Book Archives - Animefangirl!

No Sweat Cantonese book review

I hadn’t read the AllJapaneseAlltheTime blog for a while, but I popped in about a month ago and one of the recent posts kind of pricked my conscience a little bit. Why Are you Acting like a Deadbeat Dad Language Learner? the title goes, and it talks about abandoning a language as soon as you’re halfway good in it. Th…that’s like me and Cantonese, I thought uncomfortably.

The truth is, I’d managed to get to a semi-decent point in Cantonese. I don’t have any language partners so I can’t speak a lick, but I’ve gotten to the place where I can get the gist and sometimes more than just the gist of what people are talking about on news broadcasts, in dramas and on RTHK 2 programs (off-topic, but does anyone else have difficulty live-streaming RTHK? I have to use the RTHK on the Go app on my phone to get the broadcasts.) Right about then I kind of ran out of Canto movies I wanted to watch and music I wanted to listen to, and it became a chore hunting for HK dramas that aren’t dubbed into Mandarin, so I just kinda threw the whole thing over and walked away. I still listen to RTHK a few times a week, watch Guangdong TV from time to time and listen to Cantopop quite frequently, but with nowhere near the energy I used to.

But since the AJATT post stirred me up, I decided to at least go through my bulging folder of Canto-learning material I’d always meant to read but never got round it. There’s quite a bit of, and I’ll try to tackle at least one or two sets a month but first up, No Sweat Cantonese: A Fun Guide to Speaking Correctly by Amy Leung. That was a long intro, wasn’t it? ^_^;; A-anyway, the blurb:

The long awaited textbook from one of the most popular and successful teachers of Cantonese. Amy Leung teaches Cantonese to managers of multinational corporations in Hong Kong in a fun new way. No Sweat Cantonese distils her approach, fulfilling the demand for an up-to-date textbook focusing on the practical needs of expatriates in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Cantonese-speaking world. Like never before, Cantonese – “that impossible language!” is now easy and enjoyable to learn. Includes CD with pronunciation aid and full-length conversations.

The presence of audio was the selling point for me, because Cantonese is one language where it really helps to hear stuff spoken. There are sooo many homonyms in this language, it’s crazy. But anyway, since I spent so much time on the intro I’m going to put the actual review in point form to save time and hopefully stop myself rambling like I am so wont to do.

The good

Starts with a rather good pronunciation guide and using a romanization guide that makes sounding things out easy to do.
Vocabulary lists with hanzi at the start of every chapter.
Dialogues provided are short and easy to follow/repeat.
There’s a helpful appendix at the back with even more vocabulary, all voiced.
Lots of cultural notes and suggestions about places to go and things to do there, making this a good guide for people who intend to visit Hong Kong in the near future.

The bad

A bit too elementary for an intermediate learner like me. No Sweat Cantonese is better suited for those just starting out, preferably with the aid of a teacher.
There are a lot of careless typos, including one right on the contents page (see proof above).
Inconsistent typesetting annoys me. The typesetter will randomly change fonts on the same page and put accents on English words and numbers where they don’t belong at all.
The vocabulary comes with hanzi but the dialogues and chit-chat lines don’t, so there’s an extra step involved if you want to enter them into an SRS or put them on a card. It’s not too bad for an intermediate user because none of it uses complicated dialogue, but for someone just starting it out it can be intimidating. Again you’re better off working with a teacher.

tl;dr, I didn’t get too much out of it. The vocabulary lists are the best part, but I have an aversion to entering just words/characters into my SRS unless they’re in a sentence where they’re used in context, and the sentences in this book came without hanzi and I was too lazy to write them out from scratch so… yeah. At $30 on Amazon it’s a bit pricey for what you’ve get, but if you’ve got all the other Canto textbooks and need something to round out your collection and fill in a few vocab gaps it’s not a bad buy. Still, No Sweat Cantonese is probably most useful for current and future expats who have access to a language teacher and just need a structured textbook to help them through.

The Secret Garden book review

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickendenss of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities 0 his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God , they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” – Romans 1:18-22

A rightly famous passage from the Bible, but what does it have to do with a children’s book from 1911? Plenty, as I saw as I waded though all the proto-New Age ramblings Frances Hodges Burnett stuffed The Secret Garden with. First a quick blurb as usual:

In this timeless, enchanting tale, a lonely orphan girl, Mary, finds the key to an abandoned garden which she determines to restore. As she and her invalid cousin Colin tend the arden, with the help of their new friend Dickon, their lives change in mysterious, wonderful ways.

The magic of the Secret Garden transforms the lives of all who enter.

The story itself isn’t bad, as far as children’s stories go. Mary, Dickon and Mary’s cousin Colin discover an abandoned garden locked away by Colin’s grieving dad. They sneak in there day after day planting and weeding and cleaning the place up to make a little hideaway for themselves. Eventually Colin’s dad comes home and discovers what they’ve done and that Colin isn’t actually an invalid, and they all live happily ever after. It’s cute stuff and must have resonated with generations of kids who wish they had a secret hideout and a house all to themselves and that their neglectful parents would show up one day and think they were absolutely wonderful. Wish-fulfillment and children’s books usually go hand in hand, after all.

