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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!