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Sunday, 28th June 2009
Japanese - a plan for learning some basics
I slept in this morning, because I knew I was tired and really needed the sleep. If I woke up in time to go to church, I figured, I'd go. As it happened, I woke up not only too late to have made it to church, but after the entire service and much of fellowship hour would have finished. It would have been nice to see friends there, but given how tired and unable to concentrate I felt yesterday evening after a long journey, and how much better I feel today, I think taking the sleep I needed was the right thing. Happily, that has meant that today I can actually Do Something Interesting.
The something interesting is figuring out how I'm going to go about learning some basic Japanese. I have just over two months before I go out to spend a couple of weeks in Japan and a couple in Korea, so I plan to spend some of my free time in July focusing on Japanese and some of my free time in August focusing on Korean. For Japanese, I've made what I think is a manageable plan that sees me doing a little bit each day - more at weekends - and am hoping I can somewhat stick to it. So what does my plan involve? There's essentially three main things I plan to do.
One of them involves working through the Pimsleur Audio lessons. I have a course of 30 audio lessons of around 30 minutes each. I've already got a few of them done, and am going to try by the end of July to have reached just past lesson 25 - trying to get all 30 in is a little unrealistic, and I'd rather not discourage myself by setting a plan that I'm likely to not manage. I've used the Pimsleur lessons for some other languages - in fact, it's where I've learned much of the Russian I know from, how I started learning Spanish before I moved there for a while and got a tutor and how I've picked up tiny bits of other things.
The second is learning scripts. I've learned the Russian script already, and that was pretty easy. The letters in many cases bear a lot of similarity to those in the Latin alphabet anyway. In Japanese, the situation is rather more complicated. In fact, there are no less than three different scripts that will can all appear within a single sentence. Yes, really.
Two of them are syllabaries. The Hiragana is the first one I am taking on - I've started learning this today. The Hiragana, it seems, is mostly used for writing grammatical markers in a sentence. I'll probably scribble more about Japanese grammar here as I get a better grip on it, but basically you take things and add particles after them to mark how they are being used in the sentence (thus indicating their semantic role, somewhat like case inflections in Slovak and Russian do). There are about 50 characters to learn, some simple and some complex. It's important to not write them any old way, but also to write the various strokes that make them up in the right order. I'm starting to get a slight feel that there is a bit of a logic to that after learning my first 10 Hiragana.
After the Hiragana, there's the Katakana. It seems that this one is mostly used to write words loaned from other languages. I'm told by a friend who has been in Japan that this is highly useful to know, so I intend to learn it too, though second since it's going to be hard to progress on trying to grasp the grammatical stuff properly without being able to read the particles written in Hiragana. So, that's the second script - again, about 50 characters. Manageable, doing a column a day over a week or so.
Finally, there's the kanji. This I'm barely going to scratch the surface of, since the learning of about 2,000 of these are needed to give 95% coverage of written Japanese. If I were to learn one new character a day for five years and still be able to remember all of the rest, it'd take over five years to manage that many. So, my progress on this is going to be pretty small. I plan to learn about 100 or so in July, and then try and do a couple a day through August. Hopefully that means I'll hit around the 150 mark before I travel - less than 10% which is not great, but maybe if I can learn a few more in September before I go and a few more while I'm there I'll have managed to hit the 200 mark or so. We'll see how 100 in July goes first, though.
Last of all, I'm going to be working through an excellent guide to Japanese Grammar that I've found. I'm not setting myself any particular goals in how far I get through this, but I will be taking the Kanji I learn from the vocabulary sections of it, since it's a handy source of them and I've got to start somewhere.
Anyway, here's hoping I can manage to make some decent progress, rather than some epic fail, here. :-)
Saturday, 27th June 2009
My secret Italy trip
I've been quiet here for the last couple of weeks because...I've been wondering around Italy. I traveled with my friend Dan, who I went to Romania with last year. However, this year, there was something a bit special: he has Italian family, and some of his UK family were also heading over to Italy too. So unbeknown to all but one of them, we managed to plan and keep secret a two week trip taking in many of the key sights of Italy. Of course, that meant letting as few people know as possible...which obviously precluded scribbling about it here.
Anyway, now that I'm back and the secrecy is no longer needed, I'm getting to work on the photos. There's a couple of thousand straight off the camera, but many are copies of the same thing with tweaks to try and get the best shot, so many will not make it to what finally gets uploaded. That said, I've still got a couple of thousand images to sort through, so it's going to take a little while. :-)
I'll also be getting them onto my travel site. Since I visited Vatican City and San Marino, which are fully enclosed within Italy but actually sovereign states, as a whole this trip counts as three new countries, meaning I've now visited 30 countries. It was nice to mark that in San Marino, a beautiful city state on a hill with stunning views.
