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Author | Topic: New moderator - AdminBen | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3974 Joined: |
Ben has held "Director" status since last December. As such, he was helping Percy in the new software development and testing.
Now AdminBen is also going to be taking part in the general moderation activities at . Adminnemooseus
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AdminJar Inactive Member |
Welcome Ben. Please let me be the first to say that all problems are YOUR fault.
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AdminAsgara Administrator (Idle past 2302 days) Posts: 2073 From: The Universe Joined: |
Awe jar, we were gonna ease him into that gently. A few weeks in the super secret interrogation chamber behind the fireplace in the Admin lounge and he'd have come to that conclusion all by himself.
Oh well, welcome aboard officially Ben. Pay no attention to the sounds coming from the fireplace, its squirrels.
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mike the wiz Member Posts: 4752 From: u.k Joined: |
Awe jar, we were gonna ease him into that gently She says that to all the boys.
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Phat Member Posts: 18262 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
CONGRATULATIONS, BEN!
I always liked you. You were (no pun intended) Gentle, Ben. Folks, we have us a kinder, (ahem) gentler moderator, here! Proud to know ya!
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AdminBen Inactive Member |
Never replied to my own welcome thread... embarrassing. Anyway, thanks to all those who welcomed me (i.e. Phatboy!) I'm glad I can offer some service to the board.
I expect to be both willing to listen, but also strict and harsh. I expect people to the rules and follow them. I appreciate those who take it upon themselves to govern themselves and their own posts. At the same time, I try to listen to feedback, when appropriate. You may sometimes hear me refer to myself as "the people's admin." It happens to the best of us. This message has been edited by AdminBen, Friday, 2005/05/13 06:43 PM
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AdminBen Inactive Member |
The REAL reason I wanted to write in this thread is to talk about my avatar. If there's one thing I'll take away from my time in Japan, it's Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli movies.
Hayao MiyazakiHayao Miyazaki has been called the "Japanese Walt Disney." He's made some absolutely fantastic cartoon movies. He works for a company called "Studio Ghibli." Many of my favorite movies were done by Miyazaki, such as "Princess Mononoke", "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" and "My Neighbor Totoro." The movies are so popular here. Girls all have SOMETHING Totoro... but the movies are actually really cool. The man creates some compelling characters and stories. Studio GhibliThere is a Studio Ghibli Museum here in Tokyo, and I went to visit with my girlfriend. It's a small place, mostly boring, but there were two great exhibits. The first was a room completely wallpapered with original colored cells from many of the movies, drawn and colored by Miyazaki himself. It was amazing.. The second was an actual life-sized metal cast of one of the characters in the movie "Laputa: Castle in the Sky." That's what you see here. The AvatarThis thing is called "kyoshinhei", which is the pronunciation of three Kanji (Chinese characters). The characters mean giant (kyo) person (shin) warrior (hei). In the movie, Laputa is a mythical castle in the sky. A boy's dead father claims to have seen it and even photographed it after a battle with a storm while flying. A girl has a magical levitation crystal which was passed down to her from her family. Some government men have discovered one of these kyoshinhei on the ground, and don't know where it came from. The material it's made of is foreign, they can't figure it out, and it looks broken and they can't get it to work. Not to spoil the story, but the kyoshinhei turns out to be a warrior robot from Laputa. Laputa turns out to be real, but ... well, there's a lot more to the story, but really, it's a movie worth watching. Not my favorite Miyazaki movie, but definitely has his heart, creative spirit, and style in it. I probably would have liked it more if I had seen it before "Nausicaa." P.S. I'm more than happy to answer questions about these things here. Yes, this is the one time I will be BEGGING you to take me off topic. PLEASE take advantage of it . This message has been edited by AdminBen, Friday, 2005/05/13 06:57 PM
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Silent H Member (Idle past 5819 days) Posts: 7405 From: satellite of love Joined: |
I have seen no other Miyazaki films, except Spirited Away. I thought it was brilliant and will probably force my children to watch it and become depressed if they don't recognize its sheer brilliance as I have.
