lingqi's Journal: April 2nd, 2003

April 2nd, 2003 (8:05pm)

I spent a good part of today worrying about my necessary trip at the end of the month to the US. As a green-card holder who wants to keep this status, such semiannual trips are unavoidable.

Except, of course, when you have the problem of possibly being quarantined in an airplane with people who might be sick - as what the San Jose airport had done with a plane from Tokyo.

It seems that the disease kills about 3.5 - 5% of the people infected. I think that's pretty good odds. However, if everybody in the world was infected, 200-300 million would die - a significant figure to say the least. I am not quite sure what to make of it - that this disease is deadly, or that this planet has really got a lot of people.

The only other possible deviation from an otherwise completely average day (seriously - this day would re-define "average") is the fact that due to a last-minute conference I had to cancel my japanese class last minute as well. Being half hour before class, the teacher was probably on her way here when she recieved the notice.

So, public apology - I'm very sorry.

On the other hand, for some neat japanese: how many ways can you say sorry?
ã(TM)ã¾ãã
å¾å... (ã"ãã")
å¾å...ããã
ã(TM)ãã¾ãã"
ã©ããã(TM)ãã¾ãã"
ç"ã--èçã (ããã--ãã'ãã)
ç"ã--èããSã¾ãã"

I am sure people will say I am wrong, but this is the order of "politeness" for saying sorry (top being least polite, bottom the most). The second one from the bottom fit into a hazy category because that the front is polite but the inflection isn't - but I am not an expert anyway. However, I have so far seen no text book that teaches this (they only tell you about sumimasen - the exact middle). This is peachy, but it really does not help you understand what other people are saying. (For example, the waitresses at the crab-restaurant I went to earlier only says the bottom-most version.)

In any case, a workday is not particularly exciting, so I stop here.

Politeness levels

[Sam the Nemesis]

In addition to these, the super polite one:

mo(u)shiwake gozaimasen

Japanese has humble and honorific forms for almost all verbs in addition to the normal and polite forms. Humble forms are used by the first person. Honorific is for the second person.

For example, the verb èãã¾ã(TM) has following forms:

• Plain: iu
• Polite: iimasu
• Humble: moushimasu
• Honorific: osshaimasu

Question

[Sam the Nemesis]

How did you post so many japanese characters in the message? When I tried to post (see my message above), the slashcode says reduce the number of junk characters. I am using UTF-8 encoding.

Re:Question

[molo]

The junk filter isn't used on article bodies. Journals are special forms of articles, so the main body doesn't get checked. All the messages do though.

-molo

Air Travel & SARS ..

[molo]

I spent a good part of today worrying about my necessary trip at the end of the month to the US. As a green-card holder who wants to keep this status, such semiannual trips are unavoidable.

Yeah, we're planning on wearing masks as soon as we arrive at the airport and during the whole flight. Airports must be crawling with the stuff. We'll probably also have gloves that we'll wear intermitently as needed. (Its supposed to be able to spread on surfaces too.)

The only thing I'm worried about is eye protect

Re:Air Travel & SARS ..

[pbox]

I guess the face mask is good enough if everyone is wearing it. The face mask prevents the infected ones from creating "droplets", so the infection through-air can stop there. Through-surface infection can still spread. They are not yet sure about the infection paths.

Re:Air Travel & SARS ..

[lingqi]

disposable masks here are 100yen / 4.

I know what you mean by the eyes. I thought about it too but figured that wearing swimming goggles would be awfully silly =)

Re:Air Travel & SARS ..

[Vengeru]

I would suggest you stop thinking in the way of what "looks silly" and concentrate more on stopping the disease from spreading and saving lives. Noone will care about your goggles. / V

Don't overuse kanji!

[KNicolson]

I've had people mention it to me before, so I'll pass on - using too many kanji looks odd to the Japanese. For instance, in normal text I don't remember ever seeing the GO of GOMEN as kanji (GO/O seems to be kanji almost exclusively in formal calligraphy or religious settings), and MEN only in subtitles. Similarly NAI is almost always hiragana.

Re:Don't overuse kanji!

[lingqi]

I know, but that's how my dictionary listed it. Possibly in for mormal texts (instead of TV subtitles) they would use more kanji?