Anyway, I'll scribble some more here once there's some photos up to see. In the meantime, I've got some sleep to get caught up on...
Friday, 5th June 2009
Once again, I'm bad news for national security
Last year, as I was preparing to backpack across Russia, the Russian army went for a little adventure in Georgia. My mum asked nervously, "you're not going anywhere near Georgia, are you?" I said no (truthfully - I'd always been planning to mostly follow the route of the Trans-Siberian railway on that trip and pretty much did so), and tried to give her an idea of just how insanely big Russia is. In fact, I didn't even get within a thousand kilometers of Georgia.
So, a while back I wrote here that I'm currently working on arranging to visit Japan and South Korea (might even get the flight booked in the next few days or so, before I set off on this year's first summer break...it's back to a trip a month from June through September...yay!) And what happens? North Korea conducts a nuclear explosion, fires a couple of rockets and announces that it doesn't feel much like being bound by the cease fire agreement with South Korea any more. (That's putting a complex bunch of stuff simply, you can read the details at a source more reputable than my blog. :-))
This time I won't be a thousand kilometers from it all, of course. Seoul - capital of South Korea - is maybe around 100km from the border with the North, and my Korean friends tell me that visiting the border on one of the guided tours is a must-do (I'll decide whether or not to go when I'm there, depending on what the situation at the time is, of course.) And Japan certainly doesn't fall into the "thousands of kilometers away" bracket either. Well, here's hoping it doesn't escalate. I somewhat suspect North Korea is mostly wanting to try and get a stronger bargaining position in negotiations - but what is a mystery to me is what they want to get out of the negotiations in the long run. Well, looking forward to heading to this region of the world and, hopefully, hearing some local opinions, anyways.
Thursday, 28th May 2009
OK, now please shut up
So, you have a job. Your job, as a benefit, allows you claim various expenses. You do so. Your requests go through an office that checks what you're claiming is a valid expense, and anyone looking back can see what you claimed for and was approved.
Let's be honest. Most of us, with a job that has such benefits, will use them. And generally, there grows a culture of what's acceptable to claim and what's not. Of course, the values in a culture change over time. Right now, we're in a time when money is pretty tight for many organizations, so trying to keep down costs is the done thing. But in times when the money is flowing free and easy, there's rather less concern.
So there the UK media is, cheering on the current expenses row. Just as they did with swine flu which...uh...turned out to be a bit of a non-story after all. Anyone know when they might just realize the same on the expenses stuff? You know, how if people have job benefits, they might actually use them? Sure, go on, say that the goalposts were in the wrong place. But what's happening now seems to boil down to, "oh yes, you played by the rules and an audit office agreed, but we don't like them now so we're going to whine about it." For hells sake. Would any of the folks who are whining like to give back what they gained from any job benefits they've had in the past too? And no, don't give me, "but they're MPs". They're people doing a job too, you know. Would you like to do their job instead, with all its challenges and the media attention? 'cus, you know, the UK is a democracy and you can go stand in the next election. And then you can demonstrate this higher moral standard.
No, I'm not saying that nobody in the government ever claimed for anything they shouldn't have. But the picture I'm seeing is one of people claiming mostly by the rules, and the rules in the currently climate were easy to get public support to rally against. I rather suspect that the current furore wouldn't have gained the traction it has when the economy was in a good state. And, looking back, will having a bunch of experienced people lose their jobs for this cause really have been worthwhile? I suspect not.
Ah well, guess this is the endgame of a press that takes press freedom to the point of, "it's fine to have our way with the country". Oh well, guess it kept the papers selling, and gave somebody's pocket some benefit, anyway.
Saturday, 16th May 2009
LiveMocha...and Slovak meta-language
Not long back I discovered LiveMocha. It's kinda like social networking for language learning, making it a promising way to find language partners. Alongside that, there's structured lessons and tasks for certain languages, and a kind of "social review" system where you can write about a topic or read a given bit of text, then others can offer feedback and/or tips. Sadly, Slovak is not one of the languages they offer this for.
I've not put a lot of effort into finding language partners yet, but already one from Slovakia has found me. It seems it'll work quite nicely: I write in Slovak about whatever and critique her English, then she'll write back in English about stuff and critique my Slovak along the way. This, if it lasts - which I hope it will - will be very valuable to my Slovak learning. She is learning English, so I hope I will be of value to her too.
