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四月之子
Xi-laoshi, my Chinese conversation partner, recommended in passing that I get my reading practice from books designed for learners, like one she showed me called something like Beijing in Spring or The Four Seasons of Beijing, you can tell how seriously I was taking this genuinely thoughtful suggestion, I’m afraid. No! This kind of thing is why a lot of people don’t ever master languages! (Also an overgeneralization, I know—it works for some people—but still.) My f-list is full of people whose perfect English comes from TV shows and fic; I’ve just been reading Li Kotomi on learning her Japanese through anime and music. I got good at reading Japanese from a) middle-grade books aimed at Japanese preteens (I still fondly remember the first one I got all the way through, in which an eighth-grade girl daydreams about kissing her best friend, also a girl) and b) Japanese translations of novels I knew very well from having read them in English. I can’t imagine I’d have gotten even as far as I have in Chinese if I’d been dutifully reading graded readers, instead of watching dramas and the farming show and reading fics and the occasional article about Zhu Yilong. It only makes sense. Or am I biased? What do you think?
I finished my readthrough of the Joan Aiken Dido books, in general highly recommended. I think osprey_archer was talking about hesitating to read the later books because they get so dark, which is an interesting point. The two Is books--Is [Underground] and Cold Shoulder Road--are definitely dark in places, although not tonally so different from the rest of the series, and worth it for the characters and the wild plots and the language. The second-from-last book, Midwinter Nightingale, though, is the most bleak and depressing thing I’ve read in ages—most of the book is spent with various horrible people, and when we do see Dido and Simon they’re usually miserable and in trouble. It ends with a defeat for the villains, but I wouldn’t call it a happy ending in any sense. Not going back to reread that one. The very last one, The Witch of Clatteringshaws, which Aiken knew would be her last, also has its dark moments but is very funny here and there and ends genuinely happily. (I couldn’t resist the following selection, which is really not typically Aikeny at all but delightful.)
Y brought home this hilarious winter song called 布団の中から出たくない, ie “don’t want to get out of bed.” Highly recommended to anyone studying Japanese, and accessible even without Japanese thanks to the funny animation (for the southern hemisphere, they also have a summer song along similar lines). Although COMPLETELY different in style, I feel like clearly the Chinese equivalent is Liu Chang’s 再睡五分钟.
Since it’s timely, have Cesar Camargo Mariano (best known to me as Elis Regina’s husband, but also a great musician in his own right) doing April Child.
There’s a fancy coffee shop chain in Japan which uses city airport codes for its shop names, like NGS Coffee in Nagasaki and so on; the problem is that they’re based in Fukuoka, and so the company overall is known as FUK Coffee.
Photos: Spring is doing its thing and I have too many photographs, here are some and the rest will have to wait until the next post. 
Be safe and well.
I finished my readthrough of the Joan Aiken Dido books, in general highly recommended. I think osprey_archer was talking about hesitating to read the later books because they get so dark, which is an interesting point. The two Is books--Is [Underground] and Cold Shoulder Road--are definitely dark in places, although not tonally so different from the rest of the series, and worth it for the characters and the wild plots and the language. The second-from-last book, Midwinter Nightingale, though, is the most bleak and depressing thing I’ve read in ages—most of the book is spent with various horrible people, and when we do see Dido and Simon they’re usually miserable and in trouble. It ends with a defeat for the villains, but I wouldn’t call it a happy ending in any sense. Not going back to reread that one. The very last one, The Witch of Clatteringshaws, which Aiken knew would be her last, also has its dark moments but is very funny here and there and ends genuinely happily. (I couldn’t resist the following selection, which is really not typically Aikeny at all but delightful.)
‘...perhaps, in a hundred years’ time, this day will be remembered by our grandchildren as the day when a not very large force of English beat off an attacking army of Wends who wanted to turn this island into a place where everybody spoke Wendish. Don’t you agree?’
’What’s Wendish like, then?’ one of the men enquired.
Rodney Firebrace spoke up. ‘Wendish is an awful language. It’s highly inflected — there are nine
declensions of nouns—
‘What’s inflected?’ somebody shouted.
