#for my next chinese novel I want to read a modern setting because my brain is tired reading two historical books in a row | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rigelmejo · 2 years

Text

Notes today o3o)/

1. Chinese

I am 5/12 chapters through 第十二封情书 and I also recommend this as an easy-ish read, especially if you want to pick up some school related words. School related words are a weak spot for me lol because I never needed to learn 班长 is class monitor. The writing is fairly straightforward if you wanted to guess word meanings they're fairly clear from context.

Where this fic shines is its words about feelings/ideas/reasons since it's half in rhe form of introspective "love letters" Zhang zhijun never plans to send, so it's him writing how he feels and wondering if he's nervous or worried to tell his feelings, if he wants to stop the feelings and move on, if people you like become perfect in your eyes, etc. All really good conceptual words on thoughts and emotions which would help one figure out how to word their own feelings in a conversation, in a journal, or if you plan in the future to read stuff where the narrator does get self reflective.

I checked out the 200+k story 你喜不喜欢你, and although Heavenly Path ranks it as Upper Intermediate, Readibu is giving me an hsk 4 comprehension 83% and hsk 5 comprehension 93% for it, which appears to be comfortably in my Extensive Reading zone. So i may read some of that next... though 撒野 is equivalent in difficulty because of Length reasons at that point, and similarly easy language for me. 你喜不喜欢你 supposedly has ghosts though... and I love me a modern supernatural story. See: my favorite pingxie fics ToT 寒舍 and 半夜寒衣. Which, I would read those 2 pingxie fics next but. Readibu stats put them as harder (hsk 4 comprehension 77%). So while I've read them before and know a lot of THEIR specific words, on the other hand I'm reading "easier" stuff right now just to get a lot of reading in. More reading practice = more improvement, so I'm not exactly dying to slow down my progress lol.

On the other hand though? Reading stuff with more unknown words/stuff does increase opportunities to learn things I have a weak spot in. For example I'm reading this school focused thing, which is definitely filling in my high school/college vocabulary gaps. Reading a business setting with economics discussed would fill in gaps I definitely have, etc. Like... I will ultimately NEED to read stuff I'm unfamiliar with, to become familiar with it. So it's not a bad idea to push myself into Unknown vocabulary territory every so often.

Yes, I'm still trying to find out if that 9000 pages in your target language makes u able to read better ToT. One day ill get to prove that claim true or false. One day ToT

I am still reading dmbj 1. But it's slower going cause those chapters take me 20-30 minutes a piece. And of course... once I finish I've got a LOT more fucking dmbj novels ToT. Which... I might do 云村笔记 next, since it's got useful words and it's mostly a slice of life novel so I don't need to keep reading another 30 chapters of our dudes scared in a tomb! (I tell you what though: if you want to get comfortable with tomb genre words read dmbj... I feel like after this first novel, the majority of new unknown words will be sand/water setting related or names, because the vast majority of other words in dmbj are scary/reaction/tomb/old stuff antique/bugs/tomb gear which the first book is covering and getting one familiar with).

2. Japanese

I started Yakuza Like a Dragon yesterday, with Ichibian!

And like every single fucking time I start a Japanese game, my brain goes into overdrive to remind me of what's familiar but I fucking forgot ToT, what I don't know yet and desperately try to guess, what I remember but needs to Snap Back into place again, and how much I just wanna Get Better At Japanese so the task of me enjoying comparing the japanese to the English translation gets easier. (Don't ask why I enjoy so Much comparing japanese original with translations, but wow do i, I'm absolutely overwhelmed with doing it automatically and loving it a lot whenever I stumble into japanese again ToT).

The thing is. Every time I remember jjapanese, the Chinese word for things usually zooms right out of my active vocabulary and gets replaced with the japanese. This spring I played through several yakuza games and my japanese recognition and new learned stuff increased (I got to the point I kept forgetting how to converse in chinese and the japanese sentences were all that were fucking coming to me... 时间shijian was GONE and replaced with 時間 jikan ToT and nanren was replaced with otoko it was a mess, I truly couldn't remember something as basic as nanren ToT). But it just shoved my active chinese vocabulary right outta my brain - which to be fair, I was doing no chinese studying in the spring to KEEP it active.

