Oh, the other annoyance is there is no predictive English input. My English speaking friends and I mostly mail in Japanese because it's so much faster. I can't imagine the English dictionary could have taken that much more space.
Glad to hear it's working for you, though!
Oh, and I've never used the video phone option either. I'm the only one I know who has it. =(
I have the same phone over here in Japan... Are you actually using it for MP3s or are you just excited that it supports it? Because, at least over here, this phone does not play MP3s. It plays "secure" MP3s, which you have to rip with special Sharp software. Another in a long line of disappointments with this phone and my service via Vodafone. The camera is decent as long as you don't expect too much (like it being in focus when you use the zoom), and I use it all the time to send funny/interesting pics to the folks back home, but it's still just a phone.
I agree, of course, but with the economy working the way it does now (people getting a new job every few years), sometimes you can't afford to have "the best job" where someone hired you because they knew a lot about you. Sometimes your savings that was supposed to hold you until you got a new job is dwindling and you're being turned down over and over and over because there are a million people out there with the same skillset and it's just a crap shoot, etc... In these cases, and they are common, you NEED A JOB, and it doesn't have to be "the best job."
Ideally, we could all just settle into a job where people know us and like us and want us on the team, and I think most people eventually find that place, but until they do, they really just need to eat!
(And I THOUGHT FT tasted different these days--I also noticed that liquor stores were not keeping it refrigerated, meaning it must be pasteurized now.)
Okay, THAT is a shock. Do you have any references for that??? I know they are big enough that they are now a regional, not a micro, but they are still a "craft" brewery--making things from scratch. Where did you hear this?
I beg your pardon, sir, but the noble brew of which you speak is lovingly manufactured in Fort Collins, Colorado, roughly 30 minutes south of the Wyoming border.
If you're ever in the area, I heartily recommend their free brewery tour. You learn a lot about beer, and at the end you are given a little glass of each of their brews in a fun and chatty atmosphere. It's a great free day date in Fort Collins. Afterwards, you can head back the road into Old Town for great food and a plethora of great bars, all within picturesque walking distance.
I recommend The Crown Pub (on College) and the Rio Grande (on Mountain) for food/drinks, and Elliot's martini bar (on Linden) for drinks. Finish your drunken evening off at Walrus ice cream (on Mountain, next to the Rio), enjoying their homemade deliciousness.
Oh, and personally, I prefer New Belgium's Sunshine Wheat to Fat Tire, mostly because hoppy beers like Fat Tire give me terrible acid reflux, although they are tasty.
Come on, everyone! Let's enjoy Fort Collins!
This message NOT paid for by the Fort Collins tourism board or chamber of commerce. My Japanese-language historical walking tours of Old Town have also ended, due to the fact that I don't live there anymore.
Dachshunds are bred to go down into animal burrows and flush game out. Humans bred them to do that. And if you ever own a dachshund, you are likely to find that he likes digging holes and seeks out small, confined places to explore, no training necessary. But we don't find that surprising because, as I said before, he was bred to do that.
So why on Earth would you suggest that humans--another animal constanty being bred for desirable traits--are somehow "above" this, aside from the reason that it is politically and historically uncomfortable?
We all know we end up like our parents. We know that identical twins, even separated at birth, very often develop many of the same personality quirks. Why, then, is it so controversial to say that people who have more children will result in there being more of these traits out there, until at some point, they dominate a population?
This truth is as plain as the nose on your face and the simpleminded ignorance of your post (and of my self-righteous and condescending attitude!).
You really said it there. What the *AA types don't get is that they might actually be able to increase revenue by LOWERING prices. I mean, look at Wal-Mart. Look at Best Buy. In these two commodity/retail giants, offering products at margin-kissing low prices has provided them ridiculous economies of scale.
Now think what the same model could do IF YOUR PRODUCT COST YOU NOTHING! Okay, not NOTHING, but server space and bandwidth have nothing on actually paying money to people to manufacture physical goods!
I buy all my music (on CDs no less), but I pirate the crap out of TV. Why? Because paying $30 for a DVD of a season of a show I could have seen and recorded for free a couple months ago just strikes me as insane. But if the prices came down, I wouldn't bother with rummaging around on torrent trackers and P2P crapholes; I'd happily pay to get the file from a trusted source, and I wouldn't even whine too much if it had some light, iTMS-style DRM on it (but I'd still whine).
No offense, but there you go again. Granted, I'm sure your sensei has told you a lot of things which get filed away as "facts," but that right there is the problem (remember what I said about Japanese people doing little to combat the "mysterious Japanese" image?). I remember the first time I came here as an exchange student. My teacher loaded me up with so many of these "facts" I spent the first 6 months terrified I was going to upset something or break some rule and bring a thousand years of shame upon someone's dead relatives or something.
