express the relationship
Dec. 22nd, 2024 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiI’m gonna have to start off yet again with “I’m way behind on comments but if you’ve posted something I’ve read it and been thinking of you,” which, though true, I feel should only hold a limited number of times. End-of-year busy, away for a night or two, sick for a while, winter hibernating tendencies, no genuine excuses. Posting right now a bunch of accumulated paragraphs because I have too much work to do and I don’t want to do it, so I am pretending I have time to do this… .
New Year’s cards not sent yet; expect them, well, in the New Year. (As noted in my last entry, if you’ve gotten one from me before expect one again unless you notify me otherwise; if you haven’t and you want one, let me know a name/address to use.)
More math workbook translation—there are numerous problems in which two brothers (or occasionally two sisters) leave the house at the same time and proceed at different paces toward the library or the station, and I can’t help wondering why they’re all on such bad terms, why not just walk or bicycle together and get there together? And are the younger brothers(/sisters) old enough to be left to walk on their own? Also, there are problems like “express the relationship of these line segments etc. using symbols,” which always make me want to respond with “AB❤️C” or similar. I mean, it’s asking me about relationships!
A very old friend from college emailed me for the first time in something like twenty-five years to let me know he and his wife were visiting Japan and could we get together for lunch or something, so we did. We had a kind of difficult friendship in college (also I was, I think, unusual among his friends of any gender because I didn’t ever go to bed with him), but we were close and it was really nice to sit down together and catch up on the last few decades, finding out that each of us is doing okay, knock wood, with some shared interests and many new experiences.
I’m still not 100% (I always get sick around New Year’s anyway, it’s just a thing, I’ve decided) but a definite improving factor was a big pot of lentil soup made from, I think, trobadora’s recipe; I don’t know if it was the lentils or the paprika or the feta, but now I’m craving more of it. Also today a bowl of o-jiya for lunch; I like this very simple meal so much I put the recipe into a fic at some point, it’s just rice, tofu, egg, soup base, and sesame oil but so good.
Yuletide fic safely posted before deadline; needs a little tweaking (and a new title and summary) before reveals, but holds together (although for anyone who knows me it might as well have my name signed all over it). I think this is going to be the first year when I just do my assignment and no treats or pinch hits, for the reasons above along with just generally drifting away from fic writing (though not giving it up altogether!). Still, looking forward to all the good reading.
Most Saturdays I go to the free Saturday juku a couple towns over to spend three hours with junior high schoolers and their English homework, which is sometimes fun and often frustrating (mostly not the kids’ fault, they’re all nice kids if wildly varying in ability and effort). Sometimes there’s a gap of time while they’re doing test/workbook questions on their own, and I use it to write in longhand; I got about half my Yuletide fic this year done that way, along with a lot of what I wrote for the Guardian wishlist, and today—with no remaining fic obligations—about 300 words of my original thing, which felt very satisfying. I hate longhand, but maybe I should do it more often. (For the record, my handwriting is so terrible that it serves as an effective cipher no matter who might look over my shoulder.)
Rereading Helen Thorpe’s The Newcomers, an account of a year spent in an ESL classroom at a Colorado high school, with kids from the DRC, Burma, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, and various other countries, which is a lovely piece of writing (Thorpe is a terrific nonfiction writer in general), somewhat similar to another favorite, Brooke Hauser’s The New Kids, about a Manhattan high school serving similar immigrants. So many individual stories worth knowing about. Also makes me think of the nighttime junior high near here, where I hang out in two classes; English for Class E, mostly Korean-born ladies with an average age somewhere in the sixties, many of them Japanese-Korean bilingual, some of them obviously very bright and deserving of the education they didn’t get to have (also one man of similar age with a Japanese name, who may be one of the people born roughly before 1965 with a physical disability who missed out on the special education schools first established in 1977). Also Japanese for Class B, three Nepali teenagers, a Chinese-Japanese kid from Guangdong, and two recently arrived older Korean ladies, none of them fluent in Japanese yet. The Nepali kids in particular (one boy with a bright grin and a mustache, three girls with long hair and little high light voices) are all on the ball and quick to learn, I don’t know if that’s a culturally acquired habit or if they’re just a particularly with-it random selection. Everyone makes the same mistakes we did when I was first studying Japanese, よんがつ for ４月, はいてください for 入ってください。
Not enough farmboy Chinese words accumulated yet to list here, but I was thinking how lucky it is for learning purposes that Chinese isn’t as gendered/socially inflected as Japanese. There are certainly some words the farmboys use that I (as a semi-respectable middle-aged lady) would probably not, but compared to their Japanese counterparts…look, let me give you a couple examples. (Vaguely sociolinguistic waffling follows)
Photos: Seasonal.
