¡Sarah!

Oh man I haven't updated my lists in forever. Books!

Hitching Rides With Buddha: A Journey Across Japan, Will Ferguson
In which the author chronicles (mostly humourously) his attempt to hitchhike from one end of Japan to the other. It's a pretty neat book and would probably make for an interesting introduction to Japanese culture. There were some parts where I disagreed with Ferguson - at some points it seemed like he was trying to pass off culture shock as something one only experiences in Japan, and of course I didn't care for his quick dismissal of J-pop - but I have to admit I loved the passage on Noh and yeah, overall I really enjoyed this book.

Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empire, Bob Thomas
So a few years ago I read Neal Gabler's fantastic 800-odd-page Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, and every Disney biography I have picked up since has just paled in comparison. Unfortunately that remains true for this, the only biography I've seen so far of Walt's older brother and business partner. Building a Company isn't a bad book, and it included a number of passages that were new to me and really interesting, but I wish it was better organized and more fleshed out so that I could more readily recommend it. Less than a hundred pages into the book and we're already at Disneyland's opening day, what is that?!?

Also omg the last chapters made me so sad it was ridiculous.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, Arika Okrent
My own contact with conlangs is pretty much limited to that month or two in high school where I was sorta kinda learning Esperanto but stopped when I realized it was boring me. I borrowed this book from the library not actually expecting that I would read it. (I know that doesn't make sense. Don't ask questions.) Instead, I whipped right through it and now I'm sad to be done! This is a super interesting book about languages that people have created. Okrent profiles the creators behind the best-known conlangs, gives quick explanations of how the languages work, and discusses the themes that emerge when one looks at the hundreds of conlangs that we know of. There are also really interesting passages that describe certain features of natural languages, emphasizing the fact that words have certain meanings not because of any logical reason, but because that's what we agree that they mean!

Also, as someone who dropped Esperanto because its artifice bored her, I really enjoyed the chapters where Okrent described her experiences with Esperanto culture - and even with the evolution of the language! Of course now it seems obvious to me that if a conlang has speakers, it's going to evolve, but somehow that had never occurred to me before. So interesting!

So yeah - of the three books in this post this one is my favourite, and you should all be nerdy like me and read it because it's awesome. :D

I love how listening to Disney songs in foreign languages is something that even people who aren't interested in foreign languages sometimes do. xD (And something I did even before YouTube, ngl.) I was partaking in this most excellent of activities last night and I managed to get stuck on "That's How You Know" from Enchanted for like half an hour. Here it is in Japanese (although the subs are a little off in parts and it's irking me), Latin American Spanish, and Quebec French (haters to the left, 'cause that's my favourite kind of French xD ). I had completely forgotten how much I love this song! Fingers crossed that Alan Menken writes the songs for the sequel. <3 (The sequel is due in 2011? Oh my god, it's going to be another Pirates and Enchanted year and I AM SO DOWN WITH THAT.)

Uh ... insert some deep observation here. I'm off to find some more Disney dubs to listen to. xD (I'm also kind of in love with the Latin American Spanish version of "I Won't Say I'm in Love," mostly because of the way Megara sings "no van a oir" and "porque no todo es maravilloso." Awesome!!)

So just now I finally joined Lang-8! It's a language exchange site; you write journal entries in the language you're studying, and native speakers can come along and correct them. A site that lets me mess around in my second languages AND asks me to correct others' grammar mistakes?? I seriously can't believe it took me this long to sign up. xD

Anyway, this is me! If any of you happen to have a Lang-8 account, let's be friends!! :D

Sometimes I feel the need to write an entry about Pirates of the Caribbean just to ensure everyone knows that my love for these movies runs deeper than my love for pretty much anything and everything else.

That's a bit of a winding introduction just to say I've discovered that on YouTube one can watch the entire trilogy dubbed into Spanish. As one of my nearest and dearest hobbies is watching and rewatching my favourite movies dubbed into any of the languages I can kind of understand*, I think I can safely say that the rest of my weekend is shot. :D

* I've already seen the Pirates trilogy in Japanese, and was perhaps way too fascinated by the whole "kokoro"/"shinzou"/"haato" thing. xD AND THEN IN AT WORLD'S END THEY MESSED UP MY FAVOURITE LIIIIIIINE D':

Anyway, I apologize if this is all I want to talk about for the next month or so. :D Who here remembers when I was equally obsessed with Prisoner of Azkaban in its Spanish dub? OH WHO AM I KIDDING I STILL AM

So I just signed up for the Continuing Studies Korean class, because I am insane and apparently I like to pretend I don't already have two languages on the go. xDD But oh man I am excited!! Studying languages is the best. :DD

So to sum up: a month from now, I will have an MJ class on Wednesday nights and a Korean class on Thursday nights, and I'm pretty sure you are jealoussssss. xD

~ I just had a surprisingly pleasant five days of work! I say "surprisingly" because I was in box office the entire five days, and so it could easily have gone worse, but I don't think I had a single frustrating guest the entire time! Faith in humanity: RESTORED!! I also sold a bunch of tickets to This Is It, including once while "The Love You Save" was playing over the lobby radio (I still don't quite understand how that song has made it into our Top 40 station, but it's cool that it has!).