I am aware of the other works, its just that I haven't gotten around to see them yet. The Castle in the Sky movie sounds just as promising. Beats the hell out of Disney who at this point treats children as sources of revenue with infantile levels of "purity". As a side note, snce you mentioned Kanji, I have recently been thinking of studying one of the ideogramatic written languages. I am uncertain if I should study Kanji and hope it will help me understand (to some degree) Chinese and S Korean, or if I should just start with Chinese and hope it helps me with the others. Do you have a suggestion of which would be easier or more effective? Or do you think there are such differences that moving between them isn't really a practical reality. I figured it might be cool to learn a written language (which I am better at than speaking/listening) which would allow me to communicate to a large number of people, regardless of knowing direct spoken languages. holmes "...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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AdminBen Inactive Member |
Well...
Japanese kanji are a (sometimes slightly modified) subset of Chinese characters. In all, I think there are a bit over 2000 Chinese characters in Japanese. Japanese people can often get the "gist" of written Chinese (so I am told) because of this. Korean characters are completely different. At least, to the naked eye--my girlfriend says that it's somehow derived. Case in point is that she also said Korean people used to be taught to read Chinese kanji, but that stopped, and now there's a generation that can't read at all. Or something like that. So, they started teaching it again, so younger Koreans know how to read some Chinese characters. Japanese use Kanji, however, in conjunction with characters of their own writing system (hiragana). So, if you learn these Kanji characters, you'd be able to identify individual words in a sentence, but you wouldn't be able to relate them (grammatical 'particles' are in hiragana), nor would you understand words that were formed as a combination of Kanji and hiragana. The the bad point of learning written Chinese is that set of Chinese characters is huge. However, since it's more "pure" than Japanese (i.e. no hiragana), I think I'd suggest to learn Chinese characters. Although.. the one thing that Japanese has going for it, however, is that you'd automatically have a study partner. As a note, I enjoy kanji. I really enjoy 書道 (shodou), which is Chinese (ok, Japanese) calligraphy. I mean, I suck, I practice alone (not at all recently), but I got some books, watched some free basic videos online, and it rocks. I'm a visual learner too, so I find that learning Japanese is easier with the Kanji. I mean, after I learned about 500 basic ones. After that, I can remember words much better by remembering how to read them. One last thing...
Beats the hell out of Disney who at this point treats children as sources of revenue with infantile levels of "purity". Yeah, I agree. I pretty much hate Disney. I don't see how it's comparable at all (besides that they're both very rich & famous for animation). But that's what they say
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Silent H Member (Idle past 5819 days) Posts: 7405 From: satellite of love Joined: |
Well let me ask you this, are you able to look at a chinese item of some kind... menu, signpost, magazine, etc etc... and generally know what is being said?
holmes "...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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AdminBen Inactive Member |
I can recognize the Chinese sign at the Chinese restauraunt. My girlfriend started studying Chinese, and I recognize Japanese kanji from there.
I've only been studying Japanese for a little over a year. I know the most basic 700 kanji (or so). I'm considered "low intermediate" (according to the Japanese Language Proficiency Test). Like I said, my girlfriend claims she can. And she's actually studying Chinese. AbE: Feeling naked, posting in my "stripped down" form! Oh no! This message has been edited by AdminBen, Friday, 2005/05/13 09:03 PM
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Silent H Member (Idle past 5819 days) Posts: 7405 From: satellite of love Joined: |
Does your gf also know Japanese? Should I assume she IS japanese?