Meanwhile, this past week I read 5 chinese stories and I'm going on 2 more. So my chinese active vocabulary I forgot this spring came right back, and now I can remember how to chat in chinese (which is good for particular personal life reasons at the moment) but that also means I blanked out on all my old japanese active vocab. Nanren replaced otoko, haizi replaced Kodomo, jiehun replaced whatever the fuck wedding was in japanese but I forgot. (I do notice my mental active vocab seems to replace the hanzi/Kanji cognates the worst, I think cause my brain just hates multiple pronunciations for a given character so it doesn't like conceptualizing multiple... which is part of why hanzi clicked so easy for me with their usually only 1-2 pronunciations, versus Kanji which I STILl fucking struggle to pronounce with their usual several pronunciations). So yeah, my chinese is great again rn... but just playing a game with japanese audio, my brain goes into overdrive trying to remember again lol.

I find it so funny. I find it so funny things can be so easy yet so hard. That u can learn more and be eons past where you used to be in progress, and then realize how much you still don't understand and must learn. Then you learn more, get aware of New things you never realized you didn't know, and the process repeats. In japanese I was OVER THE MOON last year when I realized I could read manga finally, without a dictionary! Then I was over the moon this spring, listening to Final Fantasys X audio and just able to actually PLACE each scene I heard, follow some of the dialogue meaning. Now it's fall, I've "progressed" and I pick up Guardians japanese translated novel... I slog through the intro character page, and realize just how brutally few Kanji words I know how to pronounce, how much I'm leaning on chinese hanzi knowledge to "guess" what I'm reading. I start playing some yakuza, and realize how HYPE I was in spring to understand "I'm going to get Oden, yeah he'll kill you, ikuzou etc" when now I hear a solid 4 words I don't know and get So antsy i can't grasp that part lol! That I realize now I can follow that daily life stuff so it doesn't blow my mind to understand anymore, it's not progress that blows my mind anymore to just manage to reach (though it used to), now I've moved on and my brain insists its Frustrating to not grasp new particular details.

It's just. So funny how it's both SO motivating to be on the beginning part when you feel you made a breakthrough and comprehend more! Then it's almost demotivating to realize the new things you Still Don't grasp and desperately want to (even though objectively it's a good thing - you're making more progress if this is happening). Funny what the brain gets happy versus frustrated over.

Which is happening with me for chinese too right now. At lightning speed! At the beginning of this month my brain was DELIGHTED I could read a novel in 2 days and know almost every word! OVER THE MOON I could grasp so much, when I've read stories fully before and Never Comprehended them with such detail as this week. And now, toward the end of this week? My brain is acting frustrated if I try to read and skip or guess an unknown word! Just 1-2 unknown words feel frustrating! When I know good and well I've seen 10-20+ unknown words a chapter in rhe past, ans EASILY read, grasped main idea, and enjoyed. I know that literally earlier this week, I read a story extensively and didn't know maybe 2-5 words a chapter, and it didn't bother me at all! But now it's the end of the week, and my brains going "Oh this feels so hard to read! It has a handful of vague words (that I could definitely guess if I put the effort into and aren't hard to quickly look up)". It makes me wanna force myself to slog through something MUCH harder, if only to remind myself it's not actually a big deal that should make me STUMBLE AND STOP if I don't remember 情致 and 感情s difference absolutely perfectly in a sentence. Or if i dont remember specifically how touch 触碰 and 触摸 differ. Lol its not a big enough deal to actually impede understanding of main idea, and yet now that it's the end of the week these "vague confusions" and driving me up a wall! Lol if I went and read 默读 or 杀破浪 without a dictionary I would quickly realize how much it doesnt fucking matter if I know the specific nuance, and I'd just be grateful to see words I recognize to help me guess all the words I DONT.