Nothing is that dire.
The thing you have to remember is the same thing I said in my last post, and the same thing I've used in dealing with all the various nationalities I deal with in my job: People are essentially the same. They have different customs and cultures, but as long as you avoid the big no-nos (when you're having your Saudi friends over for a BBQ, don't serve pork and check if they are the "no alcohol" type or the "if the iman asks, there was no alcohol" type), people will work with you and you'll be fine. All these little "facts" do is make the situation difficult. Be humble, be soft, be kind and you will rarely run into trouble. Stick to the Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they would like to be done... unto... That sounded better in my head...
One of the big differences I found in having a native Japanese Japanese language teacher and a non-native is that, especially at the beginning, the non-natives were more useful. They not only explain difficult bits of grammar better, they offer better advice on getting along with people in the target culture. Quick! What are Americans like??? It's almost impossible to describe one's own culture, because it is a huge part of WHO YOU ARE, and what's YOU and what's YOUR CULTURE is very hard to distinguish. Now, speaking from experience, when you ARE teaching your own native language, people are going to press you to answer these questions. I typically refuse flat-out. I'll tell people what we do, but if they want to know why, I don't give them a great big cultural answer; I give them the most mundane answer I can think of, if anything at all.
My apartment is bigger than a hotel room! Sheesh. It's about 500 square feet, I think. We measure space in terms of tatami mats here. They are basically standard (well, ones used in apartments are) so if someone tells you that they have 2 6-jo (the counter for mats) rooms and a 4.5-jo room (like the one I'm typing now), you know not only how big that is, but also what shape it is. It's so much more useful than square footage. I live in a 3DK. Three rooms and a dining/kitchen area (plus bath/toilet area and genkan and balcony). It's nice.
When you say "honorifics system," do you mean the linguistic one (keigo) or the cultural one? If it's the former, about the only place I use that is at the bank or hotels or other such sort of expensive service industry area, and its receptive. I hate it and even though I know people are required to use it for their job, I sometimes say "I'm sorry, but keigo is very hard to follow for me; could we just switch to -masu/desu form?" It usually doesn't work. I also use it sometimes on the phone when I'm making a business call, but really, keigo (as in the "high" keigo with the different verb conjugations) seems to be dying out.
As for the "cultural" honorific system, here's an easy way to deal with it: Be especially polite and deferential to anyone who outranks you at work. Gee... Sounds quite a bit like what we do in the West, too, right? It really isn't that hard. Be polite to people older than you. (again, no big differences there) Be polite to people you don't know and at whom you are not angry (because they just shook their umbrella out all over you, in which case it is ALWAYS better to take them to task in English because sounding scary in a foreign language usually just makes people laugh). It's really not as hard as your teacher and textbooks probably make it
Ugh, I don't even know where to start with this thread.
I live in Japan, speak Japanese (have taught Japanese at the university level in the US), and have a Japanese wife, in-laws, the whole shebang.
The problem of talking about a foreign culture is always that you tend to get the basic facts down, but completely mis-interpret the reasons behind them. In the case of Japan, a lot of things get chalked up to "the mysterious Japanese," an image that they have not in any way tried to combat (it works in their favor more often than not). But there are some good, solid reasons for what happens here in terms of what products people buy.
Size. Yes, small things here do better. But I don't think it has anything to do with all that orientalist craftsmanship crap the grandparent was on about. Have you SEEN a Japanese house? I live in one (okay, a flat--but so do most people in their 30s, if they are living away from the family), and in my case, I have recently been thinking of ditching my beloved CRT for a godawful LCD just to free up that extra 20cm behind my desk. That would make a HUGE difference to my office. That tiny bit of space would not even be noticable in even the smallest apartment I ever lived in in the US. So why do people buy small? BECAUSE THERE'S NOWHERE TO PUT ANYTHING.
Also, Japan, being a civilised nation, unlike the US in this regard, uses the public transportation system. When you have to carry everything you are going to want or need all day, and don't want to look like an Akiba-kei (Akihabara dork), you need that stuff to be small. Really really small. Since I AM a bit of an Akiba-kei, I still happily port my big iPod around, but since I don't want to look like one, I put it in a Jean Paul Gaultier briefcase/bag.
In the specific case of iPods, the other thing you need to remember is that my rather average CD collection of 300 or so CDs usually elicits gasps of shock and awe from my Japanese friends. People don't buy a lot of music, on average, here. Granted, my musician friends have lots of CDs, but "normal" people have like... 10. Seriously. And the reason for that is that CDs can cost as much as $40 here. The reason for THAT is... I don't know. So there's no point in getting a 30GB ipod when you can fit every song you own on less than a gig. (The Nano sells because it's cute.)
