Classical Japanese Things

[owlectomy]

Hope springs eternal, and so I have a new Classical Japanese study book. It is, like most of them, intended for high school students doing their required Classical Japanese studies; I have one like this from before, bought in a state of absolute panic in 2001, but that one assumes just a little bit too much about what you're learning from your real textbook, which is a problem if you don't have a real textbook.

It's very friendly. It assures me in the second chapter (the first chapter is "figure out the subject of the sentence!") that it's fine to learn just 250-300 of the most important vocabulary words, because you'll have footnotes for the rest. This is not very relevant unless you're actually taking a high school Classical Japanese class, but still, it feels quite reassuring compared to the "Everyone else has been studying this SINCE HIGH SCHOOL and you are so far behind" that I felt when I got to Japan.

Sei Shonagon is the best.

Adorable Things

The face of a child drawn on a melon.

A baby of two or so is crawling, rapidly along the ground. With his sharp eyes he catches sight of a tiny object and, picking it up with his pretty little fingers, takes it to show to a grown-up person.

A baby sparrow that comes hopping up when one imitates the squeak of a mouse; or again, when one has tied it with a thread round its leg and its parents bring insects or worms and pop them in its mouth: delightful!

One picks up a pretty baby and holds him for a while in one's arms; while one is fondling him, he clings to one's neck and then falls asleep.

Pretty, white chicks who are still not fully fledged and look as if their clothes are too short for them; cheeping loudly, they follow one on their long legs, or walk close to the mother hen.

(Ivan Morris's translation.)

My study book tells me something interesting I didn't know before about The Pillow Book. The famous first line is literally something like "In spring it is the dawn," but translators (translating it into modern Japanese or English) have usually interpolated "...that is most beautiful" or something like that. Ivan Morris has "In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful." But apparently, the modern scholarship is that we should maybe treat it as part of a conversation already in progress, talking about the different seasons and what times of day are the most wintry in winter, or spring-like in spring, and you can just start off more literally: "In spring it is the dawn."

Comments

[daedala]

I saw this on learning Japanese radicals and thought of you. You might be well past that, or might find it useful. I'm finding this guy's stuff pretty useful in my quest to re-learn Spanish. (Also this; the reason I kind of gave up on Spanish after school was that I could read at a high level but couldn't speak worth a damn because I couldn't hear or make the sounds correctly.)