Does it make sense to you? It didn't to me at first. I was doing my French homework today, and it said, "Moi, j'adore le saucisson. Avec du pain et du beurre, miam, miam!!" (It really did have two exclamation points. Talk about excited over food. Though of course, cuisine is one of the finer points of life, as I was watching the Food Network recently, The Next Iron Chef and stuff like that)

English translation: Me, I adore sausage. With bread and butter, yum, yum!

I tried it out in Google Translate just to be sure, and "miam, miam" means "yum, yum". Very interesting. Next time I go to France I'll see what kinds of things my cousins say when they're eating. (Funny, but the word for cousin - the female cousin, mind you, not the male - is pronounced like cuisine)

Oh, but I have been meaning to talk about Google Translate, and Wikipedia. I often use Google Translate if I can't figure out what a word is in French (luckily, they are often similar to English words, so you can guess at some of what you don't know). The teacher said not to use translators, because she says it's a machine and can't always figure out what you're trying to say. For instance, a student once tried to say he had turkey in his sandwich but he said the word for Turkey the country instead of the word for turkey the bird.

Still, despite that, it does work pretty well, as long as you compare it to another translator, or online dictionaries, and I've been able to figure out a lot that way. I guess some things work for some people. "One man's trash is another's treasure", shall I say.

Wikipedia is often scorned as well. Teachers don't want students to use it for their reports most of the time because, basically, anyone could edit the pages in Wikipedia. In fact, one time my history teacher had a student who was apparently dumb enough to want to try causing trouble, so the student went and changed a Wikipedia page. The teacher figured out what was going on because he remembered some of the information on the page and could tell that it wasn't what he had seen in the morning. However, I do hear that there are more serious people who are dedicated to Wikipedia who would probably fix something if it was messed up. So, I don't think you need to worry about Wikipedia pages being opinionated, unless it's a delicate topic. (I mean, something like politics.)

But you know, Wikipedia is actually the most accurate encyclopedia in the world. I heard that people have done studies and it is quite accurate and up to date. I can vouch for this. There is a Japanese singer named Ceui and she didn't have a Wikipedia page before, but one day, a few months ago, I was clicking about in Wikipedia, and discovered she did have a page! Wikipedia is updated much more quickly than an old, classic, book encyclopedia, because those get remastered maybe every few years. -_-;;

My language arts teacher displayed a scary, but still funny, side of herself today. We were talking about the eighth grade standards for the writing test we will take on behalf of the district (and maybe the whole state of California too?) later on this year. She said that there is a person who advises the language arts teacher, and so my teacher heard that there was an elementary school teacher who said to her students, "You can just write the way you speak." This is not encouraged, and my teacher said, "If I ever meet that teacher, I will challenge her to a cage match, and I will take her down!" with quite a bit of vigor. It was pretty amusing, but it was a bit intimidating too.

Speaking of which, it isn't always bad to have your writing seem like you're talking to someone. I know you shouldn't be using speaking slang like "gonna" and stuff like that, but I have seen books where the main character and/or narrator of the book actually acknowledges that there is a reader, as if the character of the book is aware that they're in a book. And if you've seen books that are written to be like diaries, then certainly they aren't written so formally. It really could depend on the situation, I suppose.

Labels: books, ceui, cousins, encyclopedia, food, french, google translate, language, miam, teacher, the next iron chef, translation, turkey, wikipedia, writing style, yum

On the school announcements on Friday, one of the announcers said that it was To Write Love on Her Arms Day. During that day, you could write the word love on the arms of your friends. I have heard of To Write Love on Her Arms, because I saw it on a banner someone made once, but I had no idea what it really was, I actually thought it was a song... -_-;; It isn't a song at all. In fact, it's an organization. One of my classmates said that the organization was started because there was a girl who was depressed, she probably had wanted to commit suicide or hurt herself, and to help her, people would try to show that she was loved and wanted in the world, and now it's really major.

Unfortunately, someone commented that a lot of people just thought it was fun to write on each others' arms and didn't understand the meaning of this. It's bad to write on people's arms in the first place. I was once told that every time pen ink touches your skin, you lose a very tiny part of your life (not even a full second). That could be an exaggeration, but it's probably still not good to have ink on your skin, it might seep inside you, and some chemicals could make you sick if you had too much ink, or whatever. But the idea of To Write Love on Her Arms is admirable, nevertheless.

Currently I am reading the book Little Men by Louse May Allcott. I remember having written a post about Little Women in the past. It was a lot of fun writing the blog post in a more fancy way of speaking. I wonder if I should attempt that again sometime, maybe with a different style of writing. (I won't write in caps lock or in different colors, or with chatspeak, or with overuse of punctuation, because that kind of thing just blinds people)

My mom and I are still struggling to make a decision about whether to have braces still. Well, we're probably going to be going to the orthodontist I visited for a consultation (the one who isn't my usual dentist - my usual dentist, however, is also trained in orthodontics) because there were folks who recommended him, except for my mom's friend, who said, "Oh, THAT old man?" when my mom mentioned his name (interesting reaction, is it not?). The main decision now is whether I should get these things called "expanders". The orthodontist suggested that I should have them in order to apparently make me look better, and also because he plans to have my teeth moved so that they will be leaning outward a bit - it might help the gaps in my teeth disappear, or give me an overbite, which apparently is considered good-looking. I like my teeth just the way they are, though. I feel like I won't be myself anymore if I have braces and expanders and change the shape of my jaws. I've never been particularly religious but I do think it was karma and things like that which caused us to have the kind of brains and personalities and bodies that we have, and you shouldn't mess with the larger powers at work! D:

Just the other day, I finally got Ouran High School Host Club Volume 13 from the library. I hadn't read the manga for a while because it takes time for the English translations to come to the USA, and even more time for the library to buy them. It's really annoying, as I don't like to read manga on the computer. You have to click to flip the page and plus you don't get to read the author's comments and stuff (sometimes manga-kas write something, like some personal info or questions from readers, on the side of the page or on the bottom of the page) since it's still in Japanese, the people who translate manga for online readers don't always translate the author's comments...

I'm mentioning this because I noticed something. It said near the back of the manga, where there's a drawing by the author and some notes thanking people who helped or family and things like that, it said it was signed September 2008. Do you see that?! The English version didn't come out for sale until November 2009! It took more than a year! Us folks in North America are getting everything late. ;_;

Labels: author's comments, expanders, ink, late, little men, love, orthodontist, ouran high school host club, skin, song, to write love on her arms, writing style

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