Thanks for the info. holmes "...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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AdminBen Inactive Member |
She's Japanese. I guess I could have mentioned that
Let me know if you want any other info (if you do try Japanese, I know quite a few good online study materials) This message has been edited by AdminBen, Friday, 2005/05/13 10:29 PM
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cmanteuf Member (Idle past 6765 days) Posts: 92 From: Virginia, USA Joined: |
holmes writes: I am uncertain if I should study Kanji and hope it will help me understand (to some degree) Chinese and S Korean, or if I should just start with Chinese and hope it helps me with the others. I took Chinese 101 in college. I know nothing of Japanese other than some time spent talking to people taking Japanese 101, so I can't compare the two. But the Chinese language kicked my ass. Hard. And not for lack of effort on my part, if I may be so bold. A few observations on my experiences with Chinese: *) Spoken language was the hardest part for me. I have two native-Chinese speaking friends, and we would walk all around campus with me saying "Xiexie" again and again and again. And after I'd say it the same way 10 times, Richard would say "your fourth was right, your seventh was awful, the rest were bad" and other helpful things like that. They would sound *exactly* the same to me, but the native speakers heard differences. This also applied to things the native speakers said, I had a hard time understanding them because ma sounds to me like ma which sounds to me like ma which sounds to me like ma. (One of our first 'sentences' in Chinese was "ma ma ma ma" which, when pronounced properly, is a not quite right way to say "Mother scolds the horse?") *) The Chinese langauge didn't seem to have a grammar. It had constructions: you use this phrase in this manner to indicate this, and you use this phrase in this manner to indicate that. You construct statements like this. Adding this sound (or character, if written) at this point makes it a question. Adding this sound (or character, if written) at this point in this construction makes it plural, but you don't use that sound with this construction over here. Adding this sound (or etc.) makes the whole thing past tense. When I took German, grammar was one of the first things we learned (tense, case, conjugation, etc). Not so with the Chinese class. As near as I can tell, from talking to Chinese speakers and trying to learn their language, it has no real tense, case, or conjugation. Beyond the addition of measure words -(like ma in the above example: one type of ma turns a statement constructed in a certain manner into a question) I didn't encounter much grammar. *) The PRC simplified the character set, while the ROC still uses the traditional character set. We learned the simplified form in my class. From looking at the differences in the book, it seemed a lot like the differences between Suetterlin and Latin characters for handwritten German: if you were really familiar with one you could read the other with some effort, if you weren't you were in trouble. Also, I've been told that Korean is not like Chinese or Japanese at all. It has a 24 character alphabet and creates words and sentences out of them. Hangul was created by Sejong the Great in the 1400's (?) to be readable by the common person, so they didn't have to learn full up Chinese to be able to read. The Japanese tried to eradicate it during their 50 year occupation, replacing it with Japanese. The book _Lost Names_ by Richard Kim has an evocative description of his family apologizing to their ancestors for following the Japanese orders and adopting Japanese names. After the war, as I understand it, Hangul and Korean returned with a vengence (though the ROK and the DPRK use slightly different spelling). Chris
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Silent H Member (Idle past 5819 days) Posts: 7405 From: satellite of love Joined: |
Thanks for the info.
I was actually aware of the problems related to learning spoken Chinese. I tried to learn that years ago and certainly got my ass handed to me. I hadn't run into a ma ma ma ma exercise, but understand that would be a great example of how difficult it is. In fact I almost always have a problem with spoken language, even in languages which do not carry the entire meaning of a word based on its style of pronunciation. For some reason people sound garbled and when I think I have said something right they tell me I'm garbled. That's why I was intrigued with the possibility of just picking up a written version of a language, that is not keyed to the spoken version. I can always pretend I'm a deaf mute and use writing to get along. Of course I have no experience trying to memorize 1000's of individual characters, or trying to arrange them in a grammatical structure. Is there a grammatical structure with written Chinese, or is it as haphazard as the spoken form?
Also, I've been told that Korean is not like Chinese or Japanese at all. It has a 24 character alphabet and creates words and sentences out of them. Hangul From what I've read Chinese (or Chinese derived script) is still used in South Korea. It is only North Korea which has done away with it completely. That seems almost ironic given N Korea's political ties with China. holmes "...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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