Re: [edict-jmdict] Re: Example sentences 例文募集

["Dennis Schrader" <jpnthailand@*********>]

Re: "Troll" versus "Trawl"

 

Sorry for the confusion. I meant "troll" as typed. It's a fisherman's term. Maybe "trawl" would appeal to a broader audience, though Merriam-Webster puts them at virtually synonymous. Thanks for the question and Thanks All for taking this topic of P word selection seriously. I'm not asking for people to agree with me, just to re-examine the metrics methodology we are currently using. I think it is seriously flawed, especially based upon the entries I see that have earned a P marker. Many, many other members have shared my thoughts on this - but not in the forum. No reason not to. JIm is hardly an autocrat. At the same time he needs some kind of metric. And, for the time being, what he is using is every bit as valuable, ie convenient but flawed, as the seminal work of Ogden and his crew way back in the 1930's.

 

While I endorse the TV exclusively as a standard (not every word but the high frequency words on the TV), having been a victim of every highly touted Japanese language vocabulary list and grammar methodology available in the olden days, I freely admit that the TV is not a static medium. Rather it is evolving like spoken language; and for that reason is the best window into real Japanse language and society possible.

 

Point #2 - and I will go dormant for awhile (maybe) - Example sentences are a complete waste of time. Now I feel that in this group I am pushing excrement up hill but it's something that Yahoo, Google, and even ALC/Eijiro get. Sentences are fatty. Phrases are more than adequate and the most efficient way to bring out a word's "core etymological meaning". That is something that I got way back in 1971 in the Nara Prefectural Library, when all that we had available was the Nakayama vocabulary lists and some idiocy by the Vacari's siblings. In short, there was nothing.

 

For five years I lived in an adobe/wooden farm house with rats playing rugby on the ceiling at night. I did not memorize sentences. And, my favorites subjects being symbolic logic and organic chemistry, I memorized phrases as models or templates and then applied them, building as many molecules with hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen as possible and hence stretching their parameters of usage and then watching body language to see if I was correct. Only after this effort, outdoor toilet, public bath, often no food, and 5,000 hours in front of a black and white TV 12-16 hours per day, did I become known, invited to give speeches around Kansai --- and hence relatively well-to-do - a two-story house in Kanmaki and zeros added to my monthly bank balance at a rapacious rate. All things considered I don't know that I would make the effort again, nor do I wish for others to suffer needlessly as I did.

 

That was wey back when the Japanese were highly, highly ethnocentric, such that if one did not speak flawless Japanese, the people would literally freeze up in embarrassment for you and go dead quiet. And, when at that time I had a lengthy telephone conversation with people who had never met me, upon meeting me and finding out that I was not Japanese complimented me by calling me a "hen-na gaijin", a weird foreigner. What a helluva reward for all my efforts. In contrast the Japanese nowadays are much more forgiving and actually expect us to speak their language. Like the Chinese and the Thai people, a breath of fresh air.

 

So what I am trying to do in this group and in the materials that I am developing for the furure? I want to remove the pain and agony of learnng Japanese. Trust me. Japanese is harder than all the other languages I have learned - combined. Chinese is a piece of cake if you know kanji, a year of moderate effort if you don't. But then I don't need to tell you folks how difficult Japanese is, only the folks who have not learned one or more non-cognate (to English) language. ( Btw, I don't count Spanish as a foreign language. It's just English with bad spelling.)

 

In conclusion, so sorry for the swipe at language-base AI. That was more of a gut response, since I did not pursue a career in it myself, though I had the opportunity to do so way back when. Sorry, that was a cheap and undeserved shot.

 

All the best,

 

Dennis

jpnthailand@*********

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 8:49 PM, Jeroen Hoek <mail@*************> wrote:

My apologies, but your post confuses me a little. Did you mean "trawl"
instead of "troll"?

~ Jeroen

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 20:27 -0500, Dennis Schrader wrote:
> [...]troll[...]
>