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nnozomiWhile I’m thinking of it: December’s coming up and about time for me to think about sending New Year’s cards. You know the drill: if I haven’t sent you a card before and you’d like one, DM me with a name and address to send it to, likewise if your name/address/etc. has changed, or if you’d rather not get one this time around.
Silly language stuff: I realized the other day that I’d inadvertently done a Tom Swifty in the thing I was writing, along the lines of “he was making tea adroitly with one hand.” (Of course, it could have been his left hand! But still. I guess in that case he would have been making tea gauchely, or else sinisterly… .) Also, I keep seeing people refer to the well-known dictionary as “Miriam Webster,” and now I want to work a minor character with that name into a story somewhere, just for fun. I always liked the name Miriam.
While Y is not what I would call fannish per se, he is sort of fannish-aware thanks to a long history with manga, anime, and games, plus he looks tolerantly on my fandom-related hobbies (“oh, is it time for the Christmas transformative-creation event already again? good luck!”). He texted me the other day to say “there are two girls in archery-club gear sitting in front of me on the train canoodling like nobody’s business, pure yuri!”
Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 赫马佛洛狄忒斯, an enormous transliterated mouthful of a title that renders down to “Hermaphroditos” (nicknamed 小赫马 by fans). The lyrics, by the pseudonymous 沃特艾文儿 (“Whatever”), always strike me as really surprisingly queer for a mainstream Chinese song, when you put together 每个名词都分男女，标签贴给我也贴给你，可仍有人坚信不疑牵手同行就能做情侣 (all the nouns are divided between male and female, with labels stuck on me and you, but there are still people who never doubt that you can be a couple if you hold hands and journey together) and 愚人的眼光里才没彩虹悬挂天际 (it’s only the fools who can’t see the rainbow hanging in the sky) and 世界是个什么东西，是个巨大的柜子而已…容纳谁都容纳不了你 (what is the world, it’s just a giant closet…no matter who they enclose, they can’t enclose you) and 深知爱就该百无禁忌 (deeply knowing love means having to ignore all taboos) and 我爱你是你，只因你是你 (I love you being you, just because you’re you). All that aside, it’s also a just plain good song with an irresistible rhythm in the chorus.
In ongoing architectural exploration, we went to see another Vories building, the Osaka Church, which is very simple and very lovely, although I have to say if you’re going to have a rose window I want it to be stained glass, not plain. Planned down to the angle of every pew. Old-fashioned portative organ in very beautiful wood sitting next to a modern piano, plus a pipe organ up in the loft. The church is open to visits on condition that visitors attend a service first, so we sat through half an hour of a noonday service: organ music (a Messiaen piece and something from the Messiah, I forget which one, and one I didn’t know), hymn-singing, the Lord’s Prayer (having spent six months in my youth attending a CoE school for reasons, I found I could still back-translate from the archaic Japanese to the “hallowed be Thy name” version), and a short sermon by a young woman pastor, possibly Chinese or Korean from her first name and very faint accent, wearing an immaculate trouser suit. No proselytizing of the visitors, much appreciated; if I lived nearby I might even visit the services regularly for the organ and the windows.
Because I do some volunteering for the local YMCA (very long story), I spent a day as a volunteer interpreter for…how can I explain this succinctly…a group of professionals (social workers, pastors, farmers, teachers, etc. etc.) from various developing countries who are spending several months in Japan studying to become “rural leaders.” They were visiting the day laborers’ district here, with a tour in the morning and a lecture and discussion in the afternoon.
Translation work can give you a lot of access to other people’s family privacy. I felt very bad for the little girl whose documents passed through my hands the other day, to the tune of her baby immunization record, second- and third-grade report cards (it’s always a little surreal to translate report-card comments like “She paid attention in class very well this year, but needs to work on forgetting fewer things”), and her parents’ divorce and custody agreement. Then there was another little girl of similar age, transferring from a prestigious private elementary school in Kyoto to a similar one in Tokyo, maybe a professor’s child subject to the whims of university employment. Also a family register in which the date of marriage preceded the first son’s date of birth by only six months, making me wonder as always where it actually fell on the range from 100% shotgun to “well, we’re getting married soon, why wait.”
