If I get asked

どこで昼ごはんを食べますか

And I want to reply

at Tadashi’s.

Can I write.

正さんので食べます。

？

When it comes to writing, the gift of being a good writer is about making anything interesting. there doesn’t have to be a great story or plot, or anything interesting you can make things interesting even if they’re not just by being an engaging writer.

So lets see, I didn’t do much interesting today. Lets see I caught a train, because I was too lazy to cycle from A to B, to be fair A and B were like 50 miles apart, and I haven’t been getting enough sleep, though I have been eating enough chocolate, which may also be why I haven’t been sleeping so much. SUGAR OMMM NOM NOMNOM.

On the train I saw some guy get on who had got on before, not very interesting, but at the time I had my old bike a beat up mountain bike I had converted to a single speed, he was pretty nice and talked to me, he was all, hey man single speed, rad, I wanna try that and I was, yeah man totally do it, its the only way to cycle. And he was all pumped to go get a single speed bike. Anyway this time he got on and he totally had the same bike, with gears, euughhh, and derailuers and etc. I on the other hand had transcended to full cycling god hood with my new fixie bike. He could not meet my eyes and did as all mortals did and hung his head in shame whilst he prostrated himself on a seat over there.

I then went to a bicycle shop and ordered an inner tube, or two, an interesting diversion because I had to convince the sales assistant that they did infact sell the type of inner tube I wanted. I knew this because I had bought one the previous weekend, accidently when I asked for an awkward type of inner tube (700 x 35c, with a longer than normal presta valve. Which they didn’t have so I bought normal tubes with valve extenders, didn’t work out so well, cos my rims weren’t as deep as required and the valve extender snapped right off when I tried applying the pump. But it turned out the other tube I bought was infact exactly what I’d asked for, and I had somehow bought it by mistake, sdo I knew that there existed such a tube that they sold, if only by mistake) So back to nthe story, the sales assistant was very doubtful that such a tube existed and was sold, luckily I am slightly deranged and so had kept my recipt so I could prove I had infact bought such a innner tube from this shop. The young bright spark eventually got an idea to search for the item code on the recipt to see if they did infact sell said innner tube, and they did, no surprise there, but they didn’t have any in stock so they ordered them for me…

After that I saw my aunt standing outside of An Anne Summers shop, I’ll not say much about that I really don’t want to think about the significance.

I then ate a pasty and drank a red bull in the cornish pasty shop place. The pasty was edible, but not as good as a home made pasty. The Red Bull was Red Bull. I then went to StarBucks and had a Mocha and  Cinnamon Swirl. The Mocha was good, the cinnamon swirl was a little stale. After this I visted my favourite bicycle shop, talked with the rad owner dude, bought some toes clips for my bike, then I cycled home as fast as I could.

On the way home I cycled behind a lady riding a chopper, bwap bwap bwap.

When I got home I stuck a bunch of stickers on my bike, they were vintage stickers I’ve had for like 10 years, to protect my bike from getting further scratches. I also attached the toe clips to my pedals, the Red leather straps provide an interesting counter point to the dark blue frame and black hardware.

All of this is pretty boring stuff, but hey I can write about it, it might even be interesting to read. Maybe I could go into more detail about the cinnamon swirl, like why did it have those funny yellow bits on it, had it come in contact with another cake, had it been Durdened up by disgruntled staff?

Oh there was a cute girl who was new at the Starbucks on the till, it was so cute to see her trying her best, we’re rooting for you new Starbucks till girl!

Anyway, the trick to writing is just to write, the more you write the better you get, just write, and worry about the rest later, much later.

What version of anki?

What Operating System?

If you are using the release anki, there should be an anki folder with subfolders for each of your decks, in which should be an media folder. Make sure the media files are there and can be played.

Also if you have downloaded the files from tf they are zipped, importing then before unzipping won’t work properly. Make sure you unzip the file, then import from the unzipped folder.

I’m not clever enough to answer your questions but I can tell you to expect plenty of exceptions, exceptions are the rule, except when they aren’t and thats the exception that proves the rule.

England was invaded many times and every invader had to bring a new way to say things, the most linguistically significant invasion was in 1066 when the normans who were vikings who had lived in north france for 90 years came over and invaded bringing a fair bit of french, in fact about 60% of english comes from french, and if theres a stupid pronunciation in English its because it’s french.

French being a romance language it has ties to other romance languages e.g. italian etc.

But don’t forget english people sometimes pronunciate words weirdly because they are silly.

like herbs pronounced as ‘erbs,

Bonus trivia! I now speak English like I’m speaking Japanese, apparently when I spell my name its hard to tell if I say b or v. And everyone asks where I got such a strange accent from. God knows what my r/l’s are like.

I guess I speak Japanese more often than English, even if its just practicing. Though it probably is more than I don’t speak much English than lots of Japanese.

冬 Japanese!

HiJack time!

Anyone having problem with anki playing audio?

I’m on Mac OS X Snowy Leopard.

According to the FAQ this is because it uses mplayer and mplayer is rubbish, I tried a bunch of fixes changing the config file for mplayer in ~/.mplayer/config, I compiled a new mplayer from the latest source.

But it still likes to stop half way through the audio file.

Its weird, it seems to happen to older audio files, the latest I’ve added are playing fine but older ones aren’t playing correctly.

I think the problem is down to pesky romaji, those characters are written in different ways depending on all manner of different things. Let alone how some person reads them.

There isn’t really an easy way to describe the pronunciation using roman alphabet because its not a sound that really exists, in the same way that らりるれろ is a mixture of r,l, and d sounds. You could use the phonetic alphabet… but no one wants that.

when a sound is written as dz, the sound you are looking to create is somewhere between a d and z, so try to combine the two consonants into a new sound, what does that sound like a juh sound? so it could be written as j* and it is written in some romanisations as ju or ji etc. but its not a true j sound thats just a simplification.

This is why romaji is the devil. Try to completely ignore romaji, and focus only on the real Japanese sounds and the character that represents it.

Also don’t sweat the small stuff, as you say the sounds are rare, yes, but also is no 100% right way to say them, different people say them differently, its easy to imagine that there is some single Japanese standard for speaking, but there isn’t. Even French which has an institute that officialises the language is spoken differently by different people.