The reason you don't see "junkers" on the road is that it's illegal to drive them. There is a system here (put in place by cronies of the automotive industry in the name of "safety") where you have to get your car re-certified every 2 years (it goes down to every year with older cars). This is extremely expensive, because it basically entails replacing everything that can be replaced on it all at once, whether it needs it or not. A brand-new car goes 3 years before you have to get it checked. So guess what? A lot of people drive new cars. Used cars, not surprisingly, are quite inexpensive, which is nice when you are buying, but heartrending when you want to sell (our 1999 Opel is currently worth $500, and we were told it will go to 0 next year--It's paid off, thank God).
The electronics companies are trying to get in on this same deal with some ridiculous legislation that is to make it illegal to sell any electronic item over 5 years old.
Despite all this, Costco, of all companies, has been doing quite well. We see people walking out just like in the US, with more croutons than they will ever be able to eat. So perhaps the poor economy is shaking things up. But in the case of foodstuffs from Costco, the people are having to buy deep-freezes to keep everything--and lord knows where they are putting them.
Finally, the idea that Japanese only buy Japanese is from the 80s, when there were predatory tariffs in place. Japanese buy what they expect to be of high quality (yes, they are more interested in quality than Americans--and thank god for that), regardless of who made it. Right now, I am typing on my company-issued Dell (laptop--re
Huh. My Brit friend used to complain about the cost of dialup all the time when she had it, and that was why I included the UK in my mental list of places where you had to pay... Whaddayaknow.
The big difference between the US and most of the rest of the world (okay, EVERYPLACE I CAN THINK OF, but I don't want to make generalizations), is that in the US we have free local calling. That means that if you want to call your ISP downtown, you can be on 24/7 and it doesn't cost you a dime more on your phone bill.
This is not the case elsewhere.
This means that if you, for example, were living in Japan in 2000-2002 (as I was then, and as I am again now), your phone bill with dialup was $200/mo for enjoying the kind of net access you had in the US--and even then, that was disconnecting anytime you thought you'd be reading a page for a long time. When ADSL hit your area (okay, MY area), it represented a HUGE savings. Suddenly you could stay on all the time like you wanted for the low low fee of $50/mo.
So widespread broadband penetration here (Japan), and likely a lot of other places in the world, is due to the fact that it represents a HUGE cost savings over dialup. The fact that it's faster is a side benefit (and before anyone starts oohing and ahhing about my "24Mbps" connection--I get 3Mbps on a good day--it's all BS marketing, which the great NTT tech geeks to whom one can actually COMMUNICATE with about things of a technical nature, like their product, are all too ready to eye-rollingly admit).
So instead of saying "The US is behind in broadband," we probably should say "The US is WAY ahead in phone service!" Same thing with cellphones. The fact that in the US one can TALK on a cellphone and still eat every month is because Americans demand cheap voice communications and are used to getting it.
That's exactly what I thought as well. Granted, I'm a shit gamer.
And as an SLA (second language acquisition) researcher, um... I've never heard of any research indicating one "suppresses" his L1 to speak his L2... In fact, that doesn't make any sense at all. When you use a Mac, do you suppress your knowledge of Windows? I think not. You just use the Mac.
Human language acquisition, not machine language acquisition.
Also, as another linguist, let me add the part the parent forgot: In the literature, the term "language acquisition" is usually distinct from "language learning." Language acquisition is usually the term used to describe the process by which children acquire their "native" language(s). It appears to be very different from language learning, which is what you do if you start studying a foreign language after you have left the so-called "critical period," usually thought to be around 7 years old.
It's a good point, of course, and one I probably should have addressed better. But here's the major problem these systems always have: they aren't human.
Yes, it runs statistical analyses on the propositional content of the utterances it picks up, which is LIKE what we do (because the propositional content of human language output--esp. spoken output) is actually pretty sparse. It assumes a shared understanding of the world, a shared schema. This is actually one of the major problems behind communication with speakers of other languages anyway. Coming from different cultures, people often have vastly different schemas. So something that someone would say in one language, expecting to hit schemas resident and already active in the listener's brain, may hit absolutely nothing. Here's my newest favorite example, which is from my wife, a Japanese person:
Sore wa are da yo ne!
This translates, roughly, to "That is that thing over there, huh!"
Now, I speak pretty darn good Japanese, but whenever she spits this gem out, I get dizzy and fall over. Especially if it's in the middle of a disagreement. You have two deictic, demonstrative adjectives lacking any kind of antecedent. What she means is "that thing we were just talking about is an example of (whatever concept it is she's trying to tell me it's like)." But God knows what the concept is; I sure don't.
Now, Japanese is a mean example for this point, because it is just LOADED with propositionally empty phrases that assume shared schema. But every language has them, and not just in these little social phrases either. Take the word "crusade." This got Bush in trouble a couple years ago, because, yeah, it can mean a righteous struggle for good... Or it could call up images of a long-term Christian genocide of anyone who looked vaguely Arabic a few hundred years ago. It is likely to hit both schema equally and translating it is going to be difficult, even for a human interpreter.