One of the other issues with this kind of work is that young children in particular tend to have far-out names, and the clients usually don’t advise you how to pronounce them. Japanese is (I think) unique this way, in that a) the writing system is mostly not phonetic and b) while there are standard character readings, most characters have multiple standard readings plus you can basically decide to pronounce them any way that comes into your head, which is the way a lot of parents name their children, presumably without considering that the kids will have to spend their whole lives explaining how their names are pronounced and spelled (speaking from personal experience, albeit through a different process). So all you can do with names is take a wild guess. Place names are just as bad, since they are often distorted by long history into weird forms; I had hundreds of addresses to transl(iter)ate lately and had to look up almost every single one, just to be sure. I think the worst offender this time around was a place called 福谷, which could be Fukuya or Fukutani or Fukudani just in normal terms; in context it turned out to be Ukigai, God help me. Places like this constitute regional shibboleths of sorts; a couple more I’ve come across personally include 酒々井 and 柴島, where you just have to know how to read them or you’ll never guess.
Photos: Lots of seasonal fruits and leaves. Persimmons usually look much nicer than they taste, but we recently received bounty from my father-in-law’s kumquat bush and the fragrance is wonderful. Also the railway at sunset, and Kuro-chan the elder who noticed me passing by and stopped me with an imperious meow, in order to make use of me as a heating device usefully equipped with a mofu-mofu function (not a good picture, but my other hand was occupied). 
Be safe and well.
Silly language stuff: I realized the other day that I’d inadvertently done a Tom Swifty in the thing I was writing, along the lines of “he was making tea adroitly with one hand.” (Of course, it could have been his left hand! But still. I guess in that case he would have been making tea gauchely, or else sinisterly… .) Also, I keep seeing people refer to the well-known dictionary as “Miriam Webster,” and now I want to work a minor character with that name into a story somewhere, just for fun. I always liked the name Miriam.
While Y is not what I would call fannish per se, he is sort of fannish-aware thanks to a long history with manga, anime, and games, plus he looks tolerantly on my fandom-related hobbies (“oh, is it time for the Christmas transformative-creation event already again? good luck!”). He texted me the other day to say “there are two girls in archery-club gear sitting in front of me on the train canoodling like nobody’s business, pure yuri!”
Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 赫马佛洛狄忒斯, an enormous transliterated mouthful of a title that renders down to “Hermaphroditos” (nicknamed 小赫马 by fans). The lyrics, by the pseudonymous 沃特艾文儿 (“Whatever”), always strike me as really surprisingly queer for a mainstream Chinese song, when you put together 每个名词都分男女，标签贴给我也贴给你，可仍有人坚信不疑牵手同行就能做情侣 (all the nouns are divided between male and female, with labels stuck on me and you, but there are still people who never doubt that you can be a couple if you hold hands and journey together) and 愚人的眼光里才没彩虹悬挂天际 (it’s only the fools who can’t see the rainbow hanging in the sky) and 世界是个什么东西，是个巨大的柜子而已…容纳谁都容纳不了你 (what is the world, it’s just a giant closet…no matter who they enclose, they can’t enclose you) and 深知爱就该百无禁忌 (deeply knowing love means having to ignore all taboos) and 我爱你是你，只因你是你 (I love you being you, just because you’re you). All that aside, it’s also a just plain good song with an irresistible rhythm in the chorus.
