Rocking in Hakata

I’m in the same boat as Alex, who has just “tagged” me. I normally don’t post this kind of stuff. However, I have nothing exciting to post today, and shortly will wind up on a picnic at Hirakiyama Park (AGAIN). Ha ha. Therefore, I’ll play along. The idea is that I must post 5 goals of mine and then tag 5 other bloggers to do the same. I’m wondering if I can actually tag anybody that Alex hasn’t already tagged…hmmm. Ok, well, let’s get to it.

1 – Pass the Japanese Proficiency Test at the 2nd level this year. I need to study. Badly. Oh, so badly. I need another 400-500 kanji.

2 – Take at least 2 overseas trips this year. I’m thinking one in summer and maybe one in fall or winter. May turn out to be 3. This is just a minimum setting.

3 – Pay off the rest of my student loan with the must absurd (variable) interest rate. (For the curious, err…nosy anyway, I have just knocked it down to $8K – down from $11K in January – and plan to finish it off before next January.) I hate being in debt. Once I’ve killed this one, I’m moving to another one. So many loans.

4 – Save more than $22K by the end of 2008. I am using my GE Interest Plus account for this purpose, and am loving it so far. I highly recommend them. Low risk to your capital, higher interest yield than other kinds of common accounts, and full access to your money whenever. Pretty darn nice.

5 – Apply to a bunch of graduate schools and get accepted by ONE with the offer of financial assistance within 2 years. I know, I know – it’s a long shot. But I really want to take my studies higher.

Those are my goals. Some of them, anyway. Now, for my victims… I will choose Wendy, Melissa, Megan, Nick (who has mysteriously vanished), and Nicole (also known as Chuck). Sorry guys. It’s the rules. Now get crackin’. It’s like annoying chain letters, but for blogs. Ha ha.

Deas Customary Drivel

The answer to a question that Megan and I used to discuss pretty frequently is being answered thanks to the wonder that is YouTube! Something that we used to ponder back while we were studying at Waseda was how English would have sounded to us, were we studying it as a foreign language. Or as a foreign language we weren’t studying – whichever. Being native English speakers, we felt like this wasn’t something we’d never really discover. We knew what our mimicry of foreign languages sounded like, but were incapable of faking English. Well, some guy on YouTube called “crehnquist” has got the ball rolling. Here’s the first video I’ve seen where someone successfully (in my opinion) fakes English.

German guy fakes English (YouTube)
Dude calls for fake language exchange (YouTube)
English speaker responds (YouTube)

What’s funny to me now is that as a person who has studied Japanese for a bit now, I understand how far off the fake Japanese of the guy behind the original video is. It sounds bad to me. And I listen to real Japanese that I don’t understand everyday. In spite of that, the languages which I don’t speak sounded like reasonable approximations. Is that weird or what? The phonemes might be right, but I guess you have to fake intonation, pacing, phrasing, and sentence construction too to make the whole thing work. I really hope some native speakers of other languages respond to his video. I wonder if my opinion of his “reasonable approximations” is shared by other folks. I wonder if a person who spoke Russian would listen and say “Man, his Russian sounds like poo, but his other stuff sounds pretty accurate!” Fun stuff.

On another note – some of the interesting things that they came up with involves faked English created by native English speakers. The 3rd video in the list up there is one example of a fluent English speaker faking it, though crehnquist mentions the gibberish of comedians like Stanley Unwin (YouTube) and Peter Sellers [UPDATE: (YouTube), skip to 2:20 to hear him demonstrate an American announcer using "American sounds" in lieu of real words.]. Simlish was also mentioned in passing. Anyway, I too hope that some legitimate non-English speakers get some fake English put up soon. Knowing something about the language seems like cheating in this game, doesn’t it? For instance, I couldn’t fake Japanese at this point, because I’d be trying to not speak in Japanese…not faking it…and my knowledge of the language would shape my attempted approximations. Besides, this is about what it sounds like to foreign people, or how foreign people pretend to speak in English, not about actually accurately duplicating the sound of English. Gibberish goes a long way in that respect, anyway. Anyway, I hope you guys found that interesting.

Oh yeah, and this blip hit my radar screen thanks to Digg.com’s Videos section.

