Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Stenography & Japanese

Ooh, so mysterious and so...samurai. (pfft)

For those of you who don't know, aside from stenography, Japanese language is one of the biggest THINGS in my life. What I mean by that is that it always had a place throughout my young adult life--whether it was studying it formally in high school and college, to spending a year abroad in the Tokyo area, to incorporating it into my professional career(s).
- editor of Japanese manga (@ TOKYOPOP)
- associate localization producer of Japanese video games (@ NAMCO BANDAI)
- freelance translation of Japanese entertainment (ex: manga, video games, novels, etc...)

Yeah, it's been a pretty big thing, so court reporting is my first break from it in the past, oh let's see, 10 years or so! That's a pretty big shift!

...Or is it?

See, since starting stenography, I learned pretty quickly that it is essentially a language. You're translating the steno language/code into English. Fascinating! And taking it a step further, time and time again I've found myself comparing the use of steno stroking, briefs, and phrases to the Japanese writing system.
Here is a quick breakdown of the Japanese writing system to give you some background:

① Hiragana ひらがな -- the phonetic alphabet of the language. You can write anything in this simple system of 48 characters. Such nice and soft symbols, compared to its counterpart...
- Katakana カタカナ -- the mirror opposite of the phonetic language, reserved specifically for foreign loan words (like "computer" and "Will Smith") or for slang. Okay, this one doesn't really have much to add to my steno + Japanese theory (thus it doesn't get it own number,) but I thought I should be thorough and lay it out there.
② Kanji 漢字 -- a vast system of characters adopted from the Chinese writing system. I mean, that's literally what "kanji" means. "Chinese letters." Anyway, these handy-dandy kanji characters can encompass entire words, phrases, meanings, and ideas.

Okay, I bet some of you are already starting to catch on with the whole hiragana versus kanji bit and how it relates to steno.
You know how when you don't know how to brief a word on your machine, you just "spell it out" or "write it out"?
You can essentially do the same with hiragana. Observe the silly sample sentence below:

なぜそのねこはつねにまどのちかくにすわっていますか。

Nice. It works. But, man, is it long.
Plus, thanks to the many homonyms of the Japanese language it can be hard to appropriately break up the symbols together to form the various words and grammatical parts of the sentence. It just started to run together like: "Nazesononekohatsunenimadonochikakunisuwatteimasuka?"

Here is that same sentence using kanji:

何故その猫は常に窓の近くに座っていますか。

Can you see how much shorter that is?!
And for those of you who know the language, it makes it that much easier to find the grammatical "pit stops" that signify the noun, verb, tense of the sentence. So now it reads more like this: "Naze sono neko wa tsune ni mado no chikaku ni suwatteimasu ka?

It's exactly the same with briefs, I find. They help you compress words or phrases into  a more succinct lines of code as you read them off your notes or program. They can help to break up long and convoluted written-out words with little "pit stops" as I like to think of them.

Huh, somehow I thought this entry would be more impressive as I was thinking it up, but now it seems sort of dull. Either way, hopefully someone out there has raised their eyebrows a bit at this entry and I've added a little food for thought to the universe!

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Passed First 100-Level Test!

Wow, these posts are getting pretty sparse, and I'm only thinking to post when I've achieved a "great goal."

As the title says, my most recent "great goal" is that I just passed my Lit 80 test!

I'm quite pleased with myself because as you'll remember, my goal was to pass a 100-level test before the end of the semester, and--boom!--I managed it on the last day of classes!

Next Monday is not only the 200-word English vocabulary quiz (breezeville, I'm sure), but also a "Test-A-Thon" from 6pm-9pm.
This is our last chance to cram in additional tests that we request of the teacher to prepare in the hopes of passing one before the summer session.
It takes a while for me to "warm up" on Mondays, but my recent 100 JC was surprisingly good (only 31 errors!) so I think I may-may-may-may-may have a shot at this on Monday night.

This recent development has also inspired to update my Reach-120-Speed-Before-End-of-Summer goal. I now believe that I may be able to not only reach 120 but also... (drum roll, please)

Pass at least one 120-level test by the end of Summer Session. @_@

Can it be done? I think so.

Current Bridge Lesson -- Lesson 21

Thursday, May 2, 2013

80 Speed Tests Passed!

Not a very imaginative title for this entry, I know.

I just wanted to quickly record some recent progress I've made in my speed building classes.
As of this week, I've passed all of my 80 speed tests!

Literary at 60 words per minute was passed on Thursday April 24.
Jury Charge at 80 words per minute was passed on Monday April 29.
QA at 80 words per minute was passed on Wednesday May 2.

Literary (which was held a good 20 wpm less than the other tests) had only 6 mistakes, but the two others were passed with the maximum of 10 errors (97.5%) -- Yeesh! -- so of course I can't say that I'm easy-peasy comfortable with 80 wpm just yet. However, it's incredible how in just a few weeks, 80 feels more like a real possibility. In a few weeks, I hope to be even more comfortable with it and tackling 100!

I'm pretty gosh-darned proud of all this so far, and it makes my original goal of reaching 120 speed building by the end of summer even more plausible!
 Fortunately for me, I have only to register for the Theory II class for the Summer session, while still attending speed building classes during both day and night.

I should also add that this recent development has inspired me to set the following goal:

Complete at least one 100 wpm test by the end of May (end of Spring semester).

A little ambitious, I know, but we'll see how it goes... Wish me luck!

Current Bridge Lesson - Lesson #16