MOTM

Seriously? Can you read Japanese?

-----Original Message-----
From: The Old Crow

  Scan this and send it to me!

  I'll translate it. ^^

  --Crow

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Tkacs, Ken wrote:

> Seriously? Can you read Japanese?

  Pretty much.  Not as well as someone from Japan.  I know about half of
the 2,000 kanji the typical newpaper reader in Japan knows.  I can usually
guess the meaning of other kanji letters, but have to look up which sound
to use in a given word.  The hiragana/katakana are easy, though.

  I understand spoken Japanese better than reading; working in Japan
(worked on the design of automated process systems in factories) for a few
years gives you about 1000% more language skills than did the 4 years of
Japanese classes I had at university.  (My writing and speaking
Japanese are considerably poorer, however).

  I had an apartment in Akihabara.  *The* mecca for electronic parts.
Imagine catacomb-like hallways traversing the entire length of a given
building's ground floor, each hallway crammed with fruit-seller stands of
vendors selling parts.  Some vendors specialise in just one type of part.
If you wander a few of the smaller alleys, some really cool parts shops
can be found.  Whenever I'm in Japan, I always stop at the "PIC Maniac
Shop" as a friend and I call it...

  They have a lot of neat synth shops, but the prices are outrageous.

  --Crow

/**/

Out of college, I did some QC work for a Japanese electronics company that
has an office here in Connecticut. For a few years, I could at least
pronounce 98% of Katakana characters. Since Katakana is used for foreign or
technical terms, I could pretty much figure out little bits of the text
phonetically, but not enough to do a real translation. I can understand from
the sound what Tomita is doing, so I once thought about just "making up" a
translation, but I would really like to have the proper text.

Akihabara sounds like something out of "Blade Runner" or a Gibson novel.

Did you get the scans okay?

I'll work on "Sound Creature" scans, but it's a lot to scan. Without having
it in front of me, it's like... ten or so 12" x 12" pages with three text
columns per page, plus his doodles. I'd like to send it to you in a format
that is very methodical so that if you could put side-by-side translations
in and send them back to me, I can reconstruct an English CD booklet, maybe
transfer SC to CD-R. My vinyl copy is pristine-in my anal youth, I only ever
played my vinyl albums once (using a Shure V-15 type V cartridge),
immediately transferring them to DBX cassettes that I could play to death.
Might be possible to get a pretty decent transfer out of this.

I'm very excited!

		-----Original Message-----
		From:	The Old Crow [mailto:oldcrow@...]
		Pretty much.  Not as well as someone from Japan.  I know
about half of
		the 2,000 kanji the typical newpaper reader in Japan knows.
I can usually
		guess the meaning of other kanji letters, but have to look
up which sound
		to use in a given word.  The hiragana/katakana are easy,
though.