Anyway it's. Funny and ridiculous to see the process. How a brain doing something Super Hard acts like it's amazing to successfully understand, but a brain doing something reasonably easy is like "oh but I'm not doing it perfectly so I wanr to give up!"

I also watched 2008 ep 1 of Legend of the Condor Heroes last night in chinese only and uh. Nothing like some huge dialogue chunks of wuxia 4 hanzi wordings to remind me I don't know shit, I can follow a much more confusing story line to me than I think I can ToT. I followed it fine, though yeah it was a bit of a struggle. It reminded me I followed Word of Honor in chinese, and to be so Grateful word of honor was actually mostly fairly modern straightforward dialogue except for a few things Wen Kexing, Prince Jin, and the big sect leader said. Versus Legend of the Condor Heroes 2008 where the first maybe 20 minutes is all several fighters saying lots of 4 hanzi line phrases with just a little relief of action and direct sentences like Tie and Guo fighting and dying. Then finally it flashes 16 years forward and I was so relieved it was regular spoken kinds of everyday stuff again like shoot the black bird/save the white bird/my daughter X/etc is coming.

Anyway back to japanese! I yet again wanna go thru my japanese old audio glossika files. So I can know more of the fucking words I'm hearing in yakuza. Though, knowing me, the words I'm gonna pick up wouldn't even be in glossika. Like I doubt kill is in that course ToT, but I sure had to learn it to follow a lot of yakuza lines.

#rant #progress

3 notes · View notes

incarnateirony · 4 years

Note

Hey dude! Do you have any recommendations for LGBTQ+ movies in the romance genre that have like a happy ending. I really don't care how old they are. I'm feeling the Gay™ hence I need the Gay™. You feel me?

HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII NONNIE

First sorry for taking so long, not only did I have to timeline this :) but :) my computer :) froze :) after writing like :) 2 pages :) and I had to do it again :)

So anyway let it be said, the LGBT dialogue is one of osmosis and shared growth and awareness. Some of these films will be very poorly dated, but as you (thankfully) mentioned that them being old wasn’t a *problem*, expect a lot of old stuff. Because one of the most important things to have under your belt when talking about the LGBT media representation battle is the actual journey from A to B – be that incrementalization, subtextual inclusion, text-breeching features, outright evocative and groundbreaking films at the time (which is what MOST of this list will be) and an improvement in our dialogue; let us never forget that while tr*nss*xual is considered a slur and transgender is proper, tr*nss*xual was at one point the politically correct way to speak it – things like that breach in our growing understanding of the spectrum of human sexuality.

I *WILL* disclaimer these aren’t all romance, so if you explicitly want romance, google them and take a look if it sounds to appeal, but I’m taking this as a general cinema history plug considering what a confused mess fandom conversation about LGBT history in film or modern text as applicable, accepted or not.

Wonder Bar (1936) (I wouldn’t really call this queer cinema, but if you have the time to watch it too, I think it was the first explicit mention of homosexual engagement even if it was fleetingly brief. You might even call it Last Call style. A blink and you’ll miss it plug that was still decades ahead of its time)

Sylvia Scarlet (1936) (Again, I wouldn’t call this queer cinema, but a lot of the community takes it as the first potential trans representation on TV due to the lead literally swapping gender presentation, even if the presentation is… not what we would modernly call representation IMO)

Un Chant d'Amour (1950) (Worth it for the sheer fact that it pissed off fundies so bad they took it all the way to the US supreme court to get it declared obscene.)

