“Achievement, n. The death of endeavor and the beginning of disgust”
— Ambrose Beirce, The Devil’s Dictionary
A rather late welcome to 2012! Wanna see what I’ve been doing?
It’s a rather motley collection, I’ll grant you. There was Nanowrimo (an additional 6,000 words added to an already established story. I aim high), then there was tea buying, yarn shopping, and, of course, ebay browsing. Oh yeah, I’ve been producted. Productive.
Ahem.
The knitting above is destined to be Rebkahjoy’s version of Hewn. There is something really magical about knitting a pattern with modifications that a complete and total stranger emailed you. I now know the attraction of a cult, and it’s driving me towards actually finishing this little bolero. Of course, I’m not going there particularly fast. This project has already become a little comedy of errors. First, because I didn’t read the pattern all the way and began by increasing an extra two stitches every knit row. I didn’t realize how wrong this was until I had increased the back stitches to the desired 88 and was trying to figure out how the thing was going to fit me (I have no spatial skills at all, so my blind trust is as necessary as it is dangerous). I had a little wrestle with myself over whether the seven additional side stitches would be noticeable, but I’m proud to say that Sense won out and the poor thing was ripped back to practically the beginning. I’ve been knitting at it ever since, but going slow as silly putty. And then, there was that five day hiatus while I waited for my knit pick order to come and replace the number four I had accidentally sat on and broke. Maybe I should move to metal needles, huh?
As for the colorful sticky notes . . . . That’s my Japanese study. Yes, I’m still pulling that goal out every now and then. If we don’t exercise our dreams, you see, they’ll atrophy away. This time has been really fun because, despite all the text books I’ve borrowed from my sister, and the grandiose ambitious plans I’ve worked out with colored pens, I’ve basically done nothing but what I want to do, which is read Natsume Youjinchou. Natsume is my all time favorite anime. It’s about as eventful as a drying room, and sweetly sticky as if the substance on the walls were honey and not paint. I adore it. And so I jumped at the chance to buy five whole volumes of the series. Yes, five little comic books, each with three or four “episodes.” I’ve had these since a little before Christmas and I’m still on the very first of the very first story. Reading a single page can take an hour, and requires every resource I can scrounge up. I usually read with my Japanese-English dictionary, which I got at a second hand store in Japan. The more I study with it the more obvious it becomes that it was meant for people learning English, and not the other way round, but I love it all the more for that. It is, however, inadequate to the task. So I’ve added in my dad’s iPad, on which he has kindly let me put Jdict. Jdict is free, which is right in my price range, and allows me to look up kanji – and thus, ultimately, words – by drawing them on the screen. Yes, that’s right, I scrawl a few lines, press search, and voila, it gives me five kanji it thinks are close. I usually have to try a few times, and the more complex kanji have a way of making it quit, pouting no doubt, but it still works really, really well for all that, and it comes with a radical* search as well, which I’ve often resorted to.
When these two dictionaries fail I usually turn to Denshi Jishou, conveniently accessible on the iPad. But sometimes the problem is grammar related. In these cases I turn to Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, one of those books I borrowed from my sister, and Barron’s Japanese Grammar pocketbook, which isn’t as good but has things the first book doesn’t have. Not to mention the later book makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for, bad romaji aside.
A lot of people who take their Japanese Journey online emphasis memorization and having fun. I’m too poor of a student for the former, and the latter for me must be weighed against my competitive nature. I can give up on a sentence ending (nowa, nanto, etc. These have no good translation avaiable to them in my dictionary, though I could probably find some if I really looked online), but giving up an entire word often feels too much like admitting defeat. Now that I’ve hit a panel that is completely unintelligible I’m having to weigh my desire to understand with my desire to progress.
Anyway, this and tea drinking have been really the only productive things I’ve done so far. Oh, and I wrote this post. In January. It’s a humble sort of achievement, I guess.
———————–
*Radical: I can’t say this word with a straight face. It’s just so . . . so . . . radical.