Japanese, Snakes on a Plane, Fish Gonads
Several cool things today:
- Well, in the course of about 9 nine days, I have successfully learned hiragana and katakana. The katakana were amazingly easy - I learned them in one day, mostly in one sitting of about forty minutes. Now if only Kanji would come that easily, I'd have a good portion of this language down in no time at all! Vino's flashcards have helped a fair amount, but mostly I just copy the kana charts over and over, varying the order to keep from memorizing by context. Via email last night, Nilbus commented that I should learn Chinese instead. He says it's much easier to learn, and, having, studied both, I'd say he has the right to make that statement. Really, the only reasons I'm attempting Japanese again are:
- 1) Jorge started it, and having someone else to work alongside/compete with makes me much more motivated (he whooped me in hiragana - I missed four out of twenty five D:! In my defense, two were me not seeing the " because I was rushing...);
- 2) anime (still obsessed with BLEACH, even to the point of writing fanfiction... I can't believe myself some times);
- and 3) I have some experience with the learning the language already, as gleaned from Nilbus when he was learning it.
- My fish changed sex! I've never been so happy to see testes in my entire life \:D/ For those of you who don't know what this means (does anybody read this journal, anyhow??), these fish were in a social environment not conducive to their natural sex-change pathway, but the drug I implanted them with (Haloperidol) made them change sex, regardless. This is really cool because it means we now have experimental evidence of the dopamine pathway in sex change, from real life (= in the field) situations. We care about sex change in this fish because it tells us about the transduction of social cues through the brain, giving us insight into how humans respond to stress. Ultimately, this may lead to research and drugs for depression, etc. in humans. That's a long way down the road from my little queens, though.
- Finally, I have to share this because it's hilarious:
This is from http://www.xkcd.com/. More people should read this comic; it's intelligent, poignant, and very funny. Very few things in life top good jokes involving pi and Chinese food, Schrödinger's cat and the fourth wall, moral relativity, the periodic table and fruit, and/or binary.