~ I studied Japanese for an hour today, awesomesauce!! :D I learned a couple new grammar points, so that was awesome. I basically cannot explain how happy studying grammar makes me. Anyway, for much of my JLPT studying this year I've been doing the exercises in this book, but now that I'm very nearly done it I decided to shake things up a bit and start doing the exercises in this book, which just arrived for me this week. :3 WHY YES that book is all about learning the Level 2 grammar points in a mere forty-five days! We are getting close to test date and I am getting nervous. D: I also got another book that's all for learning the Level 2 vocabularly in fifty days, hahaha. Too bad I no longer have fifty days!!

(Man I do love my growing collection of foreign language textbooks. xD I definitely also own a textbook or two for languages I'm not even studying ...)

In conclusion, I fully expect my November 2009 to be all about NaNoWriMo and the JLPT, and not much else. I am looking forward to a month of obsessing over studying, it reminds me of when I was studying around the clock for the AP Spanish exam and pretty well lost my ability to understand English. xD WORTH IT.

~ In other news, Facebook just told me I should reconnect with a co-worker I saw every day this week and last saw four hours ago. Oh Facebook, you know me so well.

My dad and I went to a Rick Steves talk/book signing this evening, and overall it was pretty interesting (he's not as much of a dork in real life, haha), but there's one thing that has me a bit baffled. He expressed regret over the idea that five languages go extinct every year; but later he admitted he only speaks English. I guess I just feel that he can't be too upset about disappearing languages if he can't even be bothered to learn something as mainstream as French, especially when his job has him going to Europe for four months out of every year. :P

ahaha yes my month-long obsession with the Trojan War seems to be over, and now I am back (after too long an absence) to being crazy about languages. I spent three and a half hours yesterday doing kanji practice just for funsies, haha, so yeah, you know I've got it bad. xD;

Some days the only reason I post is because I notice I have been completely knocked off of athena_crikey's friends page. xD;

So today I was thinking about my high school language classes, and some of the weird things we were taught that I would do my very best to teach much more better, were I ever to become a high school language teacher.

Spanish: Stem-Changing Verbs
As much as I adored the teacher I had for Spanish 11, 12 and AP, taking her class was somewhat of an adventure. For example, one day, halfway through class, she decided I had missed a test and was going to write it RIGHT NOW. As I was the most hardcore Spanish 12 student you ever did see (99% on the provincial exam and a 4 on the AP exam, if I may brag for just a moment about my only bragable accomplishments so far), I was able to write it and do just fine on it, but at the same time ... what??? And that's pretty much how she taught us stem-changing verbs. One day, halfway through class, she decided it was time to tell us about their existence. And so she did. And then we moved on.

Hopefully this is not a common experience in high school Spanish classes, because dude. It's kind of important, don't you think? hahaha I love that I wrote the Spanish AP exam not even really understanding this stuff. xDDD; And yet I got a 4, and that's just how hardcore I am. <3

Spanish: "Me Gusta"
"Me gusta" does NOT equal "I like" and yet that's how we were taught it, and I strongly suspect this is how it is taught in most high school Spanish classes. And don't get me wrong, I can definitely see why it's done this way. "Me" is a direct object pronoun, and "me gusta" seems to usually be taught very early in Spanish classes, long before students have to deal with the more nitty gritty bits of grammar. Also, I had the rowdiest classmates my first year of Spanish, and I don't doubt for a moment that teaching "gustar" as "to please" would have caused giggles and comments galore. But I still think it's wrong to teach it wrong! I mean, oh man, all the problems my classmates were having with "me gusta" even into Spanish 12, it was ridiculous, and could've perhaps been prevented by better explaining the grammar of the phrase, or maybe even going so far as to not teach it at all until it's time to learn about direct object pronouns.

(Meanwhile there are kids like me who go home and look all this stuff up. The Internet was willing to teach me about direct object pronouns even when my teacher wasn't! xD; )

French: Preceding Direct Object
I know athena_crikey has heard me rant on this subject before, way back in grade 12 when I began to decide exactly how awesome a language teacher I would be. xD But man, I still can't get over this one! As Language Guide tells us, The past participle of the passé composé will always reflect the gender and number of a preceding direct object. Were we taught about this necessary agreement when we were taught about preceding direct objects? Uhm, no. Decidedly not. When were we taught it? AN ENTIRE YEAR LATER. That's absurd. ABSURD!!