In ongoing architectural exploration, we went to see another Vories building, the Osaka Church, which is very simple and very lovely, although I have to say if you’re going to have a rose window I want it to be stained glass, not plain. Planned down to the angle of every pew. Old-fashioned portative organ in very beautiful wood sitting next to a modern piano, plus a pipe organ up in the loft. The church is open to visits on condition that visitors attend a service first, so we sat through half an hour of a noonday service: organ music (a Messiaen piece and something from the Messiah, I forget which one, and one I didn’t know), hymn-singing, the Lord’s Prayer (having spent six months in my youth attending a CoE school for reasons, I found I could still back-translate from the archaic Japanese to the “hallowed be Thy name” version), and a short sermon by a young woman pastor, possibly Chinese or Korean from her first name and very faint accent, wearing an immaculate trouser suit. No proselytizing of the visitors, much appreciated; if I lived nearby I might even visit the services regularly for the organ and the windows.
Because I do some volunteering for the local YMCA (very long story), I spent a day as a volunteer interpreter for…how can I explain this succinctly…a group of professionals (social workers, pastors, farmers, teachers, etc. etc.) from various developing countries who are spending several months in Japan studying to become “rural leaders.” They were visiting the day laborers’ district here, with a tour in the morning and a lecture and discussion in the afternoon.
All of them speak some amount of English but very little Japanese (although they had all picked up “daijobu”), so interpreters were needed. There was me and a younger American woman and two older Japanese women, one a high-school English teacher and one a sometime tourist guide, as well as two adorable high school girls. My group for the morning tour was me and the former-guide lady and half a dozen of the rural leader students (from India, Indonesia, Zambia, Cameroon, Vietnam and I forget where else), as well as the Japanese tour leader; I ended up doing all the interpreting (I urged the other lady to jump in but she just said “oh I couldn’t possibly)," which was not bad because I already know the district and its history quite well (a friend wrote a book about it that I might translate some day).
For the lecture in the afternoon, five of us switched off interpreting: it was clear that the two high school girls could only get through with constant help and even so managed only a sketch of the original lecture, while the American girl and the older Japanese lady did okay but missed some of the nuances in each direction; to brag unrestrainedly, I think I was the clearest and the most stable and accurate of the five. And really I should be ashamed not to be, after all, being the closest to a professional among them (although interpretation and translation are very different).
I had fun—interpreting is always exhausting, but almost always exhilarating as well—and enjoyed getting to interact with the visiting students a little (a very serious woman from Vietnam with a series of complicated questions, a Cameroonian pastor with a long beard and shorts, and so on). I was also really annoyed (typical, I’m afraid) at the way the whole thing was run. Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful, and the group discussion was particularly badly run (the discussion questions were TERRIBLE, and I signed on to be an interpreter, not a facilitator. Although I did get to explain to a doubtful Zambian guy just why the Japanese birth rate hasn’t gone up in sociopolitical terms, with an Indian lady cheering me on). Also, in theory I am absolutely in favor of giving high school kids a chance to try out interpreting, but if the participants are actually going to get anything out of the event, the interpreters have to have more or less professional-level skills even if they’re not getting paid even professional-level peanuts.)
For the lecture in the afternoon, five of us switched off interpreting: it was clear that the two high school girls could only get through with constant help and even so managed only a sketch of the original lecture, while the American girl and the older Japanese lady did okay but missed some of the nuances in each direction; to brag unrestrainedly, I think I was the clearest and the most stable and accurate of the five. And really I should be ashamed not to be, after all, being the closest to a professional among them (although interpretation and translation are very different).
I had fun—interpreting is always exhausting, but almost always exhilarating as well—and enjoyed getting to interact with the visiting students a little (a very serious woman from Vietnam with a series of complicated questions, a Cameroonian pastor with a long beard and shorts, and so on). I was also really annoyed (typical, I’m afraid) at the way the whole thing was run. Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful, and the group discussion was particularly badly run (the discussion questions were TERRIBLE, and I signed on to be an interpreter, not a facilitator. Although I did get to explain to a doubtful Zambian guy just why the Japanese birth rate hasn’t gone up in sociopolitical terms, with an Indian lady cheering me on). Also, in theory I am absolutely in favor of giving high school kids a chance to try out interpreting, but if the participants are actually going to get anything out of the event, the interpreters have to have more or less professional-level skills even if they’re not getting paid even professional-level peanuts.)