Anyhoo, I'd love to fiddle with some of this software to confirm my suspicions that it's nowhere near ready for prime time, but until I can, I think I'm right to assume it doesn't work. That makes my computer and cognitive science armchair all the more comfy. "Fie!" and "fiddlesticks!" and "humbug!", I say!
This is abysmal. Dr. Paul Nation and others have found that even if a non-native speaker understands 95% of the words in a text, he cannot accurately guess the remaining 5% and comprehension will suffer greatly. This isn't hard to imagine being that even at 95% text coverage, 1 in every 20 words will be unknown. Even if they bump this up to 80%, that is still useless. That's 1 in 5 words!
Granted, I'm pulling from my research in a different field (second language acquisition), but the concepts are the same. What is even worse is if this is WRONG 40% of the time! Then that isn't just MISSING information, it is INCORRECT information! This is utterly useless and probably represents more of an impediment to coherence than an aid.
I'm a geek, and I know we'll get computers to speak fairly authentic language in my lifetime, but as a linguist moving into cognitive science, I'm telling you all it's gonna be awhile. We barely know how WE do it, let alone make it happen with a completely different system architecture!
In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), having CALL (computer assisted language learning) on your resume is a career-maker, but as an ex-professional geek and as a current SLA researcher and university instructor, I gotta say that what I've seen has been 100% bunk.
Don't get me wrong; I use computers in the classroom whenever appropriate, but I never NEVER use any of this ridiculous educational software. The most educational software you can use for basically any field is a web browser. Seriously, have you SEEN this internet thing they got going? You can find anything you want in just about any language you want. The big thing in language acquisition (and probably all learning) is simple motivation. Are you interested in what you're learning? Is it tied to something you want or need? I give my students loosely defined projects that allow them to research something they are interested in, but that will require them to do so in English. I have seen some excellent presentations and read some excellent papers that I don't think would have happened even 5 years ago. The access to information is what really makes computers important to education. Aside from that, it's all games (not that there is anything wrong with a game under normal circumstances).
The only teachers who get into CALL are teachers who don't know what they are doing and do inane things like pronounce URL as "earl." That's why in my case, I have eschewed the bastardized geekiness of CALL and gone for the pure, unadulterated geekiness which is assessment. Lots of numbers plus the added benefit of being able to deny young people their dreams. Take THAT Dr. Sally Waxler!
They heat by induction. The cans are sealed and probably treated with god-knows-what so it doesn't get that nasty burnt coffee taste.
It also doesn't get that "Mmm! I'm drinkin' coffee!" taste either, but it does in a pinch! It's better than what you get out of one of those nasty instant coffee machines that puts the "coffee" into little cups that have some kind of card-based game on the bottom that distract you while you're looking at them and then a mercury robot from the future pokes you in the head with his mercury daggar-finger and you kinda twitch with your eyes rolled back into your head until he pulls it out and steals your identity.
You know the machines I'm talking about.
Huh? Vending machine coffee is popular over here, but I can't think of a single carbonated sweet coffee beverage in the whole country... In fact, sodas are just not nearly as popular here as they are in the US, etc.
I would like to say, however, from experience, that it's not so much "singing at a microphone for a couple hours." It's more like "honing your craft for years at one's own expense, laboring over every note and word of the song--sometimes for months, and sometimes spending days on each track before you're happy with it, then sometimes days working with your engineer and/or producer (I prefer fewer cooks to spoiling the pot) agreeing over a basic mix, THEN you can go home and let the staffers take care of the rest." Not that I've ever enjoyed that last step.
Still, you make an excellent point. A CD is a product created by a company that spent a LOT to get it out to you, and it does make sense that they make the bulk of the money--they had the biggest risk. And I'll say it again: Just because artists don't get much, it's still nice to get a pretty steady check for the royalties, even if it isn't much. You don't know when you're going to have to stop doing shows due to lack of interest, so having something that will give you at least a little money fairly regularly, about as long as you are alive (for a big act), is nice and you're taking that away from the artist you like if you don't buy the product he helped create.
All THAT being said, however, I find it apalling that I am already expected to pay $0.99 for a COPY of that product! A FLAWED, INCOMPLETE copy. I'm happy to pay $12 to $17 for a CD, regardless of number of tracks or age, and actually GET THE PRODUCT. Why people are willing to pay what often comes out to more for much less is beyond me. And that's not just from an audio standpoint; that's from a "doesn't have to stay on my hard drive" standpoint, and a "when people come over they can glance at my CD collection and it is a great conversation starter" standpoint, and from a "I gave real money for something and got a real object out of it" standpoint.
