Aino Minako-chan

I've been surprisingly busy the past two weeks or so. I'm leaving this weekend for a trip to Greece with kinomakoto, and I'm super excited. My laundry isn't quite done and my apartment probably won't get cleaned before I go, but I'm basically ready. Hurray! Excitement!

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A few weeks ago, I was watching one of the millions of animal related TV shows in Japan, and they showed an edited version of a clip known as ( Battle at Kruger. )

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Before Crisis, the Final Fantasy VII cell phone game, just came out for my current model of cell phone, so I said "What the hell!" and I downloaded it. ( Cut for those who don't really care. ^_^ )

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( Cut for those who actually care about my previous poll... )

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( And in completely random news... )

Most people wouldn't know this about me, but I spent all four years of high school as an active member of the Speech Team. I wasn't great, but I wasn't bad either; I even won tournaments. But at the very least, during those four years, I learned how to be an attentive listener (or at the very least, fake it extremely well), and I learned what types of elements make up good speeches.

Which is why I'm pained to tears every Monday when the company president delivers his little "beginning of the work week" speech.

Seriously, it hurts me physically. It's not just that the speeches are boring, or painfully repetitive, or in Japanese (although those factors certainly don't help), but they're not particularly good speeches, and it's starting to drive me up the wall. Although there are many many things that I could criticize, these are the parts that drive me up the freaking wall:

( A. The ability to talk for a long period of time does not correspond to good speaking skills. )

( B. Be aware that, for better or worse, people tend to remember repeated ideas. )

In other language related news, I was reading up on some recent studies in the field of linguistics (fierce academic rivalries = so freaking hysterical), and I ended up finding a blog about recent linguistics gossip and stuff. It looked fun and not overly academic, so I was thinking about reading it on a more regular basis... until I scrolled down a bit and found an entry pondering the use of the phrase "an hypothesis". The author was actually waffling about whether it was correct or not. I nearly choked. [FYI, "an" versus "a" depends on pronunciation, not spelling, so unless you like to say, "an ai-pothesis", you should use "a".] And this was on a linguistics blog, written by a guy who was apparently studying for his masters. Needless to say, I didn't visit the blog again.

The DTP department just handed over two bloody new versions of the same manual in two hours. I'm using TRADOS, a translation program, to translate, so you'd think that getting handed a different version of basically the same thing wouldn't be any big deal, but TRADOS had limitations and so I always do the final check by hand. This will be my third time doing a manual check on chapter 2 today. To put it mildly, I'm getting kinda ticked.

Speaking of angry, this article kinda pissed off my inner linguist, which is surprising mainly because I didn't think I had an inner linguist. While I adored my linguistics classes, my memory is somewhat akin to a sieve and knowledge tends not to stay inside for the long haul. Anyway, the article mainly talks about a book about early childhood language development from a man called Charles Lang. Normally, I would just scratch my head and try to figure out why anyone thinks this is new, except that the article started out somthing like this:

When kids leave out the subject in the sentence "Where going?" they're thinking like a speaker of Chinese, which drops topic words in some contexts. [...] Like almost everything in linguistics, Yang's idea stems from Noam Chomsky's theory that the human capacity for language is innate.

( The following has been cut because it contains nothing but linguistic bitching. You have been warned. If you don't feel like clicking, I totally understand, and the oversimplified version of my complaining can be summed up as, 'Chomsky!? OMFG Chomsky!! Hiss hiss! Spit spit!! And WTF's with that statement about Chinese? Are you a moron, writer lady!?' For those who might be interested, the following will contain highly suspect information pulled from the scraps of my remaining linguistic knowledge that may or may not be interesting. )

Finally, in completely unrelated news, I've finally scratched the surface of Final Fantasy III. Keeping in my personal naming tradition, the four characters have been renamed Fred, Bobby, Roger, and Kiki. Just... because. Go get 'em, Kiki!