Translation work can give you a lot of access to other people’s family privacy. I felt very bad for the little girl whose documents passed through my hands the other day, to the tune of her baby immunization record, second- and third-grade report cards (it’s always a little surreal to translate report-card comments like “She paid attention in class very well this year, but needs to work on forgetting fewer things”), and her parents’ divorce and custody agreement. Then there was another little girl of similar age, transferring from a prestigious private elementary school in Kyoto to a similar one in Tokyo, maybe a professor’s child subject to the whims of university employment. Also a family register in which the date of marriage preceded the first son’s date of birth by only six months, making me wonder as always where it actually fell on the range from 100% shotgun to “well, we’re getting married soon, why wait.”
One of the other issues with this kind of work is that young children in particular tend to have far-out names, and the clients usually don’t advise you how to pronounce them. Japanese is (I think) unique this way, in that a) the writing system is mostly not phonetic and b) while there are standard character readings, most characters have multiple standard readings plus you can basically decide to pronounce them any way that comes into your head, which is the way a lot of parents name their children, presumably without considering that the kids will have to spend their whole lives explaining how their names are pronounced and spelled (speaking from personal experience, albeit through a different process). So all you can do with names is take a wild guess. Place names are just as bad, since they are often distorted by long history into weird forms; I had hundreds of addresses to transl(iter)ate lately and had to look up almost every single one, just to be sure. I think the worst offender this time around was a place called 福谷, which could be Fukuya or Fukutani or Fukudani just in normal terms; in context it turned out to be Ukigai, God help me. Places like this constitute regional shibboleths of sorts; a couple more I’ve come across personally include 酒々井 and 柴島, where you just have to know how to read them or you’ll never guess.
Photos: Lots of seasonal fruits and leaves. Persimmons usually look much nicer than they taste, but we recently received bounty from my father-in-law’s kumquat bush and the fragrance is wonderful. Also the railway at sunset, and Kuro-chan the elder who noticed me passing by and stopped me with an imperious meow, in order to make use of me as a heating device usefully equipped with a mofu-mofu function (not a good picture, but my other hand was occupied).
Be safe and well.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-28 04:14 pm (UTC)I have to agree with you about the rose window, though otherwise Osaka Church looks pleasant.
福谷 = Ukigai is just evil... This makes me think about the phenomenon of mentally mispronouncing words you've only seen written. My friends and I have laughed about the English words we've mispronounced since childhood (and there are some I still get wrong...). But this must exist for Japanese on an even larger scale.
Lovely photos! I love the trees, and that railway sunset is amazing. And awwww, a very comfy-looking kitty.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 03:06 pm (UTC)Absolutely <3 (I can't find out much about the lyricist, but she also did the lyrics for 麦芒 and for several Zhou Shen songs among others.)
This makes me think about the phenomenon of mentally mispronouncing words you've only seen written. My friends and I have laughed about the English words we've mispronounced since childhood (and there are some I still get wrong...). But this must exist for Japanese on an even larger scale.
Oh, same on all counts. To some extent I think it's not as bad as it _could_ be in Japanese because books for younger kids have furigana pronunciation characters, and even adult-oriented books have them on really tricky words, but I'm pretty sure it does happen here and there anyway...
and glad you liked the photos! I was very sorry to have to eventually put the cat down and go about my day.
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Date: 2025-11-28 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 03:04 pm (UTC)and definitely a cat with cute ears ;)
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Date: 2025-11-29 02:39 am (UTC)it's relieving to hear I'm not alone in not being able to infer the right pronunciation for place names right away! mandarin has nothing on japanese with multiple readings...
oh that interpreting gig sounds like a fun, challenging handful; one thinks if the organisers put in some effort much more could have been harvested from the event! with gathering people from those different professional fields together.
