This entire project, I think, should be blamed on the combination of business trip and a new printer, which can really be the only reason I printed out the first 15 pages of a japanese-to-chinese manga and packed it, with my old chinese dictionary, into my carryon. That turned my trip (and a chunk of the time at my brother's) into long passages of page-flipping, silence, followed by a spontaneous, "ohhhh, so that's what that one is." (Not to mention gave me chance to focus on something other than business strategies for the first time in over a month.)
Why manga, and why this one? Well, the first volume's been scanlated, so I have context in terms of character names, places, conflicts. Second, manga tends to have simpler language compared to say, a novel, plus it comes with handy pictures to show you who's talking and their expressions as they do so -- more context -- and manga authors tend to use the same sentence construction and vocabulary selection repeatedly. Third, children's books have simplistic construction but are geared towards learning new words, and I want to refresh myself, not confuse myself further. Fourth, I like this author's work, so I'm motivated to finish what I started because I genuinely want to find out what happens next.And fifth, hey, PORN.
Which kinda begs the question: why learn simplified and now have to re-learn the traditional forms of the characters? (People tell me it's "easy to switch" but I think that really only applies if you're already a native reader, much like a native English speaker doesn't balk at quick/qwik, right/rite, you/u, etc.) But the only region using/writing in simplified is PRC; the rest of the world, for political, cultural, and whatever else reasons, haven't picked up the use. (Before anyone asks, my university's professors were all from the University of Beijing, so traditional wasn't even a curriculum option.) Unless I want to restrict myself to reading only novels considered suitable by PRC -- a notion I find as exciting as being stuck in the local Christian Scientist reading room -- then I need to learn traditional. It's not just what 90% of the licensed-in-Chinese manga and Chinese-original manga are; it's also, from what I can tell, the preference of 90% of the Chinese scanlation groups, too.
The bottom line is that I'm tired of seeing hanzi and thinking, I should be able to read that...
( And so begins the laborious reintroduction scheme, aka How to Waste Time while Bored on a Plane and then Later While Tending an Elderly Dog... crap, could someone refresh me on the English-standards for title capitalization? It must've fallen out when I shoved in those last three hanzi. )
One major lesson learned, though:
Crazy-ass fonts are cruel and unusual punishment to non-native speakers.
I spent almost an hour with a page exploded to like 300%, trying to figure out a character. Count strokes, look through three different dictionaries, count strokes again and think, hrm, maybe that's 14 strokes, not 13? Try again... Eventually I figured it out only by managing to spend another twenty minutes parsing the second character, and then by context (and use of a nifty feature called "end of dictionary entry" in the online searchable dictionaries), figured out what it meant. And you know what it was? A SOUND EFFECT. A freaking SOUND EFFECT ate almost TWO HOURS of my LIFE because the formatter/layout person thought the font looked COOL. Well, damn you and your coolness! I can't read it!
On the other hand, it gives me additional ammunition when bonking the heads of those crazy-ass programmers who don't see a problem with eighteen fonts on a single page in 8-pt. But still. A sound effect. All that time, and it was nothing more than a Chinese-filtered-Japanese version of KAPOW.
Well, hey, that's entertainment, I suppose.
Why manga, and why this one? Well, the first volume's been scanlated, so I have context in terms of character names, places, conflicts. Second, manga tends to have simpler language compared to say, a novel, plus it comes with handy pictures to show you who's talking and their expressions as they do so -- more context -- and manga authors tend to use the same sentence construction and vocabulary selection repeatedly. Third, children's books have simplistic construction but are geared towards learning new words, and I want to refresh myself, not confuse myself further. Fourth, I like this author's work, so I'm motivated to finish what I started because I genuinely want to find out what happens next.
Which kinda begs the question: why learn simplified and now have to re-learn the traditional forms of the characters? (People tell me it's "easy to switch" but I think that really only applies if you're already a native reader, much like a native English speaker doesn't balk at quick/qwik, right/rite, you/u, etc.) But the only region using/writing in simplified is PRC; the rest of the world, for political, cultural, and whatever else reasons, haven't picked up the use. (Before anyone asks, my university's professors were all from the University of Beijing, so traditional wasn't even a curriculum option.) Unless I want to restrict myself to reading only novels considered suitable by PRC -- a notion I find as exciting as being stuck in the local Christian Scientist reading room -- then I need to learn traditional. It's not just what 90% of the licensed-in-Chinese manga and Chinese-original manga are; it's also, from what I can tell, the preference of 90% of the Chinese scanlation groups, too.
The bottom line is that I'm tired of seeing hanzi and thinking, I should be able to read that...
( And so begins the laborious reintroduction scheme, aka How to Waste Time while Bored on a Plane and then Later While Tending an Elderly Dog... crap, could someone refresh me on the English-standards for title capitalization? It must've fallen out when I shoved in those last three hanzi. )
One major lesson learned, though:
Crazy-ass fonts are cruel and unusual punishment to non-native speakers.
I spent almost an hour with a page exploded to like 300%, trying to figure out a character. Count strokes, look through three different dictionaries, count strokes again and think, hrm, maybe that's 14 strokes, not 13? Try again... Eventually I figured it out only by managing to spend another twenty minutes parsing the second character, and then by context (and use of a nifty feature called "end of dictionary entry" in the online searchable dictionaries), figured out what it meant. And you know what it was? A SOUND EFFECT. A freaking SOUND EFFECT ate almost TWO HOURS of my LIFE because the formatter/layout person thought the font looked COOL. Well, damn you and your coolness! I can't read it!
On the other hand, it gives me additional ammunition when bonking the heads of those crazy-ass programmers who don't see a problem with eighteen fonts on a single page in 8-pt. But still. A sound effect. All that time, and it was nothing more than a Chinese-filtered-Japanese version of KAPOW.
Well, hey, that's entertainment, I suppose.