Be safe and well.
New Year’s cards not sent yet; expect them, well, in the New Year. (As noted in my last entry, if you’ve gotten one from me before expect one again unless you notify me otherwise; if you haven’t and you want one, let me know a name/address to use.)
More math workbook translation—there are numerous problems in which two brothers (or occasionally two sisters) leave the house at the same time and proceed at different paces toward the library or the station, and I can’t help wondering why they’re all on such bad terms, why not just walk or bicycle together and get there together? And are the younger brothers(/sisters) old enough to be left to walk on their own? Also, there are problems like “express the relationship of these line segments etc. using symbols,” which always make me want to respond with “AB❤️C” or similar. I mean, it’s asking me about relationships!
A very old friend from college emailed me for the first time in something like twenty-five years to let me know he and his wife were visiting Japan and could we get together for lunch or something, so we did. We had a kind of difficult friendship in college (also I was, I think, unusual among his friends of any gender because I didn’t ever go to bed with him), but we were close and it was really nice to sit down together and catch up on the last few decades, finding out that each of us is doing okay, knock wood, with some shared interests and many new experiences.
I’m still not 100% (I always get sick around New Year’s anyway, it’s just a thing, I’ve decided) but a definite improving factor was a big pot of lentil soup made from, I think, trobadora’s recipe; I don’t know if it was the lentils or the paprika or the feta, but now I’m craving more of it. Also today a bowl of o-jiya for lunch; I like this very simple meal so much I put the recipe into a fic at some point, it’s just rice, tofu, egg, soup base, and sesame oil but so good.
Yuletide fic safely posted before deadline; needs a little tweaking (and a new title and summary) before reveals, but holds together (although for anyone who knows me it might as well have my name signed all over it). I think this is going to be the first year when I just do my assignment and no treats or pinch hits, for the reasons above along with just generally drifting away from fic writing (though not giving it up altogether!). Still, looking forward to all the good reading.
Most Saturdays I go to the free Saturday juku a couple towns over to spend three hours with junior high schoolers and their English homework, which is sometimes fun and often frustrating (mostly not the kids’ fault, they’re all nice kids if wildly varying in ability and effort). Sometimes there’s a gap of time while they’re doing test/workbook questions on their own, and I use it to write in longhand; I got about half my Yuletide fic this year done that way, along with a lot of what I wrote for the Guardian wishlist, and today—with no remaining fic obligations—about 300 words of my original thing, which felt very satisfying. I hate longhand, but maybe I should do it more often. (For the record, my handwriting is so terrible that it serves as an effective cipher no matter who might look over my shoulder.)
Rereading Helen Thorpe’s The Newcomers, an account of a year spent in an ESL classroom at a Colorado high school, with kids from the DRC, Burma, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, and various other countries, which is a lovely piece of writing (Thorpe is a terrific nonfiction writer in general), somewhat similar to another favorite, Brooke Hauser’s The New Kids, about a Manhattan high school serving similar immigrants. So many individual stories worth knowing about. Also makes me think of the nighttime junior high near here, where I hang out in two classes; English for Class E, mostly Korean-born ladies with an average age somewhere in the sixties, many of them Japanese-Korean bilingual, some of them obviously very bright and deserving of the education they didn’t get to have (also one man of similar age with a Japanese name, who may be one of the people born roughly before 1965 with a physical disability who missed out on the special education schools first established in 1977). Also Japanese for Class B, three Nepali teenagers, a Chinese-Japanese kid from Guangdong, and two recently arrived older Korean ladies, none of them fluent in Japanese yet. The Nepali kids in particular (one boy with a bright grin and a mustache, three girls with long hair and little high light voices) are all on the ball and quick to learn, I don’t know if that’s a culturally acquired habit or if they’re just a particularly with-it random selection. Everyone makes the same mistakes we did when I was first studying Japanese, よんがつ for ４月, はいてください for 入ってください。
Not enough farmboy Chinese words accumulated yet to list here, but I was thinking how lucky it is for learning purposes that Chinese isn’t as gendered/socially inflected as Japanese. There are certainly some words the farmboys use that I (as a semi-respectable middle-aged lady) would probably not, but compared to their Japanese counterparts…look, let me give you a couple examples. (Vaguely sociolinguistic waffling follows)
I probably wouldn’t say 贼 as an intensifier or 不 alone as a tag question on the whole (although I could most likely get away with them in casual chat with A-Pei, for instance, it’s not like she hasn’t heard me say 特么 and other minced oaths anyway), but most of the language the farmboys use is something I could use too. Whether it’s me or Farmboy A, we can both get away (I think) with saying something like 我饿死了，吃饭吧 (I’m hungry, let’s eat) without drawing a second glance. On the other hand, Imaginary Japanese Farmboy A, talking to his peers, is probably going to say something like 腹へった、飯食おうぜ (hara hetta, meshi kuō ze) in that context, where I would say お腹空いた、ご飯食べようよ (onaka suita, gohan tabeyō yo). You will notice that although Imaginary Japanese Guy A and I are saying the same thing in the same language, there isn’t one word pronounced the same (kind of an extreme example, but then again I didn’t even put in any pronouns). This is one of the fun things about Japanese in its way, but I’m kind of glad for practical purposes the same does not apply (much) to Chinese… (Or am I wrong? Correct me if so!)
