When asked what the most difficult thing about learning the language, most people studying Japanese will probably say kanji––that was generally my answer too, at least until recently. Half way through my fourth year of study, it’s really starting to sink in just how troublesome the “simple” grammar can be. Er, okay I give up on trying to make this sound like a moderately more formal post. Anyway, I’m still shit with kanji and vocabulary, but the nice thing about kanji and vocabulary is that, on the whole, they’re really fucking easy to look up. Quirks of the grammar on the other hand, not so much. These are largely translation related frustrations as I’m in a translation class now, but I didn’t really notice a lot of this stuff until I had to translate it. Some things are more this-is-easy-in-Japanese-but-doesn’t-English-well, others are more of the this-causes-serious-issues-in-comprehension variety. (inb4 I make ignorant and egregious errors because I’m a shit student)

RELATIVE CLAUSES

Okay, so I actually think the way relative clauses work in Japanese is pretty cool (basically a whole sentence just works like an adjective–yeah I realize that’s effectively what a relative clause is, but the way RCs are used in a sentence in Japanese is almost *exactly* like an adjective). The annoying thing about relative clauses in Japanese is that they’re heavily abused and it’s not uncommon to see like 4+ embedded within each other.

So, if you were diagraming a sentence (idk if anyone else does this, I do all the time because linguistics and it makes sense to me) in which you put parenthesis around clauses, you might end up with something like four open/close-parenthesis in a row. This gets annoying because it can become very difficult to first, disentangle all of the relative clauses and figure out where they all go, and second, figure out how to put it into English. On some level, it reminds me of how we’d often end up with sentences that looked something like this in Latin class: “Caecilius, having been doing something or other, verb-ed.”

A sentence with no subject and no verb is a perfectly ‘legal’ sentence in Japanese.

Yes. You can have sentences with no subjects and no verbs in Japanese. Really, this isn’t so much of a problem in Japanese as it is in attempting to translate Japanese into English. It’s not so bad when you have a sentence with assumed subjects and verbs (as is often the case), since you can just fill in the missing information from context BUT it is far from uncommon to have sentences like this where the subject and/or verb are intentionally left ambiguous–and that doesn’t English well.

A relative clause + it’s head on it’s own is a totally reasonable sentence.

Essentially, this as a standalone sentence: “Bob, who was sleeping.” (it’s even worse when it’s attributes and not verbs, or really really long relative clauses)

I guess this could probably be thrown in under sentences-with-no-subject-or-verb, but I see this structure all the time and I hate hate hate hate it because it is so easy to understand in Japanese but so fucking hard to put into not horrible English sometimes.

It is possible to switch subjects mid-sentence with no explicit indication that this has happened.

This is one of those things you’re only likely to discover 3 sentences/a paragraph later when you realize the last chunk of text you translated makes absolutely no sense. I think this aspect is an annoyance mainly because this is totally illegal in English. For me at least, as a native English speaker, it’s really easy to forget that a mid-sentence subject switch is even possible. I’m kind of curious about the precise rules on this in Japanese, might have to dig around my linguistics textbooks to see what I can find.

On a side note, they really should teach some of this stuff with linguistics in language classes–like the devoicing of certain vowels for example, language teachers will inevitably say “you kind of just have to know, you’ll figure it out as we go along,” but the linguistic rule is so simple: い and う are devoiced after unvoiced consonants (which is *super* easy in Japanese since voiced consonants have a dakuten on them!)

Narration in fiction is fucking weird.

Okay, so outside of the story we’re translating in class I’ve only read a few bits of Japanese fiction in other classes and parts of the 00 novels (most of the stuff we read in 3rd year was news articles and the like). But, assuming that there is but an incredibly minute possibility that Enchi Fumiko’s 猫の草子 and the Gundam 00 novels have anything in common stylistically beyond general conventions of Japanese fiction, the way narration works in Japanese is fucking weird. Basically, if you have a third person, presumably omniscient, narrator there is often little to nothing to distinguish between the narrator and the character’s/s’ thoughts. Again, this is totally not cool in English (well, far from not cool it’s not really even possible considering how subjects work in English).

This is a lot like the last one in that it’s really easy to not notice when the narrator switches off into a character’s internal thoughts until a ways later when you realize either a) wait a minute, why is the third person omniscient narrator displaying strong emotions/giving opinions about things? b) shit, was that a personal pronoun not in a quote or in a sentence ending in と思った? c) something else doesn’t make sense. The same kind of problem occurs when coming out of a character’s internal thoughts and going back into narration (I usually miss it until there’s an explicit 3rd person reference and then I have to backtrack and guess the transition).

