Living with Kryptonite: August 2013

2013-08-25

Singing Impressions

I love this! I'm inspired to work on my impressions now! I do accents all right, but only a few impressions. I kind of do:

Sean Connery
Patrick Stewart
Clint Eastwood
Jimmy Stewart
Leonard Nimoy (kind of)

Want to learn how to do:
William Shatner
Hugh Grant
Jack Nicholson (kind of)
Christopher Walken
Mickey Mouse

...plus I want to learn to do at least one falsetto.

I can do (more or less well):
Californian Accent (Southern, etc.)
Texas Accent
Arkansas Accent
Generic Country Western Accent
Northern French Accent (in French or English)
Southern French Accent
Quebequois accent
Swiss Accent
Canadian (maybe, on a good day)
Russian Accent or German Accent (sometimes get stuck, either in English or with some German or Russian)
Chinese Accent (maybe some in actual Chinese, and probably not so good)
Japanese Accent (Tokyo, Osaka, etc. in English or Japanese or French)
Mexican, Argentinian, Colombian, Generic Spanish, Generic South American accent (in Spanish or English)
Scottish (on a good day)
Irish
Norwegian, maybe Swedish (on a good day)
Variety of generic Indian/subcontinental accents
"Rez accent"
Bostonian (Brahman, Southy, etc. probably depends on the day)
(can't really do Baltimore, but can recognize it and attempt it)
Pittsburghese (have really gotten rusty, but used to speak pretty well)
Nebraska/generic midwestern
New York, New Jersey (Jewish, Italian, reasonably well, depends on the day)
(I can't really do a South Afrikan accent -- need to work on that)
BBC/posh/RP British Newscaster
American newscaster
Japanese newscaster/announcer
French newscaster/announcer
East-ender, Mancunian, maybe on a good day Scouse (Liverpudlian)
Generic English
Australian I (Sydney, Queensland) and II (Melbourne)
Kiwi (New Zealand)
(can't do any Welsh accents, really...)
(I can't do Palousian-Bonnevillan, N. Utah, Idaho, even though I lived there 20 years, but I'm working on it.)
(I can't do Greek or anything like that, really....)

2013-08-21

A Radical Approach to Learning Chinese Characters

This article covers the kinds of things I cover in my class. The 7 radical positions are something that I have taught for a long time, and which I consider to be very basic to learning kanji, but somehow they don't seem to come up in very many places.

It's a bit like not teaching what the gearshift is when trying to teach somebody how to drive, but whatever. The level of English language pedagogical material for Japanese seems to be surprisingly low.

Come to my class!!

2013-08-20

Japanese Class: the architecture of a pun [oyaji-gaggu]

Post if you want me to translate any of this stuff....

Funnily enough, the words for "why" and "accident" share a character (in red).

2013-08-08

Friend got published!!

Charlie Holmberg has this really cool chart which I may try to steal that shows how far along she is on all of her books. Apparently she's making a baby as well.