Photos: Seasonal.
Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-22 12:30 pm (UTC)but a definite improving factor was a big pot of lentil soup made from, I think, trobadora’s recipe
If it's this one, it's
I think this is going to be the first year when I just do my assignment and no treats or pinch hits, for the reasons above along with just generally drifting away from fic writing (though not giving it up altogether!
I hope you'll eventually drift back to it! But yeah, sometimes treats just don't happen.
You will notice that although Imaginary Japanese Guy A and I are saying the same thing in the same language, there isn’t one word pronounced the same
OMG! I'm so glad I got into Chinese instead, LOL. Thank you for sharing these thoughts, I know very little about Japanese, so it's especially fascinating to me.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 02:09 pm (UTC)If it's this one, it's ysilme's originally! Glad it helped, and yeah, it's really good!
Yes, definitely that one! Appreciated, ysilme. When I make it it's more like a mess of pottage, I deliberately cook all the liquid away so you can't really call it a soup, but that's how I like it...
I'm so glad I got into Chinese instead, LOL.
lol, I originally chose Japanese because I thought Chinese sounded more challenging (and I still think the tones are harder than anything in Japanese). The varieties of gendered/socially inflected speech are a thing you get used to gradually and they're quite fun.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 09:19 am (UTC)I think the tones are harder in a completely different way, and yeah, I'm still failing so hard at those! But everything else about Chinese has been very up my alley, so that worked out well for me. *g*
no subject
Date: 2024-12-26 01:51 am (UTC)Happy medium in everything ;)
I think the tones are harder in a completely different way, and yeah, I'm still failing so hard at those! But everything else about Chinese has been very up my alley, so that worked out well for me. *g*
It's so neat when a language fits your brain that way :) I feel like any Chinese I've been able to learn has been thanks to the motivation of my helpful teachers Zhu Yilong, Liu Chang, the farmboys and so on (not to speak of online friends!), so I probably would have found it less rewarding if I'd tried to pick it up when I was eighteen...
no subject
Date: 2024-12-26 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-28 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-28 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-30 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-22 03:25 pm (UTC)New Year’s cards not sent yet; expect them, well, in the New Year
Yeah, same. I haven't even done mine as yet, but yes, I am at least hoping to send them out by end of the month.
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Date: 2024-12-23 02:03 pm (UTC)Sounds like you have had plenty on your hands; I figure cards are always welcome regardless of whether they arrive exactly on a given holiday or not ;)
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Date: 2024-12-22 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 02:04 pm (UTC)lol, exactly! You'd have to rewrite the problem as "If you are trying to lure someone to follow you by dropping enticing sweets at intervals..." ;)
no subject
Date: 2024-12-22 10:13 pm (UTC)Sometimes there’s a gap of time while they’re doing test/workbook questions on their own, and I use it to write in longhand; I got about half my Yuletide fic this year done that way, along with a lot of what I wrote for the Guardian wishlist, and today—with no remaining fic obligations—about 300 words of my original thing, which felt very satisfying. I hate longhand, but maybe I should do it more often.
