I need to thank the YouTube algorithm…

For suggesting these two videos this morning (and ask it to go give Facebook’s algorithm a few pointers… ;)).

The first is by Dogen, and I’m subscribed to their channel, so maybe it doesn’t deserve mad props for suggesting it, but it was a perfect video for the morning. Foreigners versus Coffee… And I just love one of the comments too (I screencapped it). Admittedly, a month or two ago, I wouldn’t have understood it, despite knowing the kanji for store and for inside/middle.  I may have been horribly close to becoming one of the Japanese learners who only reads (there’s another Dogen video for that).


I’ve experienced some of this video in Paris (only obviously with regards to French, not Japanese :p) - when I flew to my French exchange’s wedding, I had to catch a metro from Orly airport to Gare Du Nord, then a train to Auxerre… 

This was the summer that I left university and I hadn’t actually done any French since leaving high school*, so while I waited in the long line, I was mentally rehearsing some very basic French to make sure that I was ready when I reached the front of the line… “un billet allez et retour au Auxerre, s’il vous plait.”  Fighting autocorrect to get that out was painful.  I really don’t want to add French as an acceptable language to my phone, Autocorrect sabotages me enough when it just thinks I want English (& Japanese, but it has never suggested anything in Japanese when I’ve been typing in Roman characters, so I’m grateful for small mercies).

So, I got to the front of the line, money in hand (maybe even my first ever credit card), and trotted out my carefully rehearsed French and the guy replied In English!!!  I was appalled after carefully rehearsing it all through the line (and after about 9 years of French plus 8 years of exchange visits). But I also knew it was a damn sight faster and a long line and just got on with it in English, instead of being like the native English speaker in the Dogen video… 🤣

And the other thing that YouTube suggested is a complete change of mood because it is a music video by Aimer (& when I went back to YouTube to grab that link too, it tried to suggest that I should watch Dogen’s videos on renovating an old Japanese house, and his “I built my dream house in Japan” half hour tour…  Not sure why it didn’t suggest those when we were actually doing about Japanese houses for our JCCC class… 🤨  They’re on my watch list now anyway (so I’ll probably never see them. It’s a bit like Mount To Be Read, which is more like a small mountain range by now.  Definitely keep buying more books while things linger  on the lower slopes ignored…).

Anyway, the video… Their channel is well worth subscribing to, they have a lot of good music and videos.  I’ll have to post about night world later, it deserves its own post.


My usual footnotes section…

* this was before the internet** It was certainly before things like Duolingo*** existed to help you keep your ear in and your vocabulary up. For all I know, the only Rosetta Stone at the time was the one in the British Museum… 

** we had a vax network at university and internal e-mail. Possibly external if you knew someone at another university and if they had an email address there… but it never occurred to me to ask my friends at Bristol university or Cambridge or Oxford if they had an email addresss and to save stamps and that we could just communicate that way instead, cheaper and more often 😳🙄😣 And that was despite the fact that we used to communicate internally for jon-course work things  I still have a printout in the basement of the stories that Bob or Simon wrote about “the dread Lord Vax and his servant Mini Ta’ab”! 🤣😂🤣 Minitab was the statistics program that we had to work with on the vax (Unix) network for our statistics course and if we ever wanted to print any graphs for our science labs… I don’t think there is an emoji that shudders hard enough to capture all those feelings…

*** and even if it had existed, I’d probably have worked on my Latin, not my French, because I liked it more. And obviously, so much more useful… 🤣😭🤣 I really shouldn’t have asked Rachael what she was going to do with her Norse languages degree, become a used longboat salesman? 😔

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hiragana Chart ひらがな

Image
  I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This...
Read more

What a Difference a Year Makes, Part 2...

 It was around this time last year that I was first considering learning Japanese... This year, I went to a ぼねんかい last week hosted by the Nijikaewa group, was cheerfully wishing people よいおとしを ＆あけましておめでとうございます( & 楽しいクリスマス・メリクリスマス a week earlier too), and yesterday, at a regular check up appointment at the doctor's office, was studying Kanji while I was waiting - which I assume is the reason that when they called my name, I automatically, loudly, called "はい!" in response - and why on my way hoping and trying to find the nearest branch, I typed "starba" into google maps, instead of "Starbucks"... 😵 Luckily, Google knew exactly what I meant (often, it suggests the right thing until you misspell it, then it disappears off the suggestions list.  That didn't happen this time, and when I automatically hit enter without thinking, Starbucks still popped up as the searched for item.  It is evidently used to people googling starba 😁).
Read more

Perfect…

Image
 I was playing a game on my tablet and I found that I already had the last of the five items I needed to level up… and when I saw it and as I dragged it across to merge it, my brain was going “あー、かんぺき！” And I thought “really brain?  That means perfect?  You’re just making things up now!” So I went and checked it in the dictionary and I owe my brain an apology 😳 I had a similar thing happen the other day with a crossword clue - I had just binged about 6 episodes of anime before deciding to do the crossword puzzle and the clue was “sufficient, nice, fine, pretty, quite” and my brain instantly said “けっこう” which I thought was highly implausible as I would have sworn we had never had it as a vocabulary word - despite all those hiragana (& more) being available in the answer candidate pool for the app.  But I entered it in anyway, and it was right…then realized that I had heard the word multiple times in the anime episodes that I had just binged and my brain must have...
Read more