English Language Learners

Anonymous

00:02

1

In my thesis I am quoting a passage from a paper in which the author* used the word "learnable" in the sense of something that is easy to be learned. I have searched for the word in both the Merriam-Webster and the Cambridge English online dictionaries, but didn't find it there. Nevertheless, th...

Anonymous

Yes! Next.

Anonymous

I bet they wouldn't be satisfied with a one-word answer, though :-(

Damkerng T.

00:16

はい！

One row down, nine to go!

:-)

They look simple, but it's tricky to write them nicely enough!

あ and お are particularly tricky. Their curves are a bit unfamiliar to me.

Anonymous

Make sure you write them both with the right stroke order.

Anonymous

00:32

A lot of people seem to have trouble with them at first. If you don't get them perfect on day 1, that's totally fine. Just so long as you can remember how to write them :-)

Anonymous

Since you'll be writing them a lot over time, they'll get nicer as you go.

Damkerng T.

It's surely different when we only have to recognize them from when we really want to write them. :-)

Anonymous

If you can write them, you can recognize them!

Damkerng T.

Absolutely!

Anonymous

The converse does not necessarily hold :-)

Damkerng T.

00:35

nods

Anonymous

Did you write the characters in that image?

Damkerng T.

Yes.

Everything in dark blue in that image is mine.

Anonymous

They're pretty good. 'Cept for お, I think, could you try to make the first part more to the left side?

Damkerng T.

nods

It is really tricky for me. I still couldn't find a good balance for it.

Anonymous

You have it going all the way across.

Anonymous

00:37

Try exaggerating it slightly and put the initial vertical part at 25% across

Damkerng T.

Ahh... That's the trick!

Anonymous

And the horizontal stroke on the top, don't go all the way across

Damkerng T.

The last part of the curve that goes upward a bit is really tricky for me.

Anonymous

Are you right or left handed?

Damkerng T.

I'm right handed.

Anonymous

00:47

Have you had any practice in writing Chinese? Like the way you'd hold a brush?

Anonymous

You can ignore all this and write them however you want, btw, but in schools I think you'd be made to hold the pen a certain way :-)

Damkerng T.

I haven't really practiced Chinese calligraphy.

Anonymous

Ahh, never mind then :-)

Damkerng T.

Though I know how to draw a bit. :D

Anonymous

Well, if you want, try holding the pen vertically so it's hanging straight down over the page

Anonymous

00:49

But if that's harder, then do it however you normally do :-)

Damkerng T.

Ah, I think I have seen they do it like that. (I'm not sure if they were doing it in Chinese or in Japanese.)

How would Japanese people write with their pens or pencils? The way we write English letters, or more like the way you just described?

Anonymous

They're taught to write vertically in school using brushes

Anonymous

And they are taught specific types of strokes for kanji using those brushes.

Damkerng T.

Ah! They hold brushes before pens or pencils!

Anonymous

You can get something called a fude pen (筆ペン), lit. "brush pen" if you like

Damkerng T.

00:54

I think I might still have the one I bought in China. Hmm... I don't know if it's still usable.

Oh, you mean brush pen, not a real brush.

Anonymous

I did mean a real brush

Anonymous

But I was pointing out brush pens as well :-)

Damkerng T.

I found a lot of images of such a pen. They all look neat! It also seems like they use this kind of pen for drawing manga too.

Anonymous

►

Anonymous

He writes お around 2 minutes, although you might want to watch all of the first row

Damkerng T.

01:02

nods -- I can observe lots of things I'm not aware of before seeing watching this clip.

I'm not sure about the reason why he marked some characters as x (wrong), though.

Anonymous

Which character are you asking about?

Damkerng T.

I've noticed a few of them. The first one a is one of them.

Anonymous

Okay, for あ he said it's not good to make the vertical stroke perfectly straight

Anonymous

Notice the gentle curve

Damkerng T.

Ahh

The dot thing is a very good hint!

Anonymous

01:06

＾＾

Damkerng T.

ありがとう　ございます！ for the tips and the video clip!

Anonymous

:-)

Anonymous

By the way, you can write that without a space.

Damkerng T.

はい！

F.E.

02:19

Yawn . . . scratch . . . scratch . . .

Damkerng T.

02:37

repairing the scratched wall...

Awal Garg

14:29

What is happening here?

no people here?

This room is going to be freezed soon, there is not enough activity here...

Cerberus

15:55

@AwalGarg Haha, you are spoiled!

Awal Garg

16:42

@Cerberus what does that mean?

Cerberus

17:42

@AwalGarg Like a child who always gets what he wants, you are used to getting constant conversation here. When there is a short pause, you are unhappy.

A kind of joke.

Damkerng T.

20:24

> I didn't like this chocolate when I was 5.

Hmm...

Is that chocolate a time traveler?

F.E.

Ah got comments for your first paragraph in one of your posts: *"This is to depicts events in the story as something happened before the time the author wrote the novel …"*
That ain't right, yanno.

