I have been trying to find programs in Japanese to watch on TV as the more Japanese I hear the better.  In the past I watched Infomercials but sometimes these just don’t hold my attention.  For a while the only thing I watched in Japanese was the F1.  This has taught me some interesting phrases for describing how cars move around a track but I wanted to find more to watch than this.

In the past month I have found a couple of new things to watch.  One of these is karaoke TV.  We have the Star Karaoke channel which plays a lot of karaoke songs and the Popular Music Channel which has charts of karaoke songs.  Being able to listen to someone sing the words whilst I read them is really helpful.  It is improving the speed at which I can read hirigana and the 200 kanji that I have learnt as well as improving my accuracy.  These programs can be hard for me to watch as they contain a lot of Japanese music that I don’t like but they do play lots of slow songs with the words written underneath.  And sometimes I do hear something I that I like.  Today I heard a group which I think was called “Tenjochiki” which I quite liked at a first hearing.

The second thing I have been watching is the Sci-Fi channel.  I hadn’t realised we had this channel, as it wasn’t one of the ones we selected when we got the Sky Perfect box, but I’m glad I have found it. They have been showing Buffy the Vampire Slayer dubbed in Japanese.  I have all of Buffy on DVD so I have been watching the episodes in English and then watching the Japanese versions.  These are really hard for me to understand but I am starting to understand some of the things being said.

What I would really like to find is something that was made in Japanese that is interesting enough for me to watch even if I can’t understand most of it.  Most people suggest anime but so far I haven’t found any I like.  And I can’t even easily tell people what I have been watching as I can’t read the titles of the programs!

I was reading some Japanese today in which a girl described her friend’s family. It was all really normal until I got to the line “your Dad is handsome”. I don’t think I have ever told a female friend that her Dad was handsome. At first I thought it was because the word seems old-fashioned but I had difficultly thinking of a more modern word. My teacher suggested “good-looking” or “attractive” but both these seemed to be a strange way to describe a friend’s Dad. I realised that the problem had to do with sexual connotations and how I think a female friend would react if she thought I found her father attractive.

As a teenager I would have avoided describing anyone’s family members in any way that would have made my friends think that I found either their brothers or Dads attractive. Children don’t like to think of members of their family as sexual and even some adults don’t cope well with the concept. And I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think I was only her friend because I thought her brother was hot.

In Japan the adjective handsome does not imply that the person is sexually attractive and refers only to the person having a pleasing or dignified appearance. My teacher assumed that the meanings would be identical because the Japanese word is a loan-word taken from English.

I wonder if I think the word means more than that because I associate it with the “handsome prince” in fairy tales who goes on to become the heroine’s lover or is at least someone who is desired?

I spent hours at the end of last week trying to translate a Japanese children’s story. Tonight I am trying to write one. I decided to pick something vaguely Irish to write about though it took a while to work out what story to tell. My first thought was of the legend of Finn MacCool. This was never told to me as a proper story but more as a series of snippets - “built the Giant’s Causeway”, “created the Isle of Man” - and neither of these scenarios inspired me. In the end I decided to write a short story based on a Leprechaun I have called Seamus. This pulls in a variety of elements from Leprechaun stories including a pot of gold and a red ribbon. So far I have only managed three sentences in Japanese. I need to finish this by Tuesday morning.

I was trying to translate one of Mint’s blog posts when I came across the following idiom, “内輪のノリ”. Google translate usually gives amusing translations and this one was no exception: “noli private”. “Noli” should really be “nori”. Nori usually refers to food that is wrapped in nori seaweed - like balls of rice or rolls of sushi. The phrase talks about the private part that is inside the nori, which seems a strange thing to put in a sentence about the organisers of London.pm. My dictionaries don’t help with idiomatic phrases but I assume that this idiom actually means a clique and is much more colourful than that English word.

We finally received the results for our Japanese exams. Unfortunately I didn’t pass mine. I knew when I was studying that it would be a close thing but I had hoped that I would manage to scrape through. In the end I only got 56% overall. I did do as well in the kanji and vocabulary as I was expecting getting 78% in that section but it was the grammar section that let me down.

