TODO [japanese.pdf]
I probaby have ADHD or something like that. I have several examples of projects where I was able to create a thing through months or even years, considering that I am easily distracted in usual life.
In my twenties I was very inspired with Japanese language and looked for a way to learn it in a practical way. It was almost impossible at the time, there was a lack of services to meet with native speakers at the time, no Duolingo, may be Rosetta Stone, and only manga / anime with subtitles, but in this case subtitles didn’t really help because they’re written in hieroglyphs.
We with my friend shared this passion and at some point I noticed that he has a book with a quite friendly and detailed Japanese grammar reference in Russian, with examples in Japanese. However, all these examples were written only in romaji which is latin-encoded japanese sounds, and may be it’s for the best and the opposite of the subtitles situation. Of course I borrowed this book. But I wanted to have both romaji and hieroglyphs in the examples, so I decided to fill them in myself.
I was using Windows at the time, and was quite familiar with Microsoft Word in terms of 3D letters with effects and using Comic Sans. Besides that I knew what Unicode tables are, since I already was a bit of programmer. And I loved typography already (not those 3D letters, at least unless they are the desired feature). So I took Microsoft Word and these Japanese Reference and typed in by hand all of 100+ sections one by one, with romaji, it took me a month or two or three. There was almost no technology to make this work automatically, at least I wasn’t aware of it or was just obsessed with typing. Because why not. The reference was pretty well organized so those sections were mostly short but informative. I have added some markup.
Then, I started to “translate” romaji to hieroglyphs and the only way to do it was to look up for every new word to be written in hieroglyphs in several paper dictionaries (to be sure it is the right one, at least when in doubt), then for every new symbol I had to look it up in the Unicode table. I already knew the radical/stroke-count system (this is the way they are ordered in the table), so it was a bit easier to search them, yet it took time. I can’t guarantee I was always right back then. Still I had fun!
TODO Unicode table Picture
In the end, I added all the relevant information, …, in the document and now it was approx. 300 pages.
TODO Pages examples as pictures