‘When words have different endings to express different grammatical relations. And Wendish has thirty different kinds of verbs. You have to decline them as well as conjugate them.’
‘What’s verbs?’
‘I hit. You run.’
‘Who says we run? We ain’t a-going to run!’
‘No way!’
‘Hooray for English verbs!’
‘We don’t want no foreign verbs!’
‘Are you all with me, then?’ called Simon.
‘Sure we are!’
‘Let’s go!’
‘We'll show those Wends the way back to Wendland!’
‘Let ‘em wend their way!’
Also, anyone reading the Dido books should not miss lionpyh’s post-series fic Now, in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high, which is one of the best fics I’ve ever read in any fandom ever as well as being an immensely satisfying conclusion.’What’s Wendish like, then?’ one of the men enquired.
Rodney Firebrace spoke up. ‘Wendish is an awful language. It’s highly inflected — there are nine
declensions of nouns—
‘What’s inflected?’ somebody shouted.
‘When words have different endings to express different grammatical relations. And Wendish has thirty different kinds of verbs. You have to decline them as well as conjugate them.’
‘What’s verbs?’
‘I hit. You run.’
‘Who says we run? We ain’t a-going to run!’
‘No way!’
‘Hooray for English verbs!’
‘We don’t want no foreign verbs!’
‘Are you all with me, then?’ called Simon.
‘Sure we are!’
‘Let’s go!’
‘We'll show those Wends the way back to Wendland!’
‘Let ‘em wend their way!’
Y brought home this hilarious winter song called 布団の中から出たくない, ie “don’t want to get out of bed.” Highly recommended to anyone studying Japanese, and accessible even without Japanese thanks to the funny animation (for the southern hemisphere, they also have a summer song along similar lines). Although COMPLETELY different in style, I feel like clearly the Chinese equivalent is Liu Chang’s 再睡五分钟.
Since it’s timely, have Cesar Camargo Mariano (best known to me as Elis Regina’s husband, but also a great musician in his own right) doing April Child.
There’s a fancy coffee shop chain in Japan which uses city airport codes for its shop names, like NGS Coffee in Nagasaki and so on; the problem is that they’re based in Fukuoka, and so the company overall is known as FUK Coffee.
Photos: Spring is doing its thing and I have too many photographs, here are some and the rest will have to wait until the next post.
Be safe and well.
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and I'm glad you liked the photos <3
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Ha, I can absolutely see how that would prejudice you against them. Maybe try the Mandarin Companion ones and see what you think?
(In the end, I think it comes down to whatever keeps you motivated. That's what I meant when I said I was a bad example: I've drifted off completely. /o\)
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Ooh, I just want to add an enthusiastic: I agree! It doesn't matter how effective a strategy is if you never use it, and even an inefficient strategy will work fine if you like it enough to keep doing it. (Or as my sister says of learning Spanish, "It doesn't matter if it takes me five years; the years are gonna pass anyway. I might as well learn Spanish while it's happening.")
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the years are gonna pass anyway. I might as well learn Spanish while it's happening.
Haha, so true. <3
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Yeah, Chinese learners really benefited from the massive government push to export both language and culture starting around the time of the Beijing Olympics. There's a huge amount of learner material that just isn't available for most languages. A quick (not well researched) google search indicates that Mandarin Chinese may be one of the top languages when it comes to volume of learner content, after English, Spanish, and French.
That said, I have five tomes of Chinese-Korean graded reading, so I wonder if you'd have any luck looking for (bilingual) English graded readers for Korean speakers?
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Ohh, that's why. That's so cool!
And that's a great idea about looking for reverse-for-me graded readers, ha! I'll have a look around. Thanks! <3
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(and I still don't think you're a bad example; you did it at one point, you're not doing it now, if the need arises you can always do it again).
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(I will just add that the reader that kicked off my flurry of language-learning activity in early 2023 contained a bunch of random, bonkers short stories including time-travelling pirates. IOW, I agree that the content has to be engaging to make me want to keep at it. Alas, I'm not very motivated by folk tales.)
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oh my, yeah, that definitely sounds like a way to learn the word apple (and also the word fish).