On a happier note Marty did pass his. And I’m thrilled as his qualification was required for a course he would like to study.

My linguistics course contains lots of really interesting material but unfortunately has really boring assignments. The last assignment was so awful that I considered giving up the course as I didn’t want to spend my spare time on something I wasn’t enjoying. To help with the tedium I decided to find something to do with the new knowledge that actually interests me.

I have been reading about collocates - words that are typically grouped together such as “law and order” and “fish and chips”. What interests me is the introduction of new collocates. I read a study by Fairclough who had analysed 53 speeches given by Tony Blair. The word “new” occurred 609 times and the most frequent collocates were “new labour” and “new deal”.

I am also interested in the Perl community, how it is perceived and how it perceives itself. If I analyse the blogs of various members of the community what are the collocates of “Perl” going to be? Some are going to be obvious - “Perl community”, “Perl 6″ - but what unexpected ones will I find? And what has changed in the last few years? What did we talk about in the past that is no longer important to us and what is the latest thing to be linked with Perl?

I am starting to get overly sensitive about the use of gender specific terms in technical blogs. I really don’t mean for this to happen but tonight, when reading Schwern’s use.perl journal, I did wonder why he had to use the phrase “Gentlemen, start your RSS readers” as the word “gentlemen” makes me feel excluded. I assume that this is based on a quote “Gentlemen, start your engines” and I know that Schwern is not in any way saying that women shouldn’t subscribe to his RSS feed but I did notice it - and I’m not convinced I would have a year ago. So something has changed.

It could simply be that studying language has made me more aware of the words that people use or that in 2007 I read a lot of posts about gender and sexism. It could also be because Schwern’s post is about a new blog that discusses geek communication which made me look more critically at how he was communicating the news.

I don’t find the phrase offensive but it did make me stop and read the line again and make me wonder if there was a better way to have said it.

I come across strange English in Japan all the time but usually it’s just bad spelling (like the restaurant last night serving “plane croissants”). I was looking on-line at hotels in Universal Studios Japan and saw the following description of a room:

We present you with the time for nesting peacefully your wing of dream fluttered at the Park.

Beautifully spelt words that don’t make much sense when put together like that.

I was slightly baffled by the level of disgust Perl Buzz reported over the title of the Linux Journal article regarding the release of Perl 5.10. To me the headline was simply an editor using innuendo and word play to attract attention to a rather dull press release. I have been trying to work out if there is some cultural difference I am missing as, although the phrase “put out” is pejorative, I certainly don’t think it’s offensive enough to warrant that reaction. Maybe to an American like Andy (the author of the Perl Buzz post) it has a stronger meaning than it does to me coming from Northern Ireland.

I am also confused by the things that Perl Buzz are calling on the editors of the Linux Journal to do especially “explain to us what will be changing at Linux Journal so we think of LJ as worthy of our time, trust and readership.” Who is the “us” that Andy is referring to? Is it the editors at Perl Buzz and if so why on earth would the Linux Journal ever feel the need to explain anything to them? Perl Buzz can’t possibly assume that it speaks on behalf of the entire Perl or Open Source community and I find it detracts from anything sensible they are saying when they write as if they are.

Is the article merely an attempt by Perl Buzz to create more of a “buzz” about their blog? Because if their article is really about how wrong they think it is for the Linux Journal to print such headlines and ads why on earth are they re-printing them on the front page of their blog so that I someone like me, who never reads the Linux Journal, gets to see the material?

I am not a fan of Japanese Enka but I really wish the singer in the hotel lounge would sing more of it. She has a pleasant voice and is a talented pianist but she keeps insisting on singing songs in English with the occasional Enka song thrown in. It’s not her voice that’s killing me but the pronunciation of the songs. I can’t cope with songs like “When I Wish Upon a Stair”, “Mimories”, and “Shimwhere Over the Lainbow”. Why am I still sitting here? It’s the only part of the hotel with a wireless network and I wanted to play Scrabulous. But I think I’m just going to go to bed.