Congratulations on getting useful writing done longhand, even if it sucks to do! Back in college I occasionally wrote fic in the back of lecture notebooks (literally flipping the pages backwards from the back cover) in classes where I was especially bored, I semi-recently found a whole X-Files and Twin Peaks crossover I wrote that way while trying to find some piece of information in the old lecture notes, lol. (Though really I think it was the writing lecture notes longhand that was one of the biggest contributing factors to trashing my wrist, so I can’t exactly recommend longhand anything…) Fountain pens are so helpful, though, this $5 Japanese fountain pen that I acquired for letter-writing this summer made it a lot more doable.
Rereading Helen Thorpe’s The Newcomers, an account of a year spent in an ESL classroom at a Colorado high school, with kids from the DRC, Burma, El Salvador, Mexico, Iraq, and various other countries, which is a lovely piece of writing
This sounds like a great read! (Sort of relatedly, glad to see Colorado school districts already standing up about Trump administration threats to their immigrant students, though needless to say I wish they didn’t have to.)
Nothing to say about the sociolinguistic stuff but loved reading it, thank you for sharing! And beautiful sunset photo, what a lovely mood <3
no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 02:07 pm (UTC)Yes, just what I do--at the Saturday juku now, and when I was a company employee I'd spend long boring presentations scribbling away, since very few other people there read any English at all ;) I agree that it's not great on the wrists. My writing is too messy to make a fountain pen viable, but that's a very handsome one.
I do recommend Helen Thorpe's writing; The Newcomers and Just Like Us are both about immigrants in Denver and read like novels. Right on Colorado school districts, oh dear.
and glad you liked the photos and the language rambling <3
no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 12:10 am (UTC)Fingers crossed the seasonal clears out and stays gone!
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Date: 2024-12-23 02:02 pm (UTC)and thanks for the good wishes! <3
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Date: 2024-12-23 02:04 am (UTC)Mmm, the lentil soup and o-jiya both sound delicious, and wonderful for winter.
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Date: 2024-12-23 02:02 pm (UTC)Winter food is the best...
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Date: 2024-12-24 11:04 pm (UTC)re: sociolinguistics and gender, the common refrain I hear is that CN learners struggle with keigo levels and conjugation while learning Japanese, which tracks with my experience and which I can see extending to gendered expressions due to the big differences between CN & JP. my pet theory is that chinese on its face may not be (to use an ill-fitting biology term asdfj) so obviously ~sexually or, uh, genderly dimorphic, and is more visibly divided along lines of class + identification with chinese ~Tradition~, though this is armchair conjecture and based on my own spurious anecdata. and as always, there's a lot of nuance I'm missing. fascinating topic though, and I'm sure there's sociolinguistic research about it!
no subject
Date: 2024-12-26 01:58 am (UTC)reassuring to hear <3 and one reason why I like it so much!
the common refrain I hear is that CN learners struggle with keigo levels and conjugation while learning Japanese, which tracks with my experience and which I can see extending to gendered expressions due to the big differences between CN & JP.
oh yeah, that makes sense! I remember talking with a Taiwanese guy studying in Japan whom I met randomly a while back--we were using Chinese because my Chinese was marginally better than his Japanese, but he kept saying "jìngyǔ" was the hardest thing in Japanese, and it took me FOREVER to mentally convert that into 敬语, which is always keigo for me lol. and yeah, the huge difference in usage between Chinese verbs and Japanese ones...
more visibly divided along lines of class + identification with chinese ~Tradition~
glad to hear more about your thoughts on this any time! I did feel, when trying to picture "random middle-aged lady" using any given Chinese phrase, I had to decide whether I was thinking about "beauty salon hair, pastel twinset and makeup" or "market stall lady with ponytail and down vest," although I don't know if you had that in mind when thinking about class. Anyway, I am always up for more armchair conjecture and anecdata.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-29 07:59 pm (UTC)Most Saturdays I go to the free Saturday juku a couple towns over
All the things you do <3<3<3
Beautiful fall foliage, and I like the contrast of the red taillights with the sunset, too. <3
no subject
Date: 2024-12-30 12:21 pm (UTC)yeah, I never get tired of thinking about the various weirdnesses of languages ;)
All the things you do <3<3<3
all the things I can do because I'm not raising children (or taking care of elderly parents, etc.) or working 9 to 5+ in an office! I have it easy.
Glad the taillights worked in the sunset photo! I couldn't get the sunset without the traffic in frame too...