Slowly but surely

Right now I’m in the process of entering my Teach Yourself Cantonese book dialogues into surusu. It’s slow going because I’m really not used to typing in Cantonese, but I’m already up to chapter 7 and going great. Entering the dialogues really helps me remember the vocabulary and the grammatical structure without feeling like I’m cramming unnecessarily. I think I’ll do this with any other textbook I pick up, though I really feel I should jump right into real texts once I’m done with this book. Well, we’ll see.

What I’d really like is to cut up the audio and include that as well, but I’m hopeless at making Audacity do anything I want, and too lazy to download any other audio editing software, so…yeah.

Only other thing to report is a site I found, dramacrazy.net, where I can stream Japanese/Korean/Chinese dramas, movies and anime at will. In the past I didn’t bother with such sites because my internet was a slow piece of crap, but now I’ve switched ISPs, I can play around a bit more. Following my failed experiment with Last Friends a while ago, I don’t feel like watching any J-dramas, but I love Cantonese period dramas, so I’m going to be working my way through them in a while.

Oh yeah, I signed up to writ the JLPT level N1 in December! Just for the fun of it, really. Bragging rights and all that, “all my friends have one, why can’t I?” etc etc. Unfortunately I haven’t started studying for it yet, I keep telling myself I’ll do it from November. Will I really? Hahahaha…

Cantonese movies!

I had two flights on Emirates Airlines over the weekend, so since I was trapped in that uncomfortable metal box for almost 15 hours total, I decided to spend it studying. So I chose to watch the Cantonese in-flight entertainment and listen to Cantopop on the music station. September is Jacky Cheung month! And there was Sam Hui and Anita Mui as well! They also have an awesome Japanese selection as well, 15 hours wasn’t enough to listen to most of it. The movies I watched were both pretty bad though.

The first one was “Future X-Cops” (未來警察 in Cantonese) starring Andy Lau. What a horrible film. The premise is like Terminator mixed with all the other Back-to-the-Future kind of films, except it’s all over the place and doesn’t even make much sense. Basically Andy’s wife gets killed in 2080 trying to foil an attempt on a Professor’s life. Afterwards he’s sent back in time to protect that Professor as a kid because the assassins have gone back to try and kill him. There are so many problems with the premise that I don’t even know where to start, but it’s all good because the story takes second place to the horrible, horrible effects, bad acting and lame attempts at comedy. I really like Andy Lau, but if he thinks this is a good movie he needs to retire, like, yesterday.

The second movie was called “Beauty on Duty.” Clever name for a rather dumb movie. It’s a Hong Kong remake of Sandra Bullock’s “Miss Congeniality”, not exactly the best movie in the world to begin with. The writers decided to give it a mo lei tau spin, so it’s a silly, hokey hodgepodge of misadventures: electronic crocodiles, ‘Genetic Self-Control Disposition’, running around with a dead body, etc. That sort of thing. Eventually the bad guys are foiled with no loss of life and everything ends happily ever after. I suppose.

There was a third movie running called “Hot Summer Days”, but after the fail that was the first two, I decided to stick to music and napping instead. After all, learning a language isn’t about forcing yourself to do things you normally wouldn’t. It’s about having fun. Right?

First post in a long time

I’m embarrassed to admit I’d forgotten all about this blog (^^;;) until Khatz posted a comment I made long ago on his blog.

I just got a question about how it feels to juggle Japanese and Cantonese, so I’ll try and post a progress report below:

Because I spent a lot of time (several years) trying to get good at Japanese and I’m loath to lose all that, I’ve been spending more time keeping Japanese up to par than learning Cantonese. Given the choice I’d rather watch a Japanese drama than a Cantonese one or listen to Japanese music. I’ve been branching out more and more, but not too far. But recently I’ve been getting more confident that I’m good enough in Japanese that I won’t forget it so easily, even if I stop for a while. I won’t say I have “native” fluency in it or anything ‘cos that’s a lie, but I’m having a harder and harder time coming across vocabulary I don’t know and I don’t remember the last time I heard something in a show/movie I didn’t understand (I need to watch more complex stuff, seriously), so I must be doing something right.

From next month onwards, I’d like to get even more serious with my Cantonese. I’ve worked through most of the example sentences with audio at Cantonese.sheik.uk, and I’m on chapter 10 of Teach Yourself Cantonese. Not bad, but not that good considering I’ve had a year to get that far. However putting pressure on yourself is the surest way to stop enjoying a language, so I’m treating it as a fun journey. I’ll get there when I get there. As long as I can understand what George Lam is singing by 2050, I’m cool 😀

There’s also the issue that there’s far less comprehensible learning material available on the internet in Cantonese than there is in Japanese. Lots of people learn Japanese so the community is really supportive and you can get stuff at all stages. Complete beginner, semi-intermediate, intermediate, advanced, native, it’s all good. At any given time there are thousands of people learning along with you, and many of them have blogs and forums to take part in. Plus Japanese is just Japanese, you know? You don’t have to juggle between Simplified and Traditional or find a video that says “Chinese” and then it turns out to be “Mandarin”, etc.

