Languages · Social Media

LING on my mind

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I was watching a Korean-American vlogger on YouTube and while she professes to be bad in Hangul and to have grown up speaking mostly English, I noted:

  • verb and preposition collocation mistakes typical of non-native English speakers
  • atypical syntactical choices
  • use of “but” where “and” would be more appropriate/logical
  • adjectival/adverbial use a little off and not aligning with their conventional meaning, e.g. cutesy, so extra, actually

Come talk to me after a few years and see if I still frame things like this.

Caturdays

Caturday #1

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Kicking of Caturdays on ANGEL KITSCH with my favorite photos of our kittens! Meet…

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…Kimiko, our eldest furbaby. A mixed Snowshoe Siamese born February 6, we adopted her last year in April from the Siamese Rescue Center in Virginia when she was two. She has a shoe fetish and would prance around in our shoes when she feels like it. She likes to nap on our homework at the exact moment we’re doing them. She can play fetch with her pet mice and give us low-fives for treats. Her name means “little empress” in Nihongo.

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Tala, a Mask-and-Mantle Bicolor, came to us three months ago. A friend’s boyfriend’s brother found her on the street and took care of her for a while, but can’t keep her as he has other pets to take care of. She was about five months old when we decided to adopt her and Kimiko finally has a sister to play and be mischievous with after being the only cat in the apartment for half a year. Tala’s a biter and would leave love marks on us whenever our flesh happened to be in front of her face when she’s in the mood to nibble. She has a more voracious appetite than her sister’s and would race to finish her food (and Kimiko’s). Her name means “bright star” in Tagalog.

A couple of years ago, I would have snorted in disbelief had someone told me I would be a a mom to a couple of kitties in a few years’ time. I grew up around dogs (Cocker Spaniels, a Chihuahua, and a Toy Poodle) and have never really taken care of nor even interacted with an animal of the feline persuasion. As such, my furbabies are constantly disturbed by my cries of “Bad doggy!” whenever one of them did something I don’t agree with and by my impulses to hug them which always end up with them desperately clawing their way out of my arms. Old habits die hard.

Languages · Manga

Manga is Linguistic

Anna Lim FranckLeave a comment

Stumbled across this fascinating blog when I Googled for linguistic resources. I’ve always wanted to incorporate my love for comics and Japanese animation in my studies and this seem to be one of the viable ways to do it. The blogger co-authored an article titled The vocabulary of manga: Visual morphology in dialects of Japanese Visual Language in the Journal of Pragmatics. I love this concept.

Because this is about visual linguistics, it brings to mind the study of sign languages in general. I have a special interest in Japanese Sign Language, having studied Nihongo but not yet well-versed in the language of the Japanese Deaf. I just checked out a JSL dictionary from the university library which is a poor substitute for actual immersion into the community that uses the language but seeing as I’m living (for now) in a society that’s driven by English, it’s a start.

Now, back to my anime marathon-ing.

Forever “On the way”
Books

Forever “On the way”

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Today’s already the first day of Spring semester and I still have yet to receive the books I ordered during the Winter break, books I was planning to read while relaxing on my vacation. Seems like my frustrations with the post office will never end. They have lost some of my important packages. I do have time-sensitive things I need to send overseas, but I’m thinking of sending them next week. And maybe through another mail carrier, to be safe.

Baking

Tasty Chocolate Pastry

Anna Lim Franck2 Comments

There isn’t a day I don’t thank the Goddess for the existence of ready-made puff pastry sheets! While I did go to baking school for a mere three months twelve years ago, I’ve never really mastered the art of making puff pastry from scratch; I can’t pound the life out of millions and millions of layers of obnoxious amounts of butter, sugar, and dough.

I decided to make the Chocolate Almond Braid yesterday morning and bring it over for dessert for Catan-and-Pizza Day at some friends’ place. It was slightly burned at the bottom so we brought over snack and salad with all the fixings instead. Ate the braid ourselves for breakfast. Still delicious.

Despite the sink overflowing with bowls and baking utensils, I enjoyed the baking process. I’ve gotten some measure of meditative calm, and the end result is, more or less, edible. Now looking for the next thing to bake.

Music

Play the Music Low

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One of the drawbacks of living in an apartment in the city is that I cannot play my keyboard as loud as I want. If we can hear the heated conversations from the downstairs unit and feel the frantic thumping on the floor of the apartment across ours, then it stands to reason that all the neighbours in this building would be able to hear me pound on the keys.

This, in addition to my persistent ennui, has made it difficult for me to go back to playing music again. I’ve thought of investing in a T‑Coil Music Listening Dual Earhooks but I’m not too sure if my hearing aids are telecoil-compatible or if my keyboard has a socket somewhere on it that I can plug the t-coil in.

Probable solution: Play as softly as I can without needing to straaain to hear. School starts again in five days so hopefully, I’d be able to get some playing in before I get too busy with coursework, tutoring, and graduate assistant duties.

Languages

My Nihongo

Anna Lim Franck1 Comment

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友達 「どうして日本語、まだ勉強してるの？」
私 「… やらない理由がなかったから」

[Translation]
Friend: Why are you still studying Japanese?
Me: … there’s no reason not to.
______________________
(This is a repost of my Instagram from August 2013. Now that things have settled down a bit, I’ve been thinking of picking up old hobbies again, especially ones that I actually took classes for. Hoping I could bring my Japanese proficiency level back up to N3/N2 and be able to take the 日本語能力試験 after I’m done with graduate school.)

Animals

Cat Tree Condo

Anna Lim Franck6 Comments

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Right. So, greetings from Kimiko (mixed Siamese snowshoe chilling belligerently on the penthouse) and Tala’s (black-and-white domestic shorthair posing nicely with paws crossed on the 3rd level) cat tree condo! Before we brought it, I thought the concept of a cat condo was ridiculous. Very charming, but quite ridiculous. Do our furbabies really, really need one? Like, really? I thought. Amazon.com, in an amazing fit of coincidence, offered a very significant discount on this model as a post-Christmas perk and seeing that we still have some balance left on our gift card, we decided to make the furbabies’ year.

I have to say it is one of the best investments we ever made. Though they still occasionally nest in the random fleece-lined cardboard boxes that we kept around for nostalgic purposes, both Kimiko and Tala spend most of their days (and perhaps nights, though I’ll never know) in various degrees of relaxation in and on the tree condo.