Joe Bloggs

Japanese for nerds

Found a very interesting article on how to learn Japanese. Here's how it starts:

Most attempts to teach Japanese to foreigners start off with long lists of words to learn and endless drills practicing how to say things like "Suzuki-san, konnichi-wa." But with an appropriately nerdular mind, none of this is necessary. The nerd can simply study the formal Backus-Naur definition of the language, and then treat all the individual words to be learned the same way he would learn a long list of manifest constants #define'd in some C library.

It continues in much the same manner and got me thinking I could probably learn 'C' if I applied the thinking presented in the article in reverse. Until I got to this part.

OK, here is another pop quiz for bonus points. Translate the following:

1. Neg(Neg(Neg()), which is naku naku nai
2. Cond(Neg(Neg()), or naku nakereba

It seemed wierd to me and I first checked with the Bloggs boys. They couldn't make head or tail out of it. Then I checked with my university sensei (lecturer), who is now in Japan, and he confirmed the Japanese here was entirely nonsense. That was gratifying - that my Japanese wasn't worse than I thought it was. Nevertheless, even though the English doesn't make much sense either, I still like the author's premise.