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Glad to hear it's working for you, though!
Oh, and I've never used the video phone option either. I'm the only one I know who has it. =(
I have the same phone over here in Japan... Are you actually using it for MP3s or are you just excited that it supports it? Because, at least over here, this phone does not play MP3s. It plays "secure" MP3s, which you have to rip with special Sharp software. Another in a long line of disappointments with this phone and my service via Vodafone. The camera is decent as long as you don't expect too much (like it being in focus when you use the zoom), and I use it all the time to send funny/interesting pics to the folks back home, but it's still just a phone.
Ideally, we could all just settle into a job where people know us and like us and want us on the team, and I think most people eventually find that place, but until they do, they really just need to eat!
Phew.
(And I THOUGHT FT tasted different these days--I also noticed that liquor stores were not keeping it refrigerated, meaning it must be pasteurized now.)
Okay, THAT is a shock. Do you have any references for that??? I know they are big enough that they are now a regional, not a micro, but they are still a "craft" brewery--making things from scratch. Where did you hear this?
SOUTHERN MIDWEST???
I beg your pardon, sir, but the noble brew of which you speak is lovingly manufactured in Fort Collins, Colorado, roughly 30 minutes south of the Wyoming border.
http://www.newbelgium.com/
If you're ever in the area, I heartily recommend their free brewery tour. You learn a lot about beer, and at the end you are given a little glass of each of their brews in a fun and chatty atmosphere. It's a great free day date in Fort Collins. Afterwards, you can head back the road into Old Town for great food and a plethora of great bars, all within picturesque walking distance.
I recommend The Crown Pub (on College) and the Rio Grande (on Mountain) for food/drinks, and Elliot's martini bar (on Linden) for drinks. Finish your drunken evening off at Walrus ice cream (on Mountain, next to the Rio), enjoying their homemade deliciousness.
Oh, and personally, I prefer New Belgium's Sunshine Wheat to Fat Tire, mostly because hoppy beers like Fat Tire give me terrible acid reflux, although they are tasty.
Come on, everyone! Let's enjoy Fort Collins!
This message NOT paid for by the Fort Collins tourism board or chamber of commerce. My Japanese-language historical walking tours of Old Town have also ended, due to the fact that I don't live there anymore.
You are my hero.
Have you ever owned a dachshund?
Dachshunds are bred to go down into animal burrows and flush game out. Humans bred them to do that. And if you ever own a dachshund, you are likely to find that he likes digging holes and seeks out small, confined places to explore, no training necessary. But we don't find that surprising because, as I said before, he was bred to do that.
So why on Earth would you suggest that humans--another animal constanty being bred for desirable traits--are somehow "above" this, aside from the reason that it is politically and historically uncomfortable?
We all know we end up like our parents. We know that identical twins, even separated at birth, very often develop many of the same personality quirks. Why, then, is it so controversial to say that people who have more children will result in there being more of these traits out there, until at some point, they dominate a population?
This truth is as plain as the nose on your face and the simpleminded ignorance of your post (and of my self-righteous and condescending attitude!).
It IS free. Did you pay for it? No? Does it work really well? Yes?
Then what is the problem???
There is nothing wrong with making money; in fact, most of us kinda count on that in order to eat.
You really said it there. What the *AA types don't get is that they might actually be able to increase revenue by LOWERING prices. I mean, look at Wal-Mart. Look at Best Buy. In these two commodity/retail giants, offering products at margin-kissing low prices has provided them ridiculous economies of scale.
Now think what the same model could do IF YOUR PRODUCT COST YOU NOTHING! Okay, not NOTHING, but server space and bandwidth have nothing on actually paying money to people to manufacture physical goods!
I buy all my music (on CDs no less), but I pirate the crap out of TV. Why? Because paying $30 for a DVD of a season of a show I could have seen and recorded for free a couple months ago just strikes me as insane. But if the prices came down, I wouldn't bother with rummaging around on torrent trackers and P2P crapholes; I'd happily pay to get the file from a trusted source, and I wouldn't even whine too much if it had some light, iTMS-style DRM on it (but I'd still whine).
... Wow. I don't even know where to begin. So I won't.
No offense, but there you go again. Granted, I'm sure your sensei has told you a lot of things which get filed away as "facts," but that right there is the problem (remember what I said about Japanese people doing little to combat the "mysterious Japanese" image?). I remember the first time I came here as an exchange student. My teacher loaded me up with so many of these "facts" I spent the first 6 months terrified I was going to upset something or break some rule and bring a thousand years of shame upon someone's dead relatives or something.
Nothing is that dire.