Hm, I know I had some other things to add to this, but I think five whines is good enough for now. I’ll probably go back and put in more proper examples when I’m more awake (assuming my cold actually lets me get some sleep today).

[SCANS - MIRROR]

Considering the new Alejanrdo/Ribbons scenes in the SE, I decided to scan my Ribbons doujin. It’s like 80 pages so it took fucking forever to scan. There was a short fanfic section at the end; I skipped it because I was tired of scanning things.

ITD: Ribbons angsts about Alejandro (who is decidedly less gay in this doujin than he is in cannon now) not paying enough attention to him. Then he tries to get it on with a servant to get back at Alejandro (or something like that, idk I haven’t actually read the whole thing yet), but gets cold feet half way through. Alejandro walks in and is pissed then he and Ribbons make up and sex.

And on a related note, I had a paper due today, so I didn’t have time to get the doujin sales post up this weekend–it’ll be up soon-ish though (if/when we find a raw for the SE that might eat up my free time for a bit so idk when I’ll get around to it exactly, but soon).

Scanned the keep pile first because it was smaller than the others. I will probably be scanning most of these eventually (aside from the ones that have already been scanned by other people, because that’d just be redundant).

The Omomuki High Jump books are hilarious btw.

Oh, since I put some scans up, here’s my ’scan policy’: I don’t care about credit or any of that, so don’t worry about it. Do whatever you want with the scans; it’s not my work in the first place anyway.

[EDIT II] I think I have paypal figured out. I’m going to go buy some big envelopes tomorrow or the day after, so I should have everything ready to put up (at least part of) the sales post this weekend.

[EDIT] Translated a page from the book I just scanned (uploading the whole thing right now), because it was funny and I was bored :

About to go to bed, but before I do here are some amusing pieces of pages (I was flipping through the books trying to decide what to scan next and I couldn’t stop laughing at some of these) [EDIT] Goddamn I hate this gallery thingy, on one hand it’s easy to dump pictures but on the other it won’t let you pick which images are in the gallery (or maybe I’m just dumb). I guess this is kind of redundant, but whatever:

More image spam:

Got my 00 doujin mountain today.

Top piles are probably-gonna-keep, bottom are the ones I’m probably going to sell. Bottom pile is sorted into: 4koma and duplicates; all character/gag; Tieria (mostly Tieria x Lockon, but there’s some Tieria x Setsuna); other-characters-who-aren’t-Graham (mostly Lockon and Allelujah–there’s this one, really big and really pretty Lockon x Al book in there, it’s kind of disappointing that it’s so pretty because I don’t care for either of them). Keep piles sorted into: Innovators (they showed up in a lot of all characters books too); Omega 2D; Tanteikagayaoh; and Graham/Union. I might be selling the Omega 2D and Tanteikagayaoh books too, but I’m not sure. I like them but I really need to make back some of the rapetastic shipping costs and if those’ll sell more easily than the others I’ll give them up. It’ll probably take me a while to sort/catalogue everything, but I’ll probably have a sales post up in a few days either here or on the LJ comm (I remember reading you weren’t supposed to sell shit on your wordpress.com blog unless you made it or something to that effect a while ago but I couldn’t find it again in the FAQ so idk if it’s allowed or not).

Angled shot so you can see just how big the piles are.

Scanned some of the covers, here’s that Lockon x Al one that I mentioned earlier, I had to scan the cover just because it was so pretty. It’s probably about 170 pages too.

Anyway, once I get everything organized and catalogued and figure out shipping/paypal I’ll put up a sales post like I mentioned, I suspect I won’t have everything done until this weekend at the earliest, but I’ll probably be posting some cover scans here and there just because some of these are really nice to look at.