Deas Customary Drivel

Just thought I’d drop a quick post to encourage fellow Imabarians to grab the newest issue of i-News, the every-other-month free bilingual (English-Japanese) magazine / newsletter put together by the Imabari City International Exchange Association, or ICIEA. This time I appear twice in it. I’m famous! Not. Anyway, for friends and family who give a rip, check my Articles & Writings page for links to articles and blurbs I helped with. The most recent issue included my member intro on the back cover (pdf) and a quick filler article I wrote when another author didn’t deliver, dealing with graduation ceremonies in Japan (pdf). Yay! (Or boo, depending.)

Deas Customary Drivel, Unsolicited Commentary

YES, I must post about the cherry blossom viewing, or hanami. I learned about it from the Englishman in Osaka. He said that 2 years ago, the sakura police would have come to get me if I didn’t. Sure, the rule has been repealed, but I’m still nervous about being taken in the night. So, here is my obligatory entry – thought, admittedly, it wasn’t begrudgingly written. Anyway, if you enjoyed the pictures above, you might also enjoy the video below.

You may have noticed that the first 5 pictures are not from a hanami session. They are from a curry party that Will threw at his place for the Eikaiwa adult class. We all got together and threw some quick curry together. Well, ok, in reality Will and I prepped the food, and then Mimi came over and took over the kitchen. We let her, though, because she is a really good cook. She also happened to bring some pork cutlets, so we wound up making katsu-karee, or Pork Cutlet Curry, which is basically a lump of steamed white rice covered in curry sauce and topped with some crispy fried pork cutlets. Yum! Anyway, it was a good time, so I thought I’d incorporate it into this entry. Right, moving on.

We had really wacky inclement weather this past week. I had my first 黄砂 (kousa; “yellow dust which rises into the sky in spring and falls in northwest China which is visible as a haze in Japan”) experience. It’s hard to view the cherry blossoms through a yellow dust storm. Then it rained a few times. Did that stop me from partaking of the sakura goodness? Oh no. I went twice to Hirakiyama Park. It’s kind of famous around here – and by here I mean on my island. The view was great. I tried to film a 360 walk around the top of the observation deck at the park, but it turned out kind of funny because I was walking around a bunch of other tourists who were also viewing the cherry blossoms. The result is an awkward shot, but hey, what do you want for nothing? Rubber biscuit? (Anybody follow that? Emily?)

Both times I went I was taken by Yamaoka-sensei. We took the president of the student government along with us. It was really fun. I love hanging out with the students and talking about non-class stuff. This guy in particular is keen on learning conversational English. I taught him some common slang (that is useable and not impolite) – for instance, “raincheck.” He’s used it twice since I taught it to him. Anyway, the rest of the experience is visible through the pictures and video, so I’ll shut up now. One last comment – the song used in the video is Rains in Asia by Jump, from their album Between the Dim and the Dark. It is a great song, and I am proud to say that they first performed it acoustically at my university during a show I attended. Cool. Anyway, that’s all for today, I think.

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Deas Customary Drivel, Media, Photos, Video

Oh, sorry, I meant “Eureka!” Didn’t mean to imply that you smell. Although, seriously, just between the two of us, you kind of do. Might want to take a shower or something. Right, anyway. I just thought I’d share a happy accident that I had.

Last night I didn’t get around to making dinner until it was late. I wanted something fast, and the instant yakisoba on top of my refrigerator was calling to me. Then I looked in the fridge, at the half carton of milk and 5 eggs which have to be chucked because they are past their expiration dates and I changed my mind. There were other items in need of immediate use, or they too would join the queue, waiting around for trash day to come so they can hop in the lovely yellow burnable garbage bag and head to the incinerator. I thought I should make an attempt to use what I had and stop wasting money. So, I did something that I rarely do, and rinsed out a skillet then plunked it down on the gas range. Read more…

Deas Culinary, Customary Drivel

Ok – let me just say, in defense of Japanese men, that they are not all freaky, perverted, and exponentially randier with every year they add to their lives. But you sure would think otherwise if you followed some foreign media coverage after the recent Lindsay Hawker murder. For those who don’t know about the Lindsay Hawker murder, please refer to Trans-Pacific Radio’s coverage of it. (It’s in the “Society” section.) They link to some other resources there. (You can also check any newspaper that covered it.)

The newest article that I have seen is from the Daily Mail, and features this really wonderful tagline: “I was stalked in Japan like Lindsay.” You can read the original article, or see it reproduced in its entirety here below. (Click the more link, please.)
Read more…

Deas Customary Drivel, Unsolicited Commentary