(no subject)
I missed school today. So shoot me. After the past couple days I just really needed a good night's rest, and that I got. I slept longer than I meant to actually. I did mean to at least show up for the last class. But today wasn't an important day, since we had our big test yesterday, and tomorrow is a holiday. It'll just be weird showing up for karaoke when I didn't go to class, but I'll just explain to them how crappy I felt.
I also finally decided on a manga translation project to go through with. I've started translating several manga since I've been here, but I never finished any of them due to finding out that perfectly good translations of those manga already exist. But the only translation I could find of Golden Boy was of the first volume. And while it was accurate, it was too accurate and didn't read very naturally. I'd rather do a more professional, less literal translation. The kind I can show to get a job with. I wonder how well manga translation pays? Ken used to work for Iron Cat...and he got payed jack shit from them...but I dunno, he might still be able to help hook me up...once I get a little faster at translating. The language in Golden Boy is pretty easy. The only hard thing about it is that very few of the kanji have furigana on them, so if I don't know them I have to look them up in my kanji dictionary. But that's a good thing because I learn more kanji that way.
We're about to start a new textbook in my class. This time it's entirely in Japanese, and also has a lot of furigana-less kanji. I'd say it's probably at least 4th grade reading level. It's really cool that I can understand enough Japanese now to learn Japanese in Japanese. I also find that the more Japanese I learn, and the more I hang around Chinese people, the more Chinese I can actually understand. I mean, it isn't much, but I can sometimes fairly accurately guess how to say something in Chinese just based on the kanji. Of course, there's still quite a bit that's completely different. But when I do get to learning some Chinese like I've always intended to, I'll want to learn it from a Japanese textbook. Learning it from English is probably really hard, but going from Japanese to Chinese makes it a really easy language.
I also finally decided on a manga translation project to go through with. I've started translating several manga since I've been here, but I never finished any of them due to finding out that perfectly good translations of those manga already exist. But the only translation I could find of Golden Boy was of the first volume. And while it was accurate, it was too accurate and didn't read very naturally. I'd rather do a more professional, less literal translation. The kind I can show to get a job with. I wonder how well manga translation pays? Ken used to work for Iron Cat...and he got payed jack shit from them...but I dunno, he might still be able to help hook me up...once I get a little faster at translating. The language in Golden Boy is pretty easy. The only hard thing about it is that very few of the kanji have furigana on them, so if I don't know them I have to look them up in my kanji dictionary. But that's a good thing because I learn more kanji that way.
We're about to start a new textbook in my class. This time it's entirely in Japanese, and also has a lot of furigana-less kanji. I'd say it's probably at least 4th grade reading level. It's really cool that I can understand enough Japanese now to learn Japanese in Japanese. I also find that the more Japanese I learn, and the more I hang around Chinese people, the more Chinese I can actually understand. I mean, it isn't much, but I can sometimes fairly accurately guess how to say something in Chinese just based on the kanji. Of course, there's still quite a bit that's completely different. But when I do get to learning some Chinese like I've always intended to, I'll want to learn it from a Japanese textbook. Learning it from English is probably really hard, but going from Japanese to Chinese makes it a really easy language.