The thing you have to remember is the same thing I said in my last post, and the same thing I've used in dealing with all the various nationalities I deal with in my job: People are essentially the same. They have different customs and cultures, but as long as you avoid the big no-nos (when you're having your Saudi friends over for a BBQ, don't serve pork and check if they are the "no alcohol" type or the "if the iman asks, there was no alcohol" type), people will work with you and you'll be fine. All these little "facts" do is make the situation difficult. Be humble, be soft, be kind and you will rarely run into trouble. Stick to the Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they would like to be done... unto... That sounded better in my head...
One of the big differences I found in having a native Japanese Japanese language teacher and a non-native is that, especially at the beginning, the non-natives were more useful. They not only explain difficult bits of grammar better, they offer better advice on getting along with people in the target culture. Quick! What are Americans like??? It's almost impossible to describe one's own culture, because it is a huge part of WHO YOU ARE, and what's YOU and what's YOUR CULTURE is very hard to distinguish. Now, speaking from experience, when you ARE teaching your own native language, people are going to press you to answer these questions. I typically refuse flat-out. I'll tell people what we do, but if they want to know why, I don't give them a great big cultural answer; I give them the most mundane answer I can think of, if anything at all.
My apartment is bigger than a hotel room! Sheesh. It's about 500 square feet, I think. We measure space in terms of tatami mats here. They are basically standard (well, ones used in apartments are) so if someone tells you that they have 2 6-jo (the counter for mats) rooms and a 4.5-jo room (like the one I'm typing now), you know not only how big that is, but also what shape it is. It's so much more useful than square footage. I live in a 3DK. Three rooms and a dining/kitchen area (plus bath/toilet area and genkan and balcony). It's nice.
When you say "honorifics system," do you mean the linguistic one (keigo) or the cultural one? If it's the former, about the only place I use that is at the bank or hotels or other such sort of expensive service industry area, and its receptive. I hate it and even though I know people are required to use it for their job, I sometimes say "I'm sorry, but keigo is very hard to follow for me; could we just switch to -masu/desu form?" It usually doesn't work. I also use it sometimes on the phone when I'm making a business call, but really, keigo (as in the "high" keigo with the different verb conjugations) seems to be dying out.
As for the "cultural" honorific system, here's an easy way to deal with it: Be especially polite and deferential to anyone who outranks you at work. Gee... Sounds quite a bit like what we do in the West, too, right? It really isn't that hard. Be polite to people older than you. (again, no big differences there) Be polite to people you don't know and at whom you are not angry (because they just shook their umbrella out all over you, in which case it is ALWAYS better to take them to task in English because sounding scary in a foreign language usually just makes people laugh). It's really not as hard as your teacher and textbooks probably make it
Ugh, I don't even know where to start with this thread.
I live in Japan, speak Japanese (have taught Japanese at the university level in the US), and have a Japanese wife, in-laws, the whole shebang.
The problem of talking about a foreign culture is always that you tend to get the basic facts down, but completely mis-interpret the reasons behind them. In the case of Japan, a lot of things get chalked up to "the mysterious Japanese," an image that they have not in any way tried to combat (it works in their favor more often than not). But there are some good, solid reasons for what happens here in terms of what products people buy.
Size. Yes, small things here do better. But I don't think it has anything to do with all that orientalist craftsmanship crap the grandparent was on about. Have you SEEN a Japanese house? I live in one (okay, a flat--but so do most people in their 30s, if they are living away from the family), and in my case, I have recently been thinking of ditching my beloved CRT for a godawful LCD just to free up that extra 20cm behind my desk. That would make a HUGE difference to my office. That tiny bit of space would not even be noticable in even the smallest apartment I ever lived in in the US. So why do people buy small? BECAUSE THERE'S NOWHERE TO PUT ANYTHING.
Also, Japan, being a civilised nation, unlike the US in this regard, uses the public transportation system. When you have to carry everything you are going to want or need all day, and don't want to look like an Akiba-kei (Akihabara dork), you need that stuff to be small. Really really small. Since I AM a bit of an Akiba-kei, I still happily port my big iPod around, but since I don't want to look like one, I put it in a Jean Paul Gaultier briefcase/bag.
In the specific case of iPods, the other thing you need to remember is that my rather average CD collection of 300 or so CDs usually elicits gasps of shock and awe from my Japanese friends. People don't buy a lot of music, on average, here. Granted, my musician friends have lots of CDs, but "normal" people have like... 10. Seriously. And the reason for that is that CDs can cost as much as $40 here. The reason for THAT is... I don't know. So there's no point in getting a 30GB ipod when you can fit every song you own on less than a gig. (The Nano sells because it's cute.)
The reason you don't see "junkers" on the road is that it's illegal to drive them. There is a system here (put in place by cronies of the automotive industry in the name of "safety") where you have to get your car re-certified every 2 years (it goes down to every year with older cars). This is extremely expensive, because it basically entails replacing everything that can be replaced on it all at once, whether it needs it or not. A brand-new car goes 3 years before you have to get it checked. So guess what? A lot of people drive new cars. Used cars, not surprisingly, are quite inexpensive, which is nice when you are buying, but heartrending when you want to sell (our 1999 Opel is currently worth $500, and we were told it will go to 0 next year--It's paid off, thank God).