The Children’s Hour (1961) (also known as the 1961 lesson to “don’t be a gossipy, outting bitch”)

Victim (1961) (The first english film to use the word “homosexual” and to focus explicitly on gay sexuality. People might look on it disdainfully from modern lenses, but it really helped progress british understanding of homosexuality)

Scorpio Rising (1964) (Lmao this one deadass got taken to court when it pissed people off and California had to rule that it didn’t count as obscene bc it had social value, worth it for the history if nothing else)

Theorem (1968) (Because who doesn’t wanna watch a 60s flick about a bisexual angel, modern issues and associations be damned)

The Killing of Sister George (1968) (by the makers of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane)

Midnight Cowboy (1969) (…have I had sassy contagonists in RP make a Dean joke off of this more than once, maybe)

Fellini-Satyricon (1969) (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA THIS)

The Boys in the Band (1970) (This… this… this made a lot of fuss. Just remember leather)

Pink Narcissus (1971) (a labor of love shot on someone’s personal camera)

Death in Venice (1971) (This is basically a T&S prequel but whatever, based on a much older book)

Cabaret (1972)

Pink Flamingos (1972) (SHIT’S WILD)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) (The title doesn’t lie, be warned)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) [god I hope you’ve at least seen this]

Fox and His Friends (1975) (some really hard lessons that are still viable today, that just because someone acknowledges your sexuality doesn’t mean they give a shit about you as a person, and that some will even abuse the knowledge for gain)

The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983) (REALLY interesting history look it up, it’s sort of one of those “drawn from own experience” story short sets)

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) (Documentary)

Desert Hearts (1985) (Pretty much the first film to put lesbianism into a good light as a true focus based on a novel from the sixties)

Parting Glances (1986) (the only film its creator got out before his death from the aids epidemic)

Law of Desire (1987) (two men and a trans woman in a love triangle, kinda ahead of its time)

Maurice (1987) (This one’s really interesting, cuz it was based on a book made about 15 years before it, but the book itself had been written half a century earlier and wasn’t published until after the guy died, he just thought it’d never get published Cuz Gay, so basically it’s based on a story written in like, the 20s finally getting screen time. It has a bittersweet but positive-leaning-ish ending without disregarding the cost that can come with it and even addresses class issues at the same time 100% DO RECOMMEND)

Tongues Untied (1989) (a documentary to give voices to LGBT black men)

Longtime Companion (1990) (This one’s title alone is history, based on a NYT phrasing for how they talked about people’s partners dying, eg longtime companion, during the AIDS epidemic)

Paris Is Burning (1990) (Drag culture and related sexual and gender identity exploration as it intersected with class issues and other privileges explored in a documentary)

The Crying Game (1992)( I should correct this that I guess it’s more, 1992 considered, “SURPRISE, DIL HAS A DILL!” – I guess I really didn’t do that summary justice by modern language and dialogue as much as how people in the 90s were talking about that and that’s a my bad. LIKE. SEE, EVEN I CAN FUCK UP MY LANGUAGE I’M SORRY CAN I BLAME THE STRAIGHTS T_T) #90skidproblems – I guess I should call it a trans film. And this alone tells me I should go watch it again to recode it in my brain modernly rather than like circa de la 2000 understanding.

The Bird Cage (1996) (So you mix drag culture, otherwise heterosexually connected lovebirds, and then realize the girl comes from an alt-rightish house and the guy comes from a Two Dads Home and does cabaret, how to deal with the issues OF this conflict when it’s between you and your happiness, even if the fight isn’t even your own as much as it is that of the person you love. The answer is PROBABLY NOT to dress in drag and pretend to be straight, but what are you going to do? – while played for laughs we’d consider modernly crude, the fact that they even dared to approach this narrative was pretty loud)

The Celluloid Closet (1996) (Ever heard of the Vito Russo test for LGBT representation? This is based on a book by Vito Russo.)

