Update: 4/11/2010 我真的很高兴！！！！

First things first: 我真的很高兴! (I am very happy)

Why? Well I got into contact with my Chinese host family, and my Chinese wasn't so terrible that I couldn't understand them. I used a dictionary a heap, yes, but... they miss me! And I miss them, and everyone's all missing everyone else, and they're all lovely...

I just feels great that I was able to contact them, have a proper conversation with a minimum of misunderstandings, and that they still like me.

*runs through blog throwing happiness about.*

Secondly: nanowrimo is going well. Both my books are at the first turning point, which is great. Now I've just go to figure out where to go from there, but it'll come. I've got two random new characters in the steam punk novel - one that is entirely new, and is going to be a major character. I love it when things go well.

Viva la Revolution! Well, in colonial Australia, anyway.

I've also figured out how to fix a major plot issue in my other book (The Manda). I am tossing up whether to get to that now, or after november. It's probably going to be after.

But things are still percolating. I think I may be at the stage where I can start sending this thing (The Manda) out December/January. And then, if it doesn't get any bites, I can put it away in full knowledge that I have other things happening.

The only bleak note on the horizon is that the accommodation people at my university have not gotten back to me. Ahh well, you can't have it all in life.

Tomorrow, I am word warring with a fellow writer, who writes 5k a day without fail. I'm going to be slaughtered. But I may get more done then I was.

So all in all, a pretty good update. :D

Asian Languages, and Why People Find Them Hard

Now, I think I'm actually going to do what this blog promises, and write about languages.
Me, I'm an Asian language person. The two languages I know with any familiarity (apart from my mother tongue) and Japanese and Chinese. But a lot of people I know would rather kill themselves than learn an Asian language. These same people the go off to Spanish, or French, or something else European.

I, for the life of me, can't get my head around other European languages. It just does not compute. So this got me to thinking - what is the difference? If you learn Italian, it's easier to learn Spanish after that. But if you learn Italian, and then try you hand at Chinese, then you'll have just as much trouble as when you first learned Italian.

So what makes them different, and rather incompatible?

Well, to me the most marked difference is cultural. Obviously, Asian languages are not from the same culture, but they are from a group of cultures that have influenced each other over the time through war and trade and other national pursuits. Same in Europe. You can hardly say French culture is like English or German culture, but they have influenced each other.

Has Asia influenced Europe, or vice versa? Over the past 100 year - yes. Over the past 1000? Minutely. This was of course due to the sheer distance between the two cultural blocks. And while these days planes and other means of transportation can get you from one place to the other quickly, these things didn't exist, or were too expensive in the days gone past.

Now, some may say that culture doesn't really relate to language all that much. I mean, things can be translated, can't they? We can watch Japanese, Chinese and Korean movies with subtitles, and you understand what's being said.

Well, that's because translators are brilliantly smart people. They don't translate things word for word - if they did, you would have all sorts of strange words and phrases running about. They translate from culture to culture as well. This is the only reason, in my view, that computers can not be relied on to do the translating for us. Culture has a huge effect on language. On its grammar, its word choice, the way words are put together in phrases - the influence of culture can not be denied.

Therefore, in my mind at least, Asian languages are hard for European based foreigners to compute because culture almost has to be learnt hand in hand with the language. For example, in Japanese, there and heaps of words and phrases that begin with 気 (ki). Ki, loosely translated, means "spirit, mind, heart." But Japanese words such as care, pay attention, like, weird, calm down... all these words are basically descriptions of "ki". You won't find them in a dictionary, because they're sentences rather than words. So anyone trying to learn Japanese by reading Manga, say, is going to have an awful lot of trouble figuring out what "drop you heart" actually means (it means calm down). There are all these things that either have to be either explained, or understood culturally.

So I think maybe not coming from the same cultural background hampers people in learning languages. Although, I am most definitely of Anglo-Saxan background, and I can't for the life of me figure out European grammar (the feminine and masculine words ect... nope.) But I can think with my words all twisted around in Japanese. Maybe that's just me - I'm found to be fairly weird :p