The electronics companies are trying to get in on this same deal with some ridiculous legislation that is to make it illegal to sell any electronic item over 5 years old.
Despite all this, Costco, of all companies, has been doing quite well. We see people walking out just like in the US, with more croutons than they will ever be able to eat. So perhaps the poor economy is shaking things up. But in the case of foodstuffs from Costco, the people are having to buy deep-freezes to keep everything--and lord knows where they are putting them.
Finally, the idea that Japanese only buy Japanese is from the 80s, when there were predatory tariffs in place. Japanese buy what they expect to be of high quality (yes, they are more interested in quality than Americans--and thank god for that), regardless of who made it. Right now, I am typing on my company-issued Dell (laptop--re
Huh. My Brit friend used to complain about the cost of dialup all the time when she had it, and that was why I included the UK in my mental list of places where you had to pay... Whaddayaknow.
The big difference between the US and most of the rest of the world (okay, EVERYPLACE I CAN THINK OF, but I don't want to make generalizations), is that in the US we have free local calling. That means that if you want to call your ISP downtown, you can be on 24/7 and it doesn't cost you a dime more on your phone bill.
This is not the case elsewhere.
This means that if you, for example, were living in Japan in 2000-2002 (as I was then, and as I am again now), your phone bill with dialup was $200/mo for enjoying the kind of net access you had in the US--and even then, that was disconnecting anytime you thought you'd be reading a page for a long time. When ADSL hit your area (okay, MY area), it represented a HUGE savings. Suddenly you could stay on all the time like you wanted for the low low fee of $50/mo.
So widespread broadband penetration here (Japan), and likely a lot of other places in the world, is due to the fact that it represents a HUGE cost savings over dialup. The fact that it's faster is a side benefit (and before anyone starts oohing and ahhing about my "24Mbps" connection--I get 3Mbps on a good day--it's all BS marketing, which the great NTT tech geeks to whom one can actually COMMUNICATE with about things of a technical nature, like their product, are all too ready to eye-rollingly admit).
So instead of saying "The US is behind in broadband," we probably should say "The US is WAY ahead in phone service!" Same thing with cellphones. The fact that in the US one can TALK on a cellphone and still eat every month is because Americans demand cheap voice communications and are used to getting it.
That's exactly what I thought as well. Granted, I'm a shit gamer.
And as an SLA (second language acquisition) researcher, um... I've never heard of any research indicating one "suppresses" his L1 to speak his L2... In fact, that doesn't make any sense at all. When you use a Mac, do you suppress your knowledge of Windows? I think not. You just use the Mac.
'Course, I haven't RTFA, but still...
Human language acquisition, not machine language acquisition.
Also, as another linguist, let me add the part the parent forgot: In the literature, the term "language acquisition" is usually distinct from "language learning." Language acquisition is usually the term used to describe the process by which children acquire their "native" language(s). It appears to be very different from language learning, which is what you do if you start studying a foreign language after you have left the so-called "critical period," usually thought to be around 7 years old.
It's a good point, of course, and one I probably should have addressed better. But here's the major problem these systems always have: they aren't human.
Yes, it runs statistical analyses on the propositional content of the utterances it picks up, which is LIKE what we do (because the propositional content of human language output--esp. spoken output) is actually pretty sparse. It assumes a shared understanding of the world, a shared schema. This is actually one of the major problems behind communication with speakers of other languages anyway. Coming from different cultures, people often have vastly different schemas. So something that someone would say in one language, expecting to hit schemas resident and already active in the listener's brain, may hit absolutely nothing. Here's my newest favorite example, which is from my wife, a Japanese person:
Sore wa are da yo ne!
This translates, roughly, to "That is that thing over there, huh!"
Now, I speak pretty darn good Japanese, but whenever she spits this gem out, I get dizzy and fall over. Especially if it's in the middle of a disagreement. You have two deictic, demonstrative adjectives lacking any kind of antecedent. What she means is "that thing we were just talking about is an example of (whatever concept it is she's trying to tell me it's like)." But God knows what the concept is; I sure don't.
Now, Japanese is a mean example for this point, because it is just LOADED with propositionally empty phrases that assume shared schema. But every language has them, and not just in these little social phrases either. Take the word "crusade." This got Bush in trouble a couple years ago, because, yeah, it can mean a righteous struggle for good... Or it could call up images of a long-term Christian genocide of anyone who looked vaguely Arabic a few hundred years ago. It is likely to hit both schema equally and translating it is going to be difficult, even for a human interpreter.
