of course. But we're talking about cases where the subject has severe dandruff.
Has anyone else noticed that Yahoo Answers is just a giant rumor mill, but people just use a bunch of technial words to make their answers sound like they have some kind of merit? My favorite answer to "Is it true? If they smoke, they poke?" starts off like "As a man I cannot speak for all women, but generally, ..."
I've been grappling with learning Japanese for some time now. And I've come to, not a conclusion, but the momentary resting place where it seems to me that I never learned how to speak English. I just kind of did it because thats what everyone else was doing at the time, and I guess that seemed appropriate. But now, if I want to say something in English, I just start working my mouth and making noise with my throat, and people generally appear to understand WTF I'm talking about.
But it doesnt work that way with Japanese. I have to remember what order to put words in, and usually if I dont think about it for a minute it comes out more or less inconceivable. Sometimes I basically say something in English using Japanese words. which is quite a trick, let me tell you.
It doesnt stop there. I have no idea how I understand what people are telling me in English. Why do I know this or that without sitting and thinking about word order and grammar and tense etc? Beats the hell out of me. And reading. What I've decided, true or not, is that I actually have some kind of preprocessing on Japanese text that converts it to English before concious comprehension gets a hold of it. If that were true, that might be helpful in some respects, but would I actually be learning Japanese? Is learning Japanese just learning how to interpret meaning, or do I need a larger awareness of the context of the language? I mean, is it enough to understand what people are saying, or should I also understand why they're saying it, even though those reasons are not explicitly stated?
Phew.
Ok.
So now that we actually have some dispersia, disappearia, etc whatever going on, now the blog is cool again. I actually thought for a while that something had died inside fortress blog, because apparently its not hosted on sammich anymore. Or something like that. The internet is a very wierd and scary and strange place, and no place for any one with a rating of 3 or less on the Rubenburg-Goldschwagger Vector Personality Quotient Ratio Inquisition Test. Or R-GVPQRIT, naturally. Now, I can hear you people out there, the ones that say "But what about the Melkenschatz-Hurkel-Schwazwurski Quantifier for Mental Capacity To Not Be Dumb? Hasnt that been clinicly proven to be 8.3% more accurrate in cases involving severe stage fright and hypothermia?" Of course, of course. But we're talking about cases where the subject has severe dandruff.
Has anyone else noticed that Yahoo Answers is just a giant rumor mill, but people just use a bunch of technial words to make their answers sound like they have some kind of merit? My favorite answer to "Is it true? If they smoke, they poke?" starts off like "As a man I cannot speak for all women, but generally, ..."
I've been grappling with learning Japanese for some time now. And I've come to, not a conclusion, but the momentary resting place where it seems to me that I never learned how to speak English. I just kind of did it because thats what everyone else was doing at the time, and I guess that seemed appropriate. But now, if I want to say something in English, I just start working my mouth and making noise with my throat, and people generally appear to understand WTF I'm talking about.
But it doesnt work that way with Japanese. I have to remember what order to put words in, and usually if I dont think about it for a minute it comes out more or less inconceivable. Sometimes I basically say something in English using Japanese words. which is quite a trick, let me tell you.
It doesnt stop there. I have no idea how I understand what people are telling me in English. Why do I know this or that without sitting and thinking about word order and grammar and tense etc? Beats the hell out of me. And reading. What I've decided, true or not, is that I actually have some kind of preprocessing on Japanese text that converts it to English before concious comprehension gets a hold of it. If that were true, that might be helpful in some respects, but would I actually be learning Japanese? Is learning Japanese just learning how to interpret meaning, or do I need a larger awareness of the context of the language? I mean, is it enough to understand what people are saying, or should I also understand why they're saying it, even though those reasons are not explicitly stated?
Phew.
Labels: fall, scooter vacation