Happy Together (1997) (Ain’t this shit an ironic name; a mutual narrative, via chinese flick, of hong kong ceding to china and an irrevocably tangled MLM pairing as a giant mirrored metaphor)

Boys Don’t Cry (1999) (one of the most groundbreaking films about trans identity at the time)

Stranger Inside (2001) (As easy as it is to recoil to the idea of “black gays in jail”, the film makers actually went and consulted prisoners and put a great deal of focus into intersectional african american issues that really weren’t around even in straight films at the time)

Transamerica (2005) (While it made a bit of a fuss for not casting an actual trans actor, it was one of the first times a big budget studio really tried to tackle it which really pushed us forward)

Call Me by Your Name (2017) (since I’ve apparently leaned really heavy old cinema throw in a modern one lmaooooo)

Also honorable The Kids Are All Right (2010) mention for the sake of the fucking title alone.

And to any incarnation of “On the Road” by Kerouac, which

Was originally a book

Released a sanitized de-gayed edition because of the times

Later released the full homo manuscript

had a few film adaptations

Was one of Kripke’s founding inspirations for Supernatural once he left behind “Some reporter guy chases stories” and took the formula of Sal and Dean (and tbh later, Carlo) in a beat generation vibe gone modern as we know it today.

Reading both versions of this can actually help some folks currently understand that when you get confused over some shit (WHY IS CARLO SO UPSET? WHY IS HE ACTING LIKE AN UPSET GIRLFRIEND??? WHY IS HE SO JEALOUS AND SAD WHEN DEAN IS AROUND GIRLS???? WE JUST DONT KNOWWWWWWWWWWWWW) it’s because some big money asshat bleached the content, and sometimes, it takes a while for the full script to come out and again, surprise, it’s been GAY, they just didn’t want to OFFEND anybody. *jazz hands*

Now if you wanna go WAY WAY BACK, during 191X years, a bunch of gender role flicks came out like Charley’s Aunt, Mabel’s Blunder and the Florida Enchantment.

Also where is @thecoffeebrain-blog to yell about the necessity of watching Oz, for the next few hours? But no, seriously, just look into the entire LGBT *HISTORY* of Oz.

Beyond that though I’m gonna stop here cuz hi that’s a lot. I really don’t know how much counts as “happy ending” but if I had to give an LGBT cinema rec list, that’s it as a sum. I don’t really have like, a big portfolio of UWU HAPPY ENDING GAYS because 1. there aren’t a lot of those but 2. to me, it’s not about the ending, it’s about the journey. Be that in flick or through culture and history itself.

If you want more happy ending stuff, you definitely have to look at 2010+, but it’s not like we’re in a rich and fertile landscape yet so honestly just googling that would probably serve you better since I don’t explicitly explore romance genre or happy endings to really have a collection. LGBT life is hard and film often reflects that if we’re making genuine statements about it and really representing it, and we’re just now getting to a point of reliably having the chance at a happy ending. That or maybe someone can add like “Explicit happy endings” lists after this that has more experience in that subgenre.

Also, I can’t emphasize ENOUGH to remember what was progressive then is not what is progressive now, and frankly, what some people think is progressive now they’ll probably look back on what they said and feel really fuckin’ embarrassed. See: “It’s not text because by alt right homophobic dialogue, M/M sex isn’t gay if you do the secret handshake” MGTOW kinda crazy ass dialogue or parallel narratives they inspire that encourage self-closeting and denial based on the pure idea that being gay makes you somehow lesser, so It’s Not That. Like. I am. 99% sure. At least half of the people talking in this fandom. Are going to regret that the internet is forever. And maybe hope hosting servers end in the inevitable nuclear war that will annihilate this planet.

Also, edit: Speaking of mistaken dialogues and words aging poorly, I’d like to apologize from the poor description I rendered “The Crying Game” with, but that really goes to show how deep-seated the issue is we can so casually fuck up identifying a trans narrative as SURPRISE DICK IS GAY when we were all absorbing the content like 20+ years ago and HOW HARD it can be to de-code yourself from that kind of programming because here I am, writing a giant assed rep post and fucking it up because my brain hadn’t soaked that movie since Y2K. Guess what, time for me to go watch the Crying Game again.

#lgbtqia #representation #media #cinema history

97 notes · View notes