Notice how my italics didn't work! :(

A counter-example: In the year 2025, in the second year of the reign of the magnificent tigers, Tommy awoke to the sound of a bear chewing on his sleeping bag. Tommy didn't know what to do, not at first. Then he thought, what would a tiger do in this situation?

Damkerng T.

Oh, that's true.

How should I rephrase it?

Hmm... did I mention "historical events"?

F.E.

I thought your previous idea, that of "backshift" for fiction, to be a good way of starting it out.

Yeah, you wrote: "In other words, novelists write historical stories or events (probably not what really happened)." -- which probably might be best if deleted, imo. :)

Damkerng T.

I thought "historical events" could cover something that for us would happen in the future, but it's historical for the writer. But that's a different thing from "This is to depicts events in the story as something happened before the time the author wrote the novel ..."

And that's probably a different meaning of historical from its typical usage.

F.E.

20:41

You probably don't want to use the term "historical" in that discussion, because there's the term historical present that's used for telling a story in present-tense.

Damkerng T.

nods

F.E.

For a scene (of a novel), even though the past-tense is used in the prose, the events that are occurring are actually happening immediately, one after the other, in the "now-ness" of the scene that is unfolding before the reader's eyes.
This is true even if the scene had occurred in the past of the narrator who is explicitly telling the story--a reminiscent narrator--of a novel.

For fiction (done in past-tense narrative mode), the past-tense prose is equivalent to our present-tense text. E.g. In the novel: Tommy awoke to the sound of a bear chewing on his sleeping bag. -- While for the reader, it is interpreted as Tommy awakes to the sound of a bear chewing on his sleeping bag.

Damkerng T.

A quick-and-dirty fix is probably:

> This is to depicts events in the story as if it was something happened before the time the author wrote the novel..

F.E.

In that paragraph in the OP's post, it seems that the narrator "I" is retelling an old event to the reader. That is, the narrator is staying here in the current time sphere as she's telling about a past situation. That is why she uses so many past-perfect's.

Damkerng T.

That line almost made no sense to me the first time I read it. I mean, it seemed like it was out of the sequence.

F.E.

20:55

One of the problems you'll run into is that there are some non-standard sentences, due to the voice of the narrator, her dialect. E.g. I had been happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours. -- In standard English, that ought to be: I would have been happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours.

Damkerng T.

I think understanding it as would have been makes much more sense.

F.E.

This is to depicts events in the story as if it was something happened before the time the author wrote the novel. -- That doesn't work either. :(

Damkerng T.

@F.E. Which part gives us the clue (about her non-standard)?

@F.E. Hah!

I really think of it like that.

(And I read sci-fi a lot. So it's typical that the setting would be some time in the far future.)

F.E.

That last example "I had been happy to stand outside and kiss him for hours." probably is one. Though, there is an outside shot that she meant exactly what was written.

There's a lot of fiction written conventions (grammar) that just isn't covered in grammar usage manuals. And so, explaining something that involves fiction writing on a grammar site for ELL speakers might not be too easy.

Damkerng T.

Maybe I should think of it as just a device, and should not try to make sense of the ways we tell our stories.

F.E.

21:01

Yes, that might be prudent. Perhaps labeling it as "backshift" for fiction writing, or something like that.

In that fiction excerpt, the narrator "I" is thinking back to a kiss she had received earlier from Linc. She is maintaining the now-ness of the current time in the story as she is reminiscing about the past situation where she got kissed--and the writer chose to use the technique of using a lot of past-perfect verbs to do this.

Damkerng T.

nods -- That is what I felt too.

So I think I could make sense for the most part of it, except for the should have been would have been one.

F.E.

Yeah, I think the narrator just mis-spoke for that line of text--but that is intentional by the writer, as the writer wanted to show that the narrator's grammar ain't all that good.

Damkerng T.

Ahh

F.E.

Well, the two sites--ELL and ELU--are in read-only mode.

Damkerng T.

It seems like the maintenance has been going on for a while. Maybe a couple of months already, I think.

So we found this read-only mode often enough.

Hmm... usually they will tell us the status, and/or warn us before it's going to happen. I don't know what happened this time.

stackstatus.net doesn't say anything.

F.E.

21:22

I saw this: "I had gone to the market and I saw some very beautiful tables at a shop"; but let me modify it to: "I had gone to the market, and saw some very beautiful tables at a shop. I went to the owner to ask about his prices." -- Here, the writer uses past-perfect to transition into a scene that occurred in the narrator's past, and then, once the narrator is at that market, the writer than shifts into using past-tense to get the reader immersed into these scene, . . .

. . . as the scene dynamically unfolds in real-time in front of the reader. This is done even though this marketplace scene is in the past of the narrator's current "present time".

Agh, it refused to let me edit my previous stuff. :(

Damkerng T.

Ah, we can edit our messages only within 2 minutes after posting it.

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English Language Learners