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Date: 2025-11-29 03:03 pm (UTC)YOU SAID IT, on all counts. Mandarin does occasionally do me in that way （没 mo/mei, 着 zhe/zhao and so on) but compared to Japanese it's so straightforward.
one thinks if the organisers put in some effort much more could have been harvested from the event! with gathering people from those different professional fields together.
to be fair this was just one day out of a few months of study for them as a group, but even so, yeah, the organizers could have made a lot more out of it than they did.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 04:19 am (UTC)This is also me when I see people talking about Yuletide 😂
Taking that song rec, thank you!!!
Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful,
It's so annoying, like why are they even in charge!!!
Persimmons usually look much nicer than they taste,
Oooh interesting! I've only ever had persimmon from a supermarket and really like how sweet they are (I like to wait until they're very soft), but maybe it's because they're the export variety so there's less bitterness/astringency.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 03:00 pm (UTC)My pleasure! (The amount of obsessed I am with this singer right now is kind of a lot.)
It's so annoying, like why are they even in charge!!!
I mean, I assume they did do the legwork to make the event happen in the first place. But that is not the end of your job, you guys!
I tend to find persimmons _too_ sweet if anything, kind of tasteless? But maybe I haven't had really good ones. (On the other hand I've just been told that you can blend persimmons with milk, put them in the fridge, and get instant persimmon pudding, so that's next on the list!)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-01 02:14 pm (UTC)Aha, the sweetness might be it! Sweetness is my only criterion for good fruit. :D
you can blend persimmons with milk, put them in the fridge, and get instant persimmon pudding,
!!!! I need to know more about these no-effort fruit/dessert hacks. XD I saw somewhere that you can make ice cream by just mixing frozen berries with milk and creamer, I'm waiting til summer to try it hehe
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Date: 2025-12-04 01:26 pm (UTC)Fair warning that I haven't actually tried it yet and it may not work!
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Date: 2025-11-29 12:40 pm (UTC)So nice to have a supportive partner 😄
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Date: 2025-11-29 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 04:40 pm (UTC)Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful -- This would rile me up something dreadful!
A neighbor-in-law has a fuyu persimmon tree, and those fruits are the single most delicious thing I eat all year, most years. I can't wait to go up this December and have some! Like nectar…
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Date: 2025-11-30 03:02 am (UTC)It depends--most often just the pronunciation, but there are some instances where the one character has a different meaning depending on the indigenous-Japanese vs borrowed-Chinese pronunciation, for example (though I can't bring any to mind off the top of my head). I'll have to look up that novel.
I always feel that persimmons are one of those fruits where they have to be _really_ good to be worth it at all. Still, I just learned that you can make persimmon pudding with milk and refrigeration alone, and now I'm curious to try it!
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Date: 2025-11-30 12:03 am (UTC)Oh dear, that interpreting volunteer job sounds rough! Having high schoolers who aren't fully fluent in both languages definitely doesn't sound like the play for a largeish event like that, especially when there's supposed to be discussion...
which could be Fukuya or Fukutani or Fukudani just in normal terms; in context it turned out to be Ukigai
Oml, that's SUCH a range, that really does sound excruciating for transliteration. (Thank you for the explanation about this, though, this really interesting to read!)
And beautiful photos as always, I absolutely love that sunset on the tracks one. <33
(Speaking of postcards, perhaps you might PM me your mailing address so that I can hopefully send a card your way this year as well? :-D No pressure, of course!)
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Date: 2025-11-30 03:03 am (UTC)Yeah, exactly. A good thought but not practical in practice!
and glad you enjoyed the transl(iter)ation ramblings; I do find it entertaining trying to track down name and place name readings, but not when I have HUNDREDS of them to do lol.
perhaps you might PM me your mailing address so that I can hopefully send a card your way this year as well? :-D
I'd be delighted (no pressure, as you say!). Will do that now so I don't forget <3
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Date: 2025-11-30 04:35 pm (UTC)Would love a card! You must have sent me something since I moved, right? My new adress has a street name that starts with A, just so you can check...