Now, okay, I admit. When I was first presented with the idea that in French, direct object pronouns came before the verb, I definitely left class that day with a headache. It just completely blew my mind. So perhaps that was not the day to bring up this nasty agreement business. But it's ridiculous that they waited a whole year to inform us about it. I mean, I'm pretty sure that in the meantime I wrote sentences that were completely wrong. I definitely remember reading things in French and being confused by all the extra letters. Unfortunately this is one thing I didn't think to look up. :/

Japanese: "-masu" Form Before Dictionary Form
I was teaching myself Japanese for about a year and a half before I was able to get into a class that my school didn't cancel a week into the semester, and I knew there might be some weird little issues as I adjusted to the way my classmates had been learning the language during the time I was unable to join them. The only one I really remember (other than the fact that I was way ahead of everyone, oh man it was ridiculous - I was in Japanese 11 in the same classroom at the same time as the tiny Japanese 12 class, and on occasion they would lean across the aisle to ask me for help), though, is that every verb my classmates had been taught, they had been taught in the "-masu" form. My guess is that this was done because "-masu" form is more polite than dictionary form, but my opinion is that it's ridiculous. Two years into their Japanese studies and these guys can't even properly look up a verb in the dictionary?? And now they're being taught how to convert verbs from "-masu" form to dictionary form?? That's the most backwards thing I've ever heard!! Students in the Romance languages have to get used to conjugating ALL VERBS ALL THE TIME, so I don't know why our teachers felt it necessary to hide even the existence of the dictionary form from their students for two whole years. I mean, honestly.

(And let's ignore for the moment the many issues I have with the teaching of kanji. You just ... don't want to go there.)

IN CONCLUSION, were I to ever become a high school language teacher, I believe I would have a little speech to give on the first day of each of my classes, and it might go a little something like this. Learning a language is hard work. You'll memorize a lot. You'll practice a lot. You'll fill page after page with verb conjugations and kanji practice. And still you won't understand everything. You'll make millions of mistakes. You'll leave class sometimes with a headache. And I'm not going to dumb it down for you. Because learning a language is hard work. But it's never impossible, and it can be one of the most awesome and fascinating and rewarding things you ever do.

I daresay I would be the least popular teacher at my school. xD;

ahahaha YES I have been feeling like quite the language major lately, despite the fact that I'm not actually taking any language classes this semester ... ? xDDDD!

To save you my ranting about how many times I rolled my eyes during 10,000 B.C. (and I am not an eye rolling person), I shall simply share my two favourite parts. Spoilers I guess, but I'm not LJ-cutting because probably no one cares.

1) Our Heroes are walking through dense jungle. A monster keeps whipping through the plantlife and attacking people. No one can see what this creature is, until the big reveal. The animal that has had the audience (my overexcited co-workers) jumping in their seats for the past ten minutes is ...

Are you ready for it?

A dodo bird.

OH I LAUGHED I THOUGHT I'D DIE

2) This dude from another group of people was able to fluently speak the language of Our Heroes because the father of one of Our Heroes passed through his village "a long time ago" and taught it to him.

DEAR HOLLYWOOD THAT IS NOT HOW LANGUAGE WORKS SINCERELY SARAH

P.S. YOU CANNOT JUST VOICEOVER "AND THEN THEY FELL IN LOVE" AND HAVE IT BE TRUE!!! I have said this before why won't you listen~~~~ ;_; ;_; ;_;

(Hahaha this review is perfect.)

I am currently surfing through Spanish sites about the Trojan War. Because I don't want to sleep!! This page is so cute. Hehe, "el caballo de Troya." I have no idea why I find that so funny. Because it is late? I like looking at all the different names. Homer = Homero, The Iliad = La Ilíada, The Odyssey = La Odisea, Agamemnon = Agamenón, Mycenae = Micenas, Helen = Helena (or Elena?), Menelaus = Menelao, Hector = Héctor, Andromache = Andrómaca, Achilles = Aquiles, Briseis = Briseida, Paris stays the same. (Don't mind me, I just find this terribly fascinating. XD ) Of course I am not surprised to see all these differences, because in English itself there are like a million ways to spell these names. Next year I will discover how one actually writes them in Greek! Oh it will be so exciting! ^_^

I think it is interesting that this year Spanish seems to be my favourite of the languages I am learning. Because I have learned so much and it has been so interesting!! Last year Japanese was my definite favourite, but I haven't been doing as much as I should be with it lately. In grades nine and ten French was in the lead. Well, I think it's interesting. Probably not good for actually learning, but whatevah.