like morning glory vines

[nnozomi]

・Here's the Chinese word for the...duration: 一片浆糊, all confused/muddled up.

・grayswandir taught me how to use Anki for active as well as passive practice, which is great. I need more vocabulary (and more listening practice) but I'm always either too busy or too lazy/out of it, when will I get serious.

・I've been listening to the "Spanish Hour" (L'heure espagnole), Ravel's gorgeous, funny, moving 1-hour opera set in a clock shop. The comic would-be lovers, Gonçalve the poet and Don Inigo the businessman, actually have genuinely beautiful music [I mean, they are both would-be lovers of Concepción, the heroine, not of each other, although that staging could also work!], and then there's calm Ramiro the postman who spends the hour moving clocks back and forth upon demand, until Concepción finally asks him to come up to her room one more time. "And which clock would you like me to bring?" he says obligingly. "Neither one!"

・With help from china_shop at write-every-day (I find it easier when the person posting is closer to my time zone, I guess?), I've been making some progress on my original thing. The problem is kind of opposite to the first volume, where the pace started out very slow; everything is happening at once and I need to keep all the plot strands together and making sense.

・Photos. Some flowers etc. (the white and purple ones from my in-laws' garden); a hairdresser offering an unusual service; and two more which need a longer explanation. I've been reading Kakehashi Kumiko's account of a train trip around Sakhalin (the long skinny island north of Japan which was a Russian colony and then a Japanese one and then Russian again), and it brought to mind an old photo album I bought years ago at a used book fair. A few times a year there are large-scale used book fairs held outdoors at temples or shrines, with dozens of stalls and huge numbers of books; they are lovely to browse but also kind of frustrating, because you know there are books you want somewhere, you just may never find them in the confusion. The English selection is smaller but dependably weird and sometimes promising; I found a very old edition of Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (or is it the other way around) once for the equivalent of two dollars. The other thing I always look for is ephemera, old photo albums and school yearbooks, prewar if I can find them.) This one has photos taken from a 1930s boyhood in Sakhalin (Karafuto) when it was Japanese, with occasional comments like "with my brothers" and "everyone says this picture doesn't look like me" and so on. God knows how it found its way here, but I feel like it's an honor to have. A couple of photos of photos--a baseball team in "Saghalien" uniforms, a group of friends.



Be safe and well.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

I have to wonder how they keep the cat still for long enough.

The photo album looks fascinating.

[nnozomi]

I have to wonder how they keep the cat still for long enough.
lol, my thought was that they turn you into a cat and groom you? (In sober reality it's just a spelling error, but still.)

The photo album looks fascinating.
It is! Frustrating not to be able to find out who the people were and what happened to them, but neat.

[elenothar]

The problem is kind of opposite to the first volume, where the pace started out very slow; everything is happening at once and I need to keep all the plot strands together and making sense.

It's always one or the other, isn't it...

[nnozomi]

It's always one or the other, isn't it...
Too true, where is the happy medium?

[china_shop]

I find it easier when the person posting is closer to my time zone, I guess?

I know what you mean. I'm glad it's working for you this month! :D

The other thing I always look for is ephemera, old photo albums and school yearbooks, prewar if I can find them.

That's so cool. <333

[nnozomi]

That's so cool. <333
They are a lot of fun to look through! <3

[chestnut_pod]

Now, is the perm for the cat, or does it turn your hair into the shape of a cat?

That photo album is a treasure!

[nnozomi]

Now, is the perm for the cat, or does it turn your hair into the shape of a cat?
I assumed they offer turning-you-into-a-cat services! (Well. I think it's just a spelling mistake, but still.)

That photo album is a treasure!
It is! I love finding these things.

[tinny]

Good luck with anki! I talked to grayswandir in that same post, and overlooked all the advice they gave you for at least two rounds of comments before I noticed. This is cool info! (Although I'm more the handwriting type than the keyboard-writing type.)

Lovely lilies!

The hair salon with the "cat" on it cracked me up.

Awesome old photo album. <3

[nnozomi]

(Although I'm more the handwriting type than the keyboard-writing type.)
I wonder if there's a version somewhere that will let you do that...(I hate writing Japanese or Chinese by hand, so I'm just relieved not to have to ;) )

The hair salon with the "cat" on it cracked me up.
Me too. It would be super rude to go tell them there's a spelling error on their sign...but who knows, maybe they really do offer turning-into-a-cat services... 🐱

[tinny]

I wonder if there's a version somewhere that will let you do that...

;) I did check before I made the guardian handwriting Anki decks. There was nothing *complete* yet, but of course there were the libraries for stroke order and for writing a character in anki, I just had to combine them into the deck. But the characters don't stick in my memory that well when I practice them separately as opposed to writing whole example sentences.

[nnozomi]

But the characters don't stick in my memory that well when I practice them separately as opposed to writing whole example sentences.
Yeah, that makes sense. (When I was first studying Japanese I lived in a college dorm where the hallway walls were white tile, so I used to write the characters all over the walls with erasable marker...End result, I read fluently and write like an 8-year-old.)

(And thanks again for the Anki-with-real-voices! I love it.)