Another post-Hebrew class quickie:

One of the things I initially loved about my study of Chinese characters is its often unique use of compounds. Where other languages would have separate words for various concepts, this isn't so in, say, Japanese:

首, kubi, "neck", yields:

手首, tekubi, "wrist" ("hand neck")
足首, ashikubi, "ankle" ("foot neck ( Read more... )

So I've been studying for the JLPT, the Japanese Language Placement Test, on and off for a bit now. I came to realize, once I was in Japan, that there was a huge gap in my knowledge of the language (which haoppens when, you know, you're always translating porn). So I do frequent vocab quizzes to shrink my lack of knowledge. I've been happy to ( Read more... )

FINALLY I find sources on kanbun, and I intend on finding more of them!! I found An Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour, and it's rather fascinating -- at least to me. :: laugh ( Read more... )

scream4noreason asks ...

When did your fascination with all things Japanese begin?
A great question ( Read more... )

I love idiomatic expressions, even if they cause me to sometimes completely misinterpret a sentence in another language. They still provide some unique character to a language and expose a little bit of how the speakers of a language "think."

One idiom in Hebrew that succeeded in throwing me offguard was תה פתאום, ma pit'om, which literally means ( Read more... )

( Today let's look at Japanese sign language! )

One of my biggest stumbling blocks in learning Georgian was -- as stupid as this sounds -- the NOMINATIVE. The nominative is the case used -- in most languages -- for the subject of a sentence. In "I speak terrible Georgian," "I" is in the nominative. "The cat is urinating on top of the television" features "cat", in the nominative. In most ( Read more... )

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Demonstrating that I'm a complete glutton for punishment, I've been volunteering -- albeit in small amounts -- to the Cherokee translation of Facebook, or as it's been "Cherokized", ᏞᏏᏋᎩ, hlesigwvgi. Many of the things that need translated are simple words or phrases for the interface -- "Profile," "Update", "Friends", etc ( Read more... )

I'm, admittedly, fascinated when certain constructions end up requiring different verb conjugations in order to state the same thing. Different languages have different verb systems and handle concepts of time and completion in a different way. English, for example, traditionally is thought to have three "tenses" (telling "past", "present", " ( Read more... )