Doing it this way brings up a rather interesting challenge, though. Looking at a bit of English that's not quite right and knowing how I'd write it as a native speaker is easy enough - it's just a natural instinct. However, I like to also try and explain why it was wrong, and trying to pick out why something is wrong can be rather tricky. Since I never had to learn English in the sense that I need to learn languages now (because as a kid you have a bunch of hard-wired-from-birth brain circuitry to do that stuff, which dies out as you grow up), I just never had to think about English in that way. So working out the reason can be pretty hard. Thankfully there is plenty of material out there to help - this one seems pretty good on verb stuff.
Then once I do figure out how to explain it, since I'm writing in Slovak, there's putting the explanation I've come up with into Slovak. Thanks to my Slovak classes, I've got some knowledge of meta-language (that is, words for talking about language), but there's a whole bunch that I'm having to look up in the process (verb is easy enough, but then there's the likes of infinitive and perfective). But that's fine - the more I can talk about Slovak in Slovak, the less I need to talk about Slovak in English during classes, and the better I'll be able to explain English to other language partners I will - hopefully - find on LiveMocha.
Anyway, it seems like a cool resource, and I figure some of you reading who have linguistic interests may find it interesting too.
Wednesday, 13th May 2009
Good stuff I've read of late
Amongst all of the work, language learning and travel, I try to make time to read books now and then. I prefer fact over fiction, and mostly I like history, linguistics and stuff about how the world really works. I thought I'd take a moment to share some of the things I've been reading.
Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor - this is one awesome book, documenting the fall of the Nazi regime as the Red Army from Russia closed in on Berlin. I liked the insights it gave into Stalin along the way - that guy had plans beyond just winning the war. I finished reading this book just a couple of weeks ago. Antony's writing is The Awesome and it proved an enormous distraction - which was nice on some plane journeys I had to take, but less good when I needed to get some work done. :-)
Stalingrad by Antony Beevor - actually I read this one quite a while ago, but wanted to mention it here because it's every bit as good - if not better - than his book on Berlin. I'd love to read this one again some day, though I think I lent it to someone and I forget who.
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis - this guy also knows how to write a page-turner. I read this one a little while ago too, and it was a fascinating big-picture overview of the Cold War. Certainly on my re-read list, and I know where this book is - back at my family's place in England.
The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker - I learned a good chunk of what I know about linguistics - in the wider sense rather than about a specific language - from this book. How well the picture it paints maps to reality, I'm not sure (and I don't think anyone is), but it certainly presented natural language in a way that made a lot of its apparently quirks seem to have at least some underlying logic. He even has a crack at rationalizing English spelling a bit, though after Spanish and Slovak - both of them having wonderfully easy to learn spelling systems - and even Russian which is pretty easy going comparatively, it still feels pretty nuts to me. This one is pretty brain-heavy, and left me with a lot to think through after each chapter, but probably presented about as accessibly as the material could be.
McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime by Misha Glenny - started reading this one at the weekend. The first chapters are good - certainly shocking, but firmly grounded in reality and written by someone who reported through the period it covers (post-Soviet East Europe). Not quite as much a page turner as the books of Beevor and Gaddis, but certainly not hard to get into either.
So, that's a few. There's various others that I've started but found harder to get through, and others that I've just not given the time to yet. I don't think there's any of the above books that I'd not recommend if you have an interest in the subject they cover though.
Sunday, 10th May 2009
And this year's month-long backpacking trip will be...
I've had some great month-long backpacking trips so far: Scandinavia made for an easy but stunningly beautiful introduction, I spent a month being wowed by - and sometimes being frustrated at - China and I've survived crossing much of Russia - the world's biggest country - overland. Anyway, now it's 2009, and I've speculated, and pondered, and waited to see what might come up. There's so many places I want to go and I could have just as happily spent this years trip somewhere in South America or the Middle East, which are both regions I very much want to see.
Anyway, this year's it's going to be a trip taking in two countries in Asia: Japan and South Korea. I'm going to start it off with some time in Japan and attend YAPC::Asia, which if last year is anything to go by is perhaps the world's biggest Perl conference. I'll submit a talk or two and hope for acceptance. After that, it's time to go travel! I've still got a lot of details to flesh out, but essentially I'm planning a kind of circular trip, down south from Tokyo to various places, crossing the sea to Busan in the south of South Korea, working my way up to Seoul and then probably flying back over to Tokyo. Or, alternatively, I may take this in reverse, since it seems Japan gets nicer as September goes on, whereas Korea is already nice early on in September (so that'd be hang around in Tokyo, then go to South Korea, then back over to Japan and back up towards Tokyo for the trip home).
