Procrastinating at work

[tarigwaemir]

Stanley Hall on the Feast of St. Anthelm

I blocked LiveJournal on my work computer (along with a rather long list of other time-wasting sites) but I neglected to block it on my ultraportable. Oh well...maybe I'll be good and install LeechBlock on here too.

We're having a potluck picnic lunch today as a farewell party for Laurie, our lab tech. So I got up early to make 김밥 (Korean-style sushi rolls) this morning and had to dose myself with a can of Starbucks doubleshot espresso in order to stay awake. Argh. I need to adjust my sleep cycle or at least figure out how to make myself wake up before 8 AM. I think I had more discipline as a ten-year old than I do now.

I wrote the rest of this post yesterday and thought I should post it, though I originally meant to include the next topics from the alphabet blogging meme and my answers to magicnoire's TV Tropes meme. Oh well, I'll get to those soon.

I refuse to do the so-called "Big Read Top 100 Books" meme because it's actually the "World Book Day Top 100 Books As Voted on by Popular Survey of 2000 Visitors To the World Book Day Website". Yes, it annoys my inner pedant to see the incorrect attribution, particularly because the Big Read (as sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts) does have a list of featured books, which they are using in their literacy and reading promotion campaign, not as an assessment of the "best" or "most popular" books among the reading public. Anyway, those of you who dislike the list should probably realize that it reflects the tastes of a relatively small segment of the English-reading public. As I commented on aishuu's post:

Huh, I don't know where this meme originated, but this isn't the Big Read list at all. (The Big Read didn't generate a top 100 list, as far as I'm aware.) The list was generated from a survey for World Book Day (a UK-based organization, Guardian article) and hence represents popular opinion rather than a centrally constructed list.

ETA: The relevant sentence about how this list was made: "The 2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without."

The Guardian also posts the full list here.

Maybe I should collate all the Top [Insert Number] Book Lists I can find, then analyze how much overlap exists. One could weight the books by their ranks in the lists and compare the subsets of lists compiled by critics or published authors and lists generated from popular opinion surveys. Actually, the analysis would be pretty simple to do in Perl; the only headache would be to actually find all the lists and get them into a standard input format. Oh, and correct for mistakes in spelling among the different lists.

In other news, Steve agreed to study the 千字文 (Thousand Characters Classic) with me. The text consists of, well, one thousand characters, organized into four-character phrases that convey some philosophical principle according to official Confucian ideology. It used to be the first text memorized when studying for the civil service exam during the Yi Joseon dynasty. Basically, it's the classical way of learning Chinese characters. My father attempted to make me learn it five years ago, the summer after I graduated from high school, but I never got past the first sixteen characters. (I even wrote a post about it here.) I did subsequently study hanja in college, but I forgot most of what I learned.

Anyway, the idea is to memorize four characters a day. I think it will probably be more realistic to master reading and recognition, though ideally, I would like to be able to write on recall. I made a flashcard set here, in an attempt to actually continue remembering the characters we're supposed to have learned. I'm thinking of trying to do weekly posts (hah, in spite of how infrequently I've been updating lately) with my personal mnemonics as well as lists of Sino-Korean words that use the characters we've (supposedly) learned during the week. Anyone interested?

Useful links:

• Full text of 千字文
  
• Naver hanja dictionary
  
• Zon hanja dictionary
  
• 千字文 study guide

Yours &c.

Post-script: Please vote in the bibliophages poll, if you haven't seen it yet.

Post-post-script: Several people on my friends list are offering fic (plus other goods and services) for livelongnmarry, an auction fundraiser to support marriage equality and to protest against the voting initiative to outlaw same-sex marriages in California. Bidding begins in July, but I thought I might as well link to the community for those of you who might not have seen it yet.

Post-post-post-script: Did I mention that I've been watching Library War? I finished episode 11 last night...is it true that the series ends on episode 12? ;_; Anyway, talk to me about this series if you've been watching it! I haven't been this enthusiastic about an anime series in a while. Anyone think Komaki is a nicer version of Fuji Shuusuke from Prince of Tennis? Must add Doujou/Kasahara to my list of het pairings I like in fiction but would find disconcerting in real life (the fact that he's her direct superior, not the height difference). Other pairings on this list: Yankumi/Shin, Mairelon/Kim, Masumi/Maya, Doumyoji/Makino...

Comments

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Aha, 千字文. The pain. ;; Good luck, though!

[troisroyaumes]

Thanks! >_<;;;

[fable.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this info; was wondering how that list was compiled, and that explains so much.