Won 2 auctions of 60 Gundam 00 doujins each today. I have nfc what I’m gonna do with 120 doujins, most of which I really don’t care about (I wonder if anyone can guess which ones I was interested in–pictures are from the auction, I don’t have them yet).  I’m thinking I should sell the ones I don’t want/duplicates, but I’ll probably have to figure out Paypal first. Anyhow, look at the ginormous pile of doujinshi I just bought:

Yes, I realize how random the selection looks (no I didn’t just accidentally get the seasons mixed up), but I just snagged the books with the most interesting-sounding content from the kouryakukan summaries. I think I might grab the other three later. S2 book 3 is unexpectedly huge (it’s almost twice as long as the other two). I’m not really at the level that I can comfortably read a book in Japanese for fun yet (mostly because I have been very lazy about kanji) so the most I’ll likely be doing with these any time soon is picking small sections of interest and scanning/translating them. If anyone has a particular scene/section they want to see I’d be happy to scan it if you can give me a page number/general area it should be in (can’t guarantee anything as far as translation goes since I’m seriously distracted enough as it is from the stuff I should be doing for school right now). I’m tempted to get the other three sooner or later assuming I can find them in stock at the same US branch of Kinokuniya (which, btw, is fucking awesome for buying Japanese books if you’re in the states because FUCK YEAH DOMESTIC SHIPPING, it seems like a stupid thing to be excited about but when you consider that to get these three books from amazon.co.jp it would have cost me ¥3600 in shipping alone, which is more than my order + shipping cost from the NY Kinokuniya it’s pretty massive).

I should be working on a paper right now, but I think I’m going to indulge my curiosity and take a stab at the epilogue of the first S1 novel since it’s short and was my primary interest in acquiring S1 novel 1 in the first place.

This is a couple hours late, but 19.04 is one year old tod– yesterday. I was trying to think of something clever to draw, but I couldn’t come up with anything, so here’s a doodle of Hiling instead:

I can’t believe it’s been a year already…

[EDIT] In an unrelated note I ordered some of the 00 novels today because I seriously doubt the 11s will ever scan them and there are some chunks I’d really like to read (also Kinokuniya USA had them in stock and domestic shipping is like $7–take that amazon.co.jp!).

Okay, I’m gonna be honest, I started watching this show with very very low expectations, but somehow I think I’m starting to enjoy Defying Gravity. It seems to be getting better these last couple weeks and I really enjoyed the latest episode, though I’m thinking might be largely due to the fact that I’ve always been fond of the “singing spaceship” image after seeing that one episode of B5 and they basically did that this week. If it manages to keep up the roll it’s on and avoid turning into a soap opera it might actually be a decent show. They really need to work on laying off the cheesy musical montages though (thank god they didn’t do one this week, unless you consider the singing scene one). Donner’s monologues are getting a teensy bit less annoying, maybe I’m just getting used to it, I dunno (I’d say they should get rid of them, but I realize it’s a style thing that they’re not likely to give up, since I guess Donner’s supposed to be the lead and “narrator” more or less). 

Anyway, if you’re bored it might be worth giving a watch. Episodes are pretty hit-or-miss so far, but the overall quality’s been going up steadily if not slowly as the writers figure out what they want to do with the show (is it just a soap opera in space? is it actually sci-fi? do we care? etc if they can figure it out (and don’t pick soap opera in space because I’m dropping this shit if they go there) it might actually be good). But at the same time, you’re probably not really missing anything if you’re not watching it.

On a completely unrelated note, my very pretty Lelouch figure is making me sad. The cape is very cool looking but: 1) it’s really fucking heavy (like, I’m pretty sure it weighs more than the figure by itself) and 2) doesn’t really fit on his shoulders very well. As a consequence it kind of shifts all over the place and keeps putting pressure on one of his fabulously posed hands. So now my Lelouch is cape-less and shitsux until I figure out some way to stabilize the massive chunk of plastic (you’d think they’d have molded the cape out of vinyl or something kind of soft but it’s hard plastic).

This has been bugging me for the last couple months so I thought I ‘d whine about it to get it out of my system.

SciFi seems to be on the beginnings of an upswing these days now. There’s even been a resurgence of some spaceship based tv series (probably thanks at least in part to BSG), however questionable their quality might be. So, I dunno, as an SF fan who grew up in the 90s (the ‘golden era’ for TV SF if you ask me), I’m getting hopeful.

But then I keep seeing/hearing marketing and/or interviews with creators to the effect of “It’s technically science fiction, but we think we’re better than that, so don’t think of it as science fiction, we’re tackling serious issues/normal people can enjoy it/etc.” The fuck is up with that? On the SRSBSNS side of things we have Battlestar Galactica. I’ve seen a number of little specials talking to the cast and crew about the series and they almost always make a point to belittle science fiction as a genre–because Battlestar Galactica is tackling real, serious issues and SF has never done that before! Aside from obnoxious continuity issues and spotty characterization it’s this sort of thing more than anything else that fuels my dislike of BSG. Since when has SF not tackled “serious issues”? Hasn’t that been a staple of the genre from, really, pretty early on? Sure there’s plenty of pulp and cheap thrills in there too, but that doesn’t mean it’s incapable of being taken seriously. It’s a popular genre for tackling touchy issues because it’s easy to use an SF context to remove the issue a bit from the real world so it can be approached from another perspective. Even TOS, as campy and ridiculous as it was at times did all sorts of “serious” and groundbreaking things, but I guess the BSG crew is too good to associate with the likes of Star Trek.