So, less epic geographical distances this time, that's for sure. I'm sure the density of things to see won't disappoint though; indeed, in the initial research I've done so far I know that I could easily spend the full month worth in either of these countries and still not come close to covering the stuff that seems worth seeing. But, I like to get around and I've heard too many good things about both countries to not take the opportunity to sample a bit of both.
So, how does it look from a language perspective? Well, I know about nothing in Japanese or Korean at this point, so it's time to get learning! Korean is the more promising of the two. Spoken is going to be tricky for sure, but it appears to have an incredibly logical syllabary. (A syllabary differs from an alphabet in that instead of having characters for individual consonant and vowel sounds that compose together, you have a way to represent each syllable). That means I have some hope of being able to learn to read some basic signs quite easily.
On the other hand, Japanese is kinda crazy. They have three different ways of writing stuff: two different syllabaries and then a character set (this is the one character per meaning approach, like in Chinese) which can be mixed and matched even, as far as I'm aware, within a sentence. So a loanword from English might be written in one of the syllabaries but other bits of the sentence would be in the character set. Little wonder Japanese is considered so hard to learn - and that's just how you write it! I've been told that one of the syllabaries is more useful than the other, so I plan to learn that one, plus brush up on some of the Chinese characters I knew, since those appear with often the same or related meanings in Japanese too.
I expect I'll be heading over there in early September. Happily, I've got lots of travel plans for before then too. Of course, that means I'll probably spend most of October, November and December working hard to pay for it all, but that's fine. Work hard, play hard and all that lot. Anyway, that's my plans. :-)
Sunday, 3rd May 2009
Trnava
I think I just cooked and eated the unhealthiest thing so far this year: bacon sandwich with the bread fried in bacon fat with added butter. I'd forgotten how good bacon and fried bread taste together. Now I need to quickly forget about that again, or I'll have this situation. Anyways...
Today I made it to Trnava, after church. I'd planned to go yesterday afternoon, but when I woke up yesterday it looked all gray outside, and I knew the forecast for today was better. It's just half an hour or so away down the mainline that eventually (after some five hours) pretty much crosses Slovakia and ends up in Košice. As usual, the area around the station was a mess, but five minutes later I'd found the city center and that was really quite nice. When I first got there, though, it was unnervingly quiet - there was barely a soul to be seen. I hadn't got far before realizing I was rather hungry, so I took a slightly late lunch at an open air cafe on the pedestrianized Main Street (yup, it's actually really called Main Street...well, once you translate it, anyways). I washed down a delicious Sote with chicken, sausage, bacon, peppers and so on down with a couple of cold pints of nice Slovak beer, sat in the sun.
The main highlight of the city was the churches - it's not a big town but it has loads of them. The Catholic Cathedral was incredible inside, from floor to ceiling. I hung around in there for a while admiring it. I didn't find any others that were open for visiting, but many let you look through a glass door to get an idea of what they are like on the inside. I also found the synagogue. The building was in good shape, though not used as a synagogue any more. Instead, it is home to art exhibitions. The one at the moment was quite small and consisted of some very abstract sculpture stuff. Upstairs they have an exhibition of various Jewish bits, which was at least as interesting as the arts. In fact, I've not been inside many synagogues, so it was an interesting building to visit in and of itself. It was free to enter too, so I sure can't complain about the price.
Anyways, it was a nice - and easy - little escape for an afternoon. I probably could have spent a bit longer there, and I'm sure I could enjoy another visit. It's not a must see as such, but on the other hand it's only half an hour away and makes a nice change of scenery.
Friday, 1st May 2009
May: Exploring Slovakia Month
So, I have a month without any conferences to go to and no trips abroad planned. That means it must be time - at last - to explore Slovakia some more. :-) So, I'm planning - every other weekend, starting this one - to go and visit some place (I figured every weekend might be a little too tiring). This Saturday I will go to either Trnava or Trenčín (depending how early I can drag myself out of bed; I'm still a little down on sleep and the journey to Trenčín is an hour longer). The final Saturday of the month, I plan to do whichever of these two that I didn't manage yet. And in the middle of the month, I'm planning to go on the Friday to Banská Bystrica and stay there for a couple of nights (it's a little bit of a trek for a day trip). Don't think I'm going to make it as far east as Košice and Prešov, but hey, can't do everywhere in a month. :-) Anyway, more dots on The Map coming soon. (By the way, I put some new photos there form Helsingør and Helsingborg there recently too.)