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Date: 2025-12-04 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-04 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-05 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-30 06:56 pm (UTC)Thanks for all the translation explanation - that song sounds pretty queer to me, too. <3
Of all things, mofu-mofu is the word I learned from this post. :D
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Date: 2025-12-04 01:28 pm (UTC)and mofu-mofu is a very useful word! I'm always tickled that you can say 抚摸抚摸 in Chinese, fumo-fumo, for almost exactly the same meaning.
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Date: 2025-12-01 07:05 pm (UTC)An excellent idea, IMO.
Lovely photos, as always. *^^*
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Date: 2025-12-04 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-17 12:40 pm (UTC)I kept meaning to reply to this post, so you're getting a very belated comment now. I was randomly rereading my Wang Yang fic where the farmboys make an appearance, and I don't know if I read your post right before or after, but I was like, wait a minute. The boy with the queer song! I think when sakana posted her primer about the boys, she said he was kind of the (reluctant) leader? So he's the only other named farmboy in the fic beside Li Hao.
Anyway, the coincidence tickled me at the time, and here we are. It's a lovely song, in any case.
The interpreting gig sounds like a nightmare, especially for a pro bono affair. /o\ How was the lecture interpreted, just out of curiosity? I'm assuming there were no headsets or anything. Did you go slide by slide after the speaker? Translation and interpretation are really such different things, I applaud you for doing so well, and for so many hours! You were totally right to be annoyed. >.>
I dreamed of becoming a translater (of books! impossible!) when I was in high school, and I never wanted to be an interpreter, it seemed sooo stressful. But I did want to do something "with languages" (although really only English). And now I've been a sign language interpreter for 20 years. 😄
I'm sending you many warm thoughts and I hope the near year will treat you well. <3 <3 <3
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Date: 2026-01-18 01:29 pm (UTC)and what a nice fic coincidence! The amount of obsessed I am with Jiang Dunhao right now is a little alarming to me, I'm glad he gets a cameo with Li Hao and Wang Yang :)
The interpreting gig was kind of a nightmare but also fun--just picking up every few sentences after the speaker, with _some_ prior information on what the content would be. I don't think I could make it as a full-time interpreter, but every once in a while it's a fun challenge.
and I had no idea you're a sign language interpreter, that's amazing! Is that your full-time gig or do you do it as a sideline/volunteer/etc.? What contexts do you interpret in? I spent a little while studying Japanese Sign Language, but my brain just doesn't do physical memory very well and I was really slow and stupid at it. Someday I'd like to give it another try, though...
and all warm thoughts and good wishes to you in return! <3
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Date: 2026-01-25 07:44 pm (UTC)It's my full-time gig (self-employed) and I've never done anything else, so I'm kinda hoping I can do this for another, uh. Twenty something years. 😬 I'm in a quite privileged position in Germany, in that there are laws on the books about requirements for certified sign language interpreters and all sorts of fine-grained regulations, down to how much money we're paid for most kinds of gigs. That includes doctor visits, any kind of appointment with a local/state/federal government entity, most education, workplace contexts... I have done weddings, funerals, quantum physics conferences, colonoscopies, surgeries, court trials, and uh. Many other things. It doesn't get boring, but it does get annoying sometimes. 😄
<3 <3 <3
no subject
Date: 2026-01-26 02:15 pm (UTC)It doesn't get boring, but it does get annoying sometimes. 😄
Oh yeah, we have that in common ;)
I think if you're Good At Languages otherwise, you're used to parsing a new language in similarities and differences to the one(s) you already know, like where the words go and how verbs work in a sentence. But using your body and the space around you for those things is so fundamentally different, it's very jarring at first.
Yes, exactly! I would like to give it another try one day; I think learning Chinese took over my brain just around the last time I had a chance to work on JSL, but I hope I can get back to it at some point.