On Course

The project 3 work yesterday went okay. Got 3 courses of blocks up and the foundation is level in most dimensions. The next steps involve spending more hard-earned savings for a pond liner, pump and plumbing pieces, plus some natural stone (flag, pea, river) to make all the surfaces appropriate. Probably upwards of $400 to do all that. Eesh.

I suppose I could leave some of it for next year. Have to think what an appropriate pause state would be. Perhaps, the plumbing pipe in place, and the basin on top of the berm, with some of the rock and plantings, and leaving the big hole in the ground plus the liner for next year. I could put a box in place for now, and fill the hole, or just let rainwater collect for more of a swampy muck pit approach to landscaping.

Lunch Logistics
So a busy morning on other areas as well, so I"m typing with lunch. My meal today consists of three mini-pita sandwiches of ham and cheddar, a few olives and a morsel of pickled herring. I've noted that if you buy your ham from the deli counter in a block rather than sliced, you reduce the surface area, which helps with avoiding spoilage. But also, even better, if you toss it in the freezer, it freezes, but it's not rock-hard, and you can take it out and slice several slices off for a sandwich or two and put it back in the freezer. Avoides the green slimy ham in the fridge if you end up missing lunch at home for a few days, or if other leftovers arise suggesting they should be consumed first.

We have leftovers from a good meal last night at the Northern Han - a small chinese restaurant with a difference in Chinatown. I notice the owner/server folk speak Mandarin. I can pick up a word or two here and there. Reminds me of a recent biz-trip to Taiwan, and made me want to go back to Asia. The food at this place is quite different than the usual places. Seems a lot more inland originating food. I assume the name refers to the origin of the owner,cuisine or both. But there's a lot of lamb, as well as pork, beef and chicken.

We had a dish with lamb and cumin that the server recommended. It was quite good, but quite spicy. She claimed it was from the cumin - which was a new one on me. I cook with cumin all the time and have never seen cumin that added a chili-like burn to the dish. Must be a Chinese variant of cumin that we don't know here.

This restaurant is also known for it's dumpings. They have a wide variety, and you get a lot for the money, even in a small order. Plus you can get take-away frozen ones too. We had pork and chives - also very tasty with the dark wine-vinegar dipping sauce.

Too bad about the wacky air-conditioner that ruins one table at the restaurant. You see people sit and move right away. They need to get an up-facing grille for the vent outflow! Would be more efficient for AC anyway.

So the leftovers will be suitable for dinner tonight if I supplement them with some more content, and fresh rice.

Languages
This gets me on to a topic I wanted to blog about (see my coming-soon rant list at left). In studying a bit of Mandarin - I realized how difficult it is to learn that language. I listened to some tapes before going to Taiwan, which helped a bit, but I'm not too confident in my tonal control. It's very difficult to avoid a western up-lift on questions and other tonal perversions for emphasis, all of which mess with the word meeting.

So I'm pretty much relegated to Sheshe's and Zaijen's when it comes to Mandarin unless I put more time into it.

But Japanese has been my focus for a few months. Even though I took two levels over a decade back (where I met my SO as well!) I needed to take another first level this summer to get back into the swing of it. It comes pretty easy. It's a great language from a structure point of view. If you only took one other non-English language, and it was Japanese, you'd have a pretty skewed opinion of how hard it is to learn another language. I've also learned some French, German and Russian and they're all a lot tougher. Verb conjugation is quite nice in Japanese, and tenses are nicely split between past and non-past.

Then comes the written language. Oy! So, since the class I've pretty easily learned the Hiragana and Katakana sets. I can even type them on my computer: セい　はお　いて　イゼ　

Okay, that's pretty lame - but it just transliterates to "See how it is"

Now the tough part is learning Kanji - the character set borrowed from the Chinese eons ago, and slightly modified, just enough so that you don't get any benefit when you try to learn Chinese characters. The tough part is that each character can be pronounced sometimes four different ways, and might mean something on it's own like "man" or "forest" but could also be used as a single sound like "he" or "o". All this wrapped up in a single character. So when you're making flash cards and studying, each card you flip would mean ten minutes of reciting what the symbol means. Whew.

I suppose the easiest approach for the first stage is to just learn the symbol’s stand-alone meaning like for 人 I would say "hito - man or Human" or for 五　I would say "go - five."

Have you learned Kanji? How did you do it? Any suggestions for memorization techniques or flashcards? I guess I'd best not get too buried in characters and remember to not forget my grammar and build my vocabulary.

Lots of learning ahead of me still. This international keyboard palette on the Mac is pretty useful - though it's doing some strange stuff just now, and I'm not sure if it will all come through on Blogger. Hope they support mixed character sets.

So far so good - did a trial publish and it's all looking good.

Wrap
So best get on with the afternoon. This morning was all proj 1 related website and client/partner meetings and such. Now I've had lunch and even managed do a bit of blogging, so the day can't be too bad. It's also a nice cool sunny late summer day, so outdoor stuff would be nice.

You're immediate drop everything assignment for today is just to send me an email to tell me you exist and what you had for lunch or something. It should not use the vowels "o" or "u" anywhere in the body of the email however. Send it to "lwopractice (a) yahoo.ca " Of course, use the "@" symbol in that address.