Thursday, 23rd April 2009
Scandinavia
I'm back from a great, though utterly exhausting, trip to Scandinavia. First stop was Helsingborg, which I reached by taking the train up from Copenhagen Airport to Helsingør and then the ferry. It was a short journey over the sea - you can see from the Danish town over to the Swedish one - but made a nice way to arrive. The weather was lovely, though the wind on the sea was rather fresh. I glanced Kronborg Castle (setting of Hamlet) on the crossing too - you pass it while leaving the Helsingør harbor.
I was meeting a friend in the evening in Helsingborg, but had a little while to wander around before that. I hiked it up to the tower on the hill (which was actually pretty effortless, but had good views), down through the walking streets and towards the harbor, where I watched people fishing for a little while. The center was pretty small, and I'm not sure I'd have found many days worth of stuff to do there, but it was certainly pleasant to spend a day in. Tore, my friend, showed me around a few more places after we met up, took me to the town's award-winning pizza place, then for some Arabic cuisine, and finally to - of all places - a Czech bar. I was curious just how Czech it was, so when the bar girl came with the beer I thanked her in Slovak (it's pretty much the same in Czech). She went to walk away, then turned around and gave me a, "erm, did you just say what I think you did" kind of look. So I ended up talking to her for a while in Slovak - an unexpected but welcome bit of practice! It turned out she was actually from central Slovakia, so was easier to handle than if she'd been Czech. Nice. :-) And of course, the beer was great.
The next day I headed up to Gothenburg, where another friend, Jeremiah, had kindly agreed to host me for the night before we traveled up to the Perl Workshop in Oslo together. He'd also arranged company, food and lots of delicious Swedish beer for the evening. Also, he had a super-cute cat, which had no trouble getting all the attention it could possibly want from me. A good evening was had, and somehow we ended up (at my not-quite-sober suggestion) making a little stroll down to the Gothenburg port at 3am.
I woke up feeling the previous night's beer somewhat. Thankfully, Jeremiah has the perfect solution: a trip to a place serving some Swedish meatballs complete with lingonberries and potato moose. That got me in shape for the three-hour journey up to Oslo, which went smoothly. There was some snow along the roadside as we got closer towards Oslo. Once we got to Oslo center, I was pretty sure I knew where the hotel we needed to reach was on foot from the station since I'd stayed there before, but trying to navigate us in a car through the Oslo one-way system proved more of a challenge. We made it, though, and then went on to the pre-conference meet-up. Not so many people were there, but it was nice to see those who were. Was amused by Patrick's summary of me: "Jonathan turns beer into code." Not quite sure if that one belongs on the CV...
The conference itself was excellent. Great people, great venue. In fact, stunning venue - on the top of one of the tallest buildings in central Oslo, which also had a roof terrace that we had access to. Goes without saying the views were impressive. I made sure to pack my camera for the second day of the conference. My talks went pretty well - the audience certainly helped to make that the case. And I have to hand it to the organizers for perhaps the classiest post-conference party I've ever been to, which was hosted on roof terrace of the venue as the sun gradually started to sink to the horizon.
Anyone who expects me to be around at 9am the following day should probably not also invite me to such a party, however. It goes without saying that I didn't make the very start of the 3-day hackathon. And once I did get there, it took some serious coffee consumption to get things rolling. But eventually I did, and soon was involved in language design discussions to wrap up some works on parametric types I've been doing of late. By the end of the day, I'd filled the white board with scribbles of what I wanted to code up the next day.
So much got done in the three days of the hackathon, it was all a bit of a blur by the end. We got a lot of important Perl 6 design discussions, planning and implementation work done during it, which will serve us well for the coming months of development. But it was all pretty exhausting, and I was more than ready for an earlyish night by the end of it.
I'd chosen to take an evening flight rather than a morning one on the Tuesday to give me some time to see Oslo during the day. This was great in that I got to sleep in a bit and see more of a nice city, though less great in that it meant I didn't get home until 2am. I collapsed on my bed, and (unusually for me) was out like a light and the next time I was conscious enough to glance at my watch it was midday on Wednesday! Was worth a little temporary exhaustion for such a great trip, though. Oh, and yes, some photos will be forthcoming.
So, that should be my last little bit of major traveling - and certainly flying - until June. Of course, visiting a few nearby (for some definition of nearby) places by train during May could well happen. ;-)