Gregory's ServerOne of the things I've started doing with my new tablet is jumping into a language app (Pimsleur) to learn Japanese and a problem I'm running into, trying to say words out loud, is I keep wanting to drag out my consonants, both due to southern drawl and due to if I talk slower it gives me more time to think, except in Japanese phonetics how long you draw out your vowels has semantic content so my southern drawl is actually probably destroying the comprehensibility of the words I'm saying
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Audiobook: You think you see someone you recognize, and you want to get her attention. How do you do it? Me [All memory fled suddenly except anime]: Oiiii Audiobook [sample voice]: Sumimasen [ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: UGLY AMERICAN] Update: Oh no oh no "so des ne" idiomatically is understood to mean diametrically opposite things ("yes, that's true!" "hm, I'm not sure") depending on whether you say it quickly and confidently or slowly and uncertainly however because I don't speak Japanese I say everything slowly and uncertainty Update: It finally got to numbers, and it taught us… 2, 1, 9, and 8… in that order… and no other numbers?? This is so specific I feel like it must be intentional but why? Pimsleur-sensei what are you doing Is this a Clue to a Puzzle. At some point in the next 24 hours am I going to encounter a keypad to which the combination is 2198 Okay did the next lesson today and this time they taught us 3, 5, and 4, only those three and in that order. They must be doing this on purpose?? Maybe they think if they teach them in order we'll be bad at random recall because we'll be counting to 8 in our heads every time we need to say eight? …is what I was GOING to say after tonight's lesson, however also this evening I watched an anime about a vampire who becomes a YouTuber, and I noticed a pattern, which means I can now count to *hovering in air glowing* 99 Note: I am assuming the Japanese language doesn't have some kind of French-style prank where the number "seventy" and nothing else follows a different rule from every number before it |
Pimsleur is VERY CLEARLY adapted with almost no changes from a books on tape series, which… well you know what it works about a thousand times better than Duolingo so if the audiobook wearing a shoddy paper mache app costume turns out to be a *good* audiobook, that's a win