Re: CHAT: General Question

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Herman Miller wrote:

> I speak English and not much else. I had some French and Spanish in high
> school, German, Russian, and a little bit of Chinese in college, but it's
> been so long that I can't remember much. I have a somewhat large collection
> of Teach Yourself books and similar language-learning books that I never
> seem to find time to study in depth. Recently I tried learning Japanese,
> and I got to the point where I could sort of figure out the latest Zelda
> game in Japanese with heavy use of JWPce to look up words that I didn't
> know (i.e., most of them). But spoken Japanese goes by too fast for me to
> pick up much of anything.
I would probably kill for your collection; mine is quite small because
unless you get 'em used, they can be so expensive.  :-p

This probably sounds *really* dumb, but have you tried watching subtitled
anime (in any genre that you can stand--SF, comedy, drama, whatever)?  I
did for 3 years before trying to systematically learn Japnese (with one
of those self-study books, in romaji, though I'm working on the kana
separately), and you know what?  Aside from the fact that if I'm falling
asleep it *really* sounds rhythmically/pitch-ically like Korean, I
started being able to pick out verbs (once I learned a few verbs),
cognates with Korean words, and words that I'd learned from the
self-study book.  A lot of it *does* go by awfully fast, but since the
anime club here is way cheap for 4 hours of showings every weekend, it's
one way to hear lots of native Japanese speakers without spending oodles
on tapes.

> Cakewalk with the piano roll. I used to do computer art with Fractal
> Painter (now Corel Painter), but it's been so long since I stopped
> regularly drawing that I'm out of practice. I also used to collect bird
> song recordings.
Neat!  I just got PAinter 6.1.  There are way, way too many tools...I'm
going to probably be the next 10 years figuring 'em out.  But it's way fun.

YHL

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