The reason why Mr. Feynman dropped Japanese was he probably thought that it was a silly waste of time to change the verbs for no reason. But keigo isn’t completely useless because it often helps to clue you in on who is performing the action, something that is not very clear most of the time since Japanese tends to lack pronouns from its sentences. I guess the logical solution would be to make pronouns compulsory and then do away with keigo… but oh well…

Anyway, I have nothing against proverbs really. As TP mentioned, they can be interesting and subtle in their meanings. But so is painting. And yet similar forms of indirect artistic expressions are not given the same status in the education system.

Art, by its definition, should be something based on interest. If the course was Chinese Literature (and I was somehow fooled into taking it), then I would have no complains.

Anyway, I have yet to get my hands on Suzuka vol.10… NOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!

P.S. Mai-Otome 17 rocked too! :P

This kind of experiences made me remind back to when I was watching Ghost In The Shell: Innocence back in April (Singapore Film Festival). I am still dumbstruck with most of its complexities. At least I got the joke when Batou said: “Even if the donkey travels thousands of miles, it would not return back a horse.” Or something along that line.

The point of proverbs is that sometimes, useful and can be used in “sarcastic” tones if you don’t want the intended party to “immediately understand your meaning.” I.e. you can toss a proverb or two to your boss/teacher/friend that means that you don’t like him/her.

Oh, yeah. 1 question: 1.) What’s with F/SN? I feared it being most overhyped series.

Good day.

anyways, I love your attitude towards chinese, my fellow chineseman, although I have to say you would probably want to show your 133t japanese language skills whether it is necessary to or not, am I rite? :D

p.s. Fate/Stay Night episode 5 didn’t rock; episode 6 WILL rock, on the other hand :P (5 was ok, but it didn’t warrant that level of elated outburst from you)

I think that the more you learn about any language, the harder it is to actually communicate with. That is, you don’t become fluent in a language by studying it, but by using it. And even past fluency, learning more vocabulary just complicates things until you can work out how to use that vocabulary in regular speech. If you think about it, yeah, it’s awfully counter-productive, but I think it pays off in the end if you really want it to, even with proverbs.

I guess that’s it XD I never had to learn them, my parents wanted me to do it but since they weren’t very consequent about it, I never did. (I got a cassette with stories about chinese proverbs though, it was fun to listen and that’s why I remember most of those proverbs.) Which brings me to my point: I think the richness of chinese proverbs are really an interesting thing and shouldn’t be forgotten too easily. It’s just a pain that people are forced to learn them.
You probably can compare it with latin: Nobody uses it nowadays (even less than chinese proverbs), but it can enrich your comprehension of language and culture with it.