What got me shaking my head was the author’s vigorous denial of anything approximating God within nature. And be sure it’s the author not the children doing the dismissal. So you have children plant seeds, weed gardens, the rain falls, the wind blows, the sun shines, the flowers bloom, and who gets the credit? “Magic”! It must be magic, after all, it couldn’t possibly be God. And to hammer that point home, Burnett has the characters sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” only to follow it immediately by a dismissive “Well God and Magic must be the same thing” from Colin and that’s the end of that.

On top of that Burnett has her characters sit around in a ‘mystic circle’ where they chant made-up incantations at each other about how wonderful nature is. And these mantra chanting sessions are compared unfavorably with church sermons, which are implied to be boring, ritualistic cash-grabs. This is not the sort of thing I’d let my children read if I had any.

“Come on, it’s a children’s book, not a a religious tract!” you say, and you’re completely right. But that only makes it all the more insidious the way the writing deliberately aims to shift all the credit for growth and blessings on some ‘unknown force’ instead of onto God. If they never sang the Doxology and never even mentioned God you could write it off as just another children’s fantasy novel, but bringing Him up just so you can ‘put Him in his place’ and promote your own vague, unformed nature-worship ideas to children is more than just ignorant, it’s evil and dangerous.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea.” – Mark 9:42. With that in mind, while The Secret Garden wasn’t a bad read, I’m not going to let my nieces and nephews get their hands on this book. If an author wants to indulge in a fantasy world, good for them, but active God-deniers have no place in my library.

Teach Yourself Cantonese is a funny book

I’m up to lesson 18 of Teach Yourself Cantonese. It’s a funny old book, really. I’m 3/4th of my way through it and I still don’t know how to say basic stuff like “toilet”, “part-time job”, “cousin”, “elevator”, “internet” and “computer”. I do, however, know how to say “gamble”, “murder”, “rape” “deadbeat” and “plain-clothes policeman.” I don’t know what kind of life author Hugh Baker led in Hong Kong, but something tells me I shouldn’t mess with him…

Brideshead Revisited book review

We’ve had Brideshead Revisited lying around the house for years so I finally picked it up last week. First off, I want more Evelyn Waugh. Second off, why hasn’t any writer written their own version of what happens next? Does Charles Ryder ever find happiness? Does Julia ever remarry? What becomes of Sebastian in the end, does a brilliant young man like him truly end his days as a porter for a monastery?

It’s such a tragedy, of no discernible cause. Why does Sebastian hate his mother so much that it drives him to drink? From all I can see his family is a bit odd, a bit eccentric, a bit cold to each other, but not to the extent that it would drive him to despair. But I guess the point of seeing things through Ryder’s eyes is to show that each family has its strange dynamics that no outsider can ever truly appreciate, no matter how long they spend with the family. And so in the end poor Charlie finds himself booted to the curb and the family goes on as dysfunctionally as ever. I can only hope they found some measure of contentment in their final decisions.

I hear there’s a movie and a TV series out now, but I don’t think they could capture the true magic of the book, because most of it depends on the power of your own imagination. I might give them a shot one day, though.

Japanese e-book treasure trove

Remember I posted about Swedish a while back? Yeah, I wasn’t really serious about that. And I’m having second thoughts about the Swedish company anyway, firstly about whether I even want to work for them and secondly about whether it’s worth learning a whole new language for a company I’m not planning to work at for very long. I hear most Swedish people speak excellent English anyway.

So it’s back to my first love: Japanese. Learning Japanese may be time-consuming, but the pay-off is almost immediate in terms of the fun you can have with it: not just anime and manga but also tons of good books, music, movies, dramas, comedies, etc. Today I hit a mini-goldmine of books about learning Japanese. Unlike the results I occasionally get on mininova, these are all uploaded on free file-sharing sites, so no need to worry about seeds. I found them here: Japanese e-books, but since you need to register to see the links (which I recommend you do because they have lots of other great stuff), I’ll just list the results below:

Nihongo Notes
Teach Yourself Beginner’s Script
A Short History of Japan From Samurai to Sony
Japanese Children’s books – Practice reading Hiragana
Remembering the Kanji I, II, III
Remembering the Kana I, II
CultureShock! Japan: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette
Read Real Japanese: All You Need to Enjoy Eight Contemporary Writers
Knuckles in China Land! (it’s a video game, not an e-book)
Guide to Reading & Writing Japanese: Third Edition
Kana de Manga
Kanji Mnemonics – Instruction Manual for Learning Japanese Characters
101 Japanese Idioms
An Introduction to Japanese Syntax, Grammar and Language by Michael Kamermans
Japanamerica
Making Sense of Japanese Grammar

Think we’ll all be experts by the time we’re done wading through this giant pile of books? We can only hope! See you next time!