John Zeitler

I still haven’t had a chance to catch even the first episode of Stellvia yet– it was on my agenda for tonight, but I got sidetracked and it’s far too late now. However, a pair of curious little notes to tide you over until I can get to that.

The first one ties into the second. The manga ranking charts have been released for Japan today, and topping the list is Hayate the Combat Butler, volume 21. However, here in North America, we’re still waiting on Volume 13, set for early next month. Compound this with the fact that we’re still probably not going to get the dubbed version of the anime for at least another year, if we get it at all, and it all adds up to me wishing I already knew Japanese instead of having to learn it.

So naturally, the classes I’m taking are helping me out immensely. Last night’s class, which covered the beginnings of verbs and sentence particles, was the turning point for me. What once seemed like an incredibly arcane set of rules and hidden formulae for sentence structure and grammar became extremely clear once I realized the relationship between (and I’m too tired to properly kana-ize this, so forgive me) “watashi wa” and “hitori de”. Once I figured out how to map English prepositional phrases, of which I am fond, to Japanese postpositional constructs, it all just clicked.

To wit: previous to last night, I enjoyed “Tori no Uta”, the very beautiful opening theme to Air, as a wonderful piece of music with a sweet singer saying something generically poppish and haunting. It came up on random as I was driving into work this morning and I realized that, unconsciously, I was diagramming the lyrics here and there and trying to pick it apart. Failing to do so, of course, since I really only know a handful of particles and lyrics are usually dressed up poems with odd grammatical idiosyncrasies, but at least it was no longer pretty-sounding gibberish.

Catch you folks tomorrow.