(no subject)

[owlectomy]

One of the vagaries of language learning is that it's nearly impossible to predict what you will be able to attack straight-off and what is going to need a bit of work.

By the time I got finished with Like Water for Chocolate in Spanish, I was understanding enough that I wasn't using my dictionary. But I've tried that YA Isabel Allende trilogy twice, and it keeps turning me off with the cancer-dying-mother thing, and I can expect that there are things that will require a dictionary.

But when it's Captain Underpants, that's just embarrassing.

Kafka On the Shore is pleasantly surrealistic, without being as hard as Murakami's other weird stuff; and my book on Onmyoudou has potential for being interesting and readable once I got past the incredibly ponderous and pretentious introduction. There is some cool cultural stuff connected to Onmyoudou that I never knew about; like how when you go to a shrine, the fox on the right (when you're standing outside) has its mouth open and the one on the left has its mouth closed. According to the book, anyway. One of the perils of reading other languages is that you don't always catch on to the code words that let you figure out when somebody is just a little bit off the deep end.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

If it helps at all, open mouth closed mouth fox is ringing a bell, but I thought it was the Chinese dogs who guard some shrines (temples?) who do that.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I r brilliant. shishi (http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/shrine-guide-2.shtml) or komainu do the mouth thing, foxes (http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/oinari.shtml) would seem to be close mouthed all the time and rather smiley actually.

Read with grain of salt, I think.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Or possibly read with more concentration than I have while eating my lunch in my car. I'm pretty sure that's a misreading on my part.