Speaking of Star Trek, that brings me to the other side of the coin: the attempt to rebrand SF as something “not just for nerds, but normal people too.” On some level, I can appreciate wanting to get more people to see a SF film from both an economic and I-like-SF-and-you-should-try-it-too perspective. But why do they have to stigmatize nerds? I don’t recall any comic book movies launching ad campaigns to say, “comics: not just for nerds anymore.” I dunno, I think comic books are less accessible to the general populace than SF just from an availability perspective (there’s probably a better chance that, assuming you’re old enough, you’ve seen an episode of Star Trek or one or more of the Star Wars movies, etc than you’ve read an issue of Batman–I dunno, maybe I just don’t know the right people but I can’t remember anyone in my schools, boys or girls, who read comics, but we all watched Star Trek at least occasionally). So what is it that made SF into a nerds-only thing? I mean, I really don’t know what it was in particular. I guess the media stigmatized it or something, maybe? Because for the life of me I can’t think of how exactly we got to this point. Again, in my elementary school at least (isn’t this usually where this sort of thing happens?), everyone watched/knew about Star Trek and it wasn’t especially nerdy. TNG/DS9/VOY were popular primetime series at the time. 

Anyway–I’m starting to lose my train of thought–what the hell is wrong with people these days? And I wish it was just BSG and the new Trek movie in this ‘trend’, there’s all sorts of other shit like Lost and it’s “it’s scifi but we’re pretending it’s not because sf is for nerds and noone would watch it” thing, Stephanie Meyer’s garbage like Twilight, “vampires for people who don’t like vampires,” and The Host “scifi for people who don’t like scifi” (why would you want to read sf if you don’t like it?), shows like Defying Gravity–it’s not scifi, it’s a soap opera in spaaaaace, because girls don’t like scifi, so let’s take a nifty SF premise and gut it so we can have a new gimick for cheap who’s-sleeping-with-whom drama and now certain acclaimed authors denying that their work is SF because SF isn’t taken seriously/being stigmatized seriously right now for whatever reason. 

I dunno. It just makes me sad and angry that it has to be like this. I want my 90s SF baacckkk :{

I was gonna draw this so it’d be less tl;dr, but I gave up 2 panels in. 

I’ve been taking some classes over the summer mainly to avoid my parents bugging me about getting a summer job. Anyway, today in Digital Culture (it’s an awful awful class about Second Life and my professor being a pretentious faggot about everything) it was an especially boring class because my professor was going off on some tirade or other about capitalism and mispronouncing Buddhist and Hindu terminology. In this class we’re all expected to have laptops with us every day and be using them in class, which is just great for boring classes.

Today (well I guess it’s technically yesterday now), I decided to watch Casshern Sins again since it happened to be on my harddrive and he was forcing us to mess with some stupid ass audio software, so I had an excuse to have headphones in. I sit in the back row, so there’s not much danger of getting caught watching shit… usually. Anyway it turns out my professor from the previous period was still hanging out in the room (he works there with the other guy and helps run the crazy 5-screen theater we have class in), working at the control station that’s behind all the tables and he walks up from behind me and says “You must have a pretty fast connection.”

I had my finger on the escape key already so I instinctively pressed it when he started talking thinking, “fuck, he’s friends with the professor I’m gonna get bitched at… FFFFFFFFFF” So, thinking he thought I was streaming it from the internet line, I mumbled something about it being on my harddrive mixed in with the beginnings of some excuse about why I was watching anime instead of paying attention to class. Then, all of a sudden, he whips a portable harddrive out of his back pocket, motions with it in my direction and says, “I really like this stuff.”

I was all, “Oh… sure…” And then he realizes that he’s probably being too obvious and disturbing the class, so he just asks me if I’ll give him some stuff in his class tomorrow. tl;dr: lol, I’m bringing my professor anime tomorrow. 

Anyway, it was pretty wtf, so I felt inclined to mention it.