Whining won’t get me anywhere though, I’ve just got to keep on moving. A year ago everything on RTHK radio was a complete blur, but now I’m starting to get the general idea of some conversations: “Oh, they talking about hospitals”, “Oh, they’re complaining about transportation (I think)”, etc. Hopefully I’ll have something even more exciting to report a year from today.

So that’s it!

 

Akkake no Itoko – Hagio Moto manga review

Grhh…Banana Fish put me off manga for a while, in a way only truly annoying series can do. After a while I went through my collection of one-volume mangas for something new to try and settled on Akkake no Itoko by Hagio Moto. She’s pretty famous in Japan as one of the pioneers of thoughtful shoujo manga like AA’, but she’s not so well known in the west.

Unfortunately this collection of short stories is not one of her best. Maybe, just maybe, all this material was fresh when she published it back in 1970-whatever, but now they’re all silly, stale and shallow. The title one-shot is pretty good though, about a girl who moves to the countryside with her seemingly-Caucasian cousin Noelle (lots of Caucasian-types in this collection) and has to learn that there’s a lot behind her cousin’s happy-go-lucky facade.

The rest of the collection is lame. IIRC there’s this one called “Marmalade-chan” about a girl who looks like a boy, who gets involved with a fashion school and turns out to have been “pretty all along.” The next one is called “Mia” and it’s about a girl with a boy’s name who is put in a boy’s dormitory by accident and has to keep up the facade. It was so stupid I couldn’t read it but hey, maybe she was the first do to that hidden-girl-among-boys shtick, who knows. …And I stopped reading after that, even though the fourth story showed comedic promise I just couldn’t take the simplistic storylines and pat resolutions any more.

Aspiring mangakas might find the last story about mangaka struggling to come up with drafts interesting, but it seemed a little too longwinded to me so I just browsed through it. Still, I haven’t given up on Hagio Moto yet, someday I’ll find out just what it is that makes her special. It’s not Akakke no Itoko, for sure.

Banana Fish vol. 1-3 manga review

You ever had a manga you knew was good…but the main character was such a <bleep> that you couldn’t enjoy it? I like a good conspiracy theory/ragtag gang-on-the-run manga as much as anyone else, but when the protagonist is about as sympathetic as Jack the Ripper, it just ruins everything.

So this <rather unpleasant guy> named Ash had an older brother who took some bad drugs in ‘Nam and ended up shooting his whole unit. Older bro ends up as a vegetable who can only say “Banana Fish” and Ash winds up as a minor gang boss in New York. Eventually he finds a clue to the whole Banana Fish deal, but there are plenty of people – namely mafia boss Papa Dino, who will do anything to keep him from finding the truth. Etc, etc.

Banana Fish has got angst and violence – physical and sexual (how many times must Ash be raped before the mangaka is satisfied), it’s got action, mystery, suspense, tragedy and more. And everything moves along at a good pace, not too fast, not too slow. By the end of volume 3 Ash has already lost his best friend, his brother, his gang, he’s been to jail and back, he’s got a new Japanese best friend (I love how Japanese always self-insert no matter how improbable the location) and he’s gone home to trace his brother’s past.

…And that’s how far I think I’m ever going to get because I can’t STAND Ash. He’s the most incredibly stuck-up prat, ever! He’s supposed to be so smart, but most of the trouble he gets into is because he just won’t listen when people tell him not to do something. “No, Ash! It’s a trap!” means “It’s a trap!” you numbskull, don’t go dashing out there all half-cocked and act surprised when you get arrested and sent to jail. And then yeah, he shows flashes of brilliance in jail, but he wouldn’t even have BEEN in jail if he wasn’t such a nitwit in the first place. What a moron! “Oh, but he was raped as a kid, you’re supposed to feel sorry for him!” Yeah…NO. In fact the mangaka, Akimi Yoshida, clearly realizes that Ash’s level of —holery exceeds the pity point, so she keeps revising the age of his first rape earlier and earlier, wait he was 10, no wait he was 7, no wait… Give it a rest lady, your main character is a twit.

Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia where I can read up on everything that happened without raising my blood pressure. Adios, Banana Fish!