Anyhoo, I'd love to fiddle with some of this software to confirm my suspicions that it's nowhere near ready for prime time, but until I can, I think I'm right to assume it doesn't work. That makes my computer and cognitive science armchair all the more comfy. "Fie!" and "fiddlesticks!" and "humbug!", I say!
This is abysmal. Dr. Paul Nation and others have found that even if a non-native speaker understands 95% of the words in a text, he cannot accurately guess the remaining 5% and comprehension will suffer greatly. This isn't hard to imagine being that even at 95% text coverage, 1 in every 20 words will be unknown. Even if they bump this up to 80%, that is still useless. That's 1 in 5 words!
Granted, I'm pulling from my research in a different field (second language acquisition), but the concepts are the same. What is even worse is if this is WRONG 40% of the time! Then that isn't just MISSING information, it is INCORRECT information! This is utterly useless and probably represents more of an impediment to coherence than an aid.
I'm a geek, and I know we'll get computers to speak fairly authentic language in my lifetime, but as a linguist moving into cognitive science, I'm telling you all it's gonna be awhile. We barely know how WE do it, let alone make it happen with a completely different system architecture!
In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), having CALL (computer assisted language learning) on your resume is a career-maker, but as an ex-professional geek and as a current SLA researcher and university instructor, I gotta say that what I've seen has been 100% bunk. Don't get me wrong; I use computers in the classroom whenever appropriate, but I never NEVER use any of this ridiculous educational software. The most educational software you can use for basically any field is a web browser. Seriously, have you SEEN this internet thing they got going? You can find anything you want in just about any language you want. The big thing in language acquisition (and probably all learning) is simple motivation. Are you interested in what you're learning? Is it tied to something you want or need? I give my students loosely defined projects that allow them to research something they are interested in, but that will require them to do so in English. I have seen some excellent presentations and read some excellent papers that I don't think would have happened even 5 years ago. The access to information is what really makes computers important to education. Aside from that, it's all games (not that there is anything wrong with a game under normal circumstances). The only teachers who get into CALL are teachers who don't know what they are doing and do inane things like pronounce URL as "earl." That's why in my case, I have eschewed the bastardized geekiness of CALL and gone for the pure, unadulterated geekiness which is assessment. Lots of numbers plus the added benefit of being able to deny young people their dreams. Take THAT Dr. Sally Waxler!
They heat by induction. The cans are sealed and probably treated with god-knows-what so it doesn't get that nasty burnt coffee taste. It also doesn't get that "Mmm! I'm drinkin' coffee!" taste either, but it does in a pinch! It's better than what you get out of one of those nasty instant coffee machines that puts the "coffee" into little cups that have some kind of card-based game on the bottom that distract you while you're looking at them and then a mercury robot from the future pokes you in the head with his mercury daggar-finger and you kinda twitch with your eyes rolled back into your head until he pulls it out and steals your identity. You know the machines I'm talking about.
Huh? Vending machine coffee is popular over here, but I can't think of a single carbonated sweet coffee beverage in the whole country... In fact, sodas are just not nearly as popular here as they are in the US, etc.
Whoah. Well said. Well said.
I would like to say, however, from experience, that it's not so much "singing at a microphone for a couple hours." It's more like "honing your craft for years at one's own expense, laboring over every note and word of the song--sometimes for months, and sometimes spending days on each track before you're happy with it, then sometimes days working with your engineer and/or producer (I prefer fewer cooks to spoiling the pot) agreeing over a basic mix, THEN you can go home and let the staffers take care of the rest." Not that I've ever enjoyed that last step.
Still, you make an excellent point. A CD is a product created by a company that spent a LOT to get it out to you, and it does make sense that they make the bulk of the money--they had the biggest risk. And I'll say it again: Just because artists don't get much, it's still nice to get a pretty steady check for the royalties, even if it isn't much. You don't know when you're going to have to stop doing shows due to lack of interest, so having something that will give you at least a little money fairly regularly, about as long as you are alive (for a big act), is nice and you're taking that away from the artist you like if you don't buy the product he helped create.
All THAT being said, however, I find it apalling that I am already expected to pay $0.99 for a COPY of that product! A FLAWED, INCOMPLETE copy. I'm happy to pay $12 to $17 for a CD, regardless of number of tracks or age, and actually GET THE PRODUCT. Why people are willing to pay what often comes out to more for much less is beyond me. And that's not just from an audio standpoint; that's from a "doesn't have to stay on my hard drive" standpoint, and a "when people come over they can glance at my CD collection and it is a great conversation starter" standpoint, and from a "I gave real money for something and got a real object out of it" standpoint.
But well said. Well said.
Yeah, that's exactly what I thought as well. Glad to know I'm not the only one.
Because more people get DUIs than vote, duh.