[troisroyaumes]

Whew, I'm glad you found it informative. (I feel like I'm nitpicking on a detail that no one really cares about, but I do feel that the incorrect attribution is rather misleading...-_-;;)

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Well, I re-attributed my meme-post, and, er, linked to you since you explained it so well, but if you want me to take the link down (it's a public entry but I hardly cultivate a readership or anything, so if a tree falls in a forest where there's no one around...?)

[troisroyaumes]

Oh, no worries, link away! ^_^ I only wish I knew where the "only six out of the 100" statistic came from...maybe I should do more Googling.

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Well, it's too bad the link-back broke down somewhere (I mean, I didn't link back to who I got it from, and the first person I saw doing it didn't link back either....)  But I wonder how well that would work even if we could track it back to the first occurrence of the meme?  I bet the person just forgot about it. ^^;;

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Someone else with a scholarly mind was wondering about the stat too, and has a theory here (http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache:6aNLObTIsxIJ:rabidpaladin.com/archive/2008/06/25/book-geek.aspx+%22big+read%22+%22only+read%22+adult&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=18&gl=us), but their post is about as recent as yours....

[troisroyaumes]

Ooh, thanks for the link. Hm, I like their theory since there was some debate over the NEA's study a few months ago, so it would make sense for someone to conflate the two.

I tried tracking back but the links eventually broke down, so alas, not much luck in finding where the meme originated. I did notice that people put up versions of the meme but correctly attributed to the right source on some forums.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

That list totally did annoy me because it's SOOOO like a dozen other lists that I've seen, so why bother doing it? It's familiarly Brit centered, also.

Good luck on the hanja thing! BTW, how much hanja does the average Korean typically learn?

[troisroyaumes]

Haha, yes, actually the overlap is pretty interesting to me (though I think it's completely redundant to actually do the meme).

Hm, it depends on the age of your average Korean. My parents' generation had to learn a fair bit, but there was a fairly recent period where they decided to downplay the teaching of hanja in public schools as an expression of Korean nationalism. Nowadays, there's been a revival of interest in hanja in reaction to that. I'm not entirely certain how many characters most Koreans would learn--I suspect it will vary considerably with education level as well--but my father has told me that if I learn 千字文, I would know all the characters that most Koreans would use in daily life.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

It's totally like an MTD (memetically transmitted disease), really. XD

Interesting... Does not knowing much hanja trip people up a lot? I don't read Korean, but I rarely see it on Korean web pages, to use an example.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Ooh, 千字文!

I had always wanted to be a good and proper calligraphy student and work my way through that. XDXDDD (Alas, right now, my back can't handle calligraphy, which is very :( )

[troisroyaumes]

Ooh, I'd love to learn calligraphy as well. *_* My main goal though is to expand my vocabulary, since more sophisticated vocabulary is usually Sino-Korean.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Which is why it's only those words I'm good at picking up in Korean. XD Hurray for Chinese cultural imperialism! (?)

The Thousand Character Classic is apparently one of those things you traditionally learn calligraphy from. I feel like there's also a sutra on the Japan side, but maybe that was just my teacher....

(I feel like I should look at it and read it as a text. Does it make sense that way? XD If the いろは poem does....)

[issen4.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that list seemed really weird. I wasn't interested at first in playing it, but succumbed in a moment of weakness. All it did was remind me of the painful, painful days of reading Hardy... >_<

千字文 sounds fun! I have a sudden urge to dig out my copy; it has explanatory notes and everything.

[troisroyaumes]

Heh, I actually liked (some) Hardy. Though not Jude the Obscure.

Ooh, I'd love to see your copy (though I wouldn't be able to read it). The study guide I linked to has some explanatory notes, which are pretty fascinating...of course, it's all in Korean so I only understand about half of it.

[issen4.livejournal.com]

The explanatory notes are useful because those words are hard, and have different meanings from current usage (some, anyway).

Is there a bilingual version somewhere, though?

[troisroyaumes]

Probably not...at least, I don't know of one. But it's educational for me to try to read the notes in Korean; I just get lazy about looking up a lot of words in the dictionary. ^_^

[ldmoonflower.livejournal.com]

That LeechBlock add-on is absolute genius! Too bad I don't use my own computer often enough to necessarily need it. Anyway . . .

It's amazing that Steve learns stuff with you!

(Yup, I'm catching up on LJ now. Why doesn't the friendslist let you even see skip=25 anymore? Grr.)