Musical Evening

[fiat_knox]

I'm sitting here in the flat, listening to these MP3 tracks I haven't played in ages. I really need to get new headphones for my MP3 player, so I can enjoy these tracks out in the field again.

Earlier today, I found myself watching Serenity yet again, and thinking of my brief flirtation with Mandarin Chinese - which led to reminiscences of my Japanese studies.

Sooner or later, it always comes back to studying languages. When it isn't studying mathematics or the elements of the periodic table.

I'm planning on another little jaunt to Manchester tomorrow. I think I'll take along a language book of my choice - just one - to give me something to brush up on during my journeys.

Comments

Linguistic Preferences

[fiat-knox.livejournal.com]

I have grown quite fond of Portuguese and Italian, both derivatives of the parent Latin. I study Welsh because I was born speaking it and English in my household, and because I feel that continued study of Cymraeg does honour to my ancestors.

As for the Eastern languages, I got involved with the study of Japanese when a businessman from Japan moved in a couple of houses down the street. His missus was the one who taught me the basics, and the rest I picked up from dictionaries, guide books and a couple of other sources available at the time.

The interest in Mandarin Chinese, of course, emerged when I first saw Firefly and Serenity on DVD. Unlike Japanese, which has two syllabaries - katakana and hiragana - Chinese has but a single, complex alphabet.

The good news is, since Japanese kanji is basically a version of the Chinese script that made its way across the water, I am already familiar with the Chinese script somewhat - even if I don't know the pronunciation for the sign for rain in Mandarin, for example, I'd recognise the symbol because I have seen it appear in Japanese in a sentence which reads "it is raining."