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Another Apple Watch Post #apple #applewatch #iwatch

I’m hesitant to call this a final analysis or anything.

 

In fact I’m hesitant to call this an analysis at all, as that implies there’s some solid opinions behind it.

 

Is the internet really still trying to make the Watch anything more than it already is: An unreleased product with a screen smaller than  a matchbox?  It should really stop.  Otherwise we could get more posts like this.

 

Well, whatever.  I’ll bite.  Here’s what I think:

 

I think Jony has a solid reason why the home screen icons are as small as they are.  Instead of, you know, the 6th-gen iPod Nano’s way of doing things.

Because that 6th-gen iPod nano…c’mon, it’s 2014…er…2015.  Smaller icons are all the rage…as the life expectancy increases…and people get older and their eyes get worse…

 

I shall again show you this:

IMG_0178

 

 

Jony, I’m waiting for your opinion as to why the above image even exists in your advert.

 

Other than that…I’m actually excited.  For the Watch.  Yeah!

 

Because while the icons and photos are as small as an ant’s house, I want to find out what the watch will do for people’s lives.

 

Apple has a reason.  But then Amazon had a reason with its Fire Phone.  And this is what happened.  I know that’s two different categories.  But the Watch is like an iPhone.  Because the above image proves it.  And now you can’t unsee it.  Lol.

 

Now for some meat to this post:  That new drawing-tapping communication thing I was mentioning?  It has a name, I just completely missed it while wondering what the hell that keynote was.  It’s called Digital Touch.

 

I still find it interesting, but I’m worried about what it will actually feel like.  There’s this phenomenon called Phantom Touches.  You might have heard of it mostly with people with amputated limbs, and in that case it’s called Phantom Limbs.

 

Your brain is apparently so used to having all of your limbs that when one gets cut off, the brain for some reason still tries to maintain the limb’s existence.  And that turns into a feeling of your missing limb still being there.

 

Phantom touches are similar.  Apparently, after a few days (or even a few instances) of the Watch tapping your wrist due to a notification coming in, your brain…acquires a sort of repeating beat…or something.  Anyway, the result being that you may feel a touch on your wrist, but the Watch didn’t do anything.  Yep:  Your brain created the touch sensation on your wrist because the Watch was doing it so much.  Why does this happen?  Because your brain is a sheep.  Also I don’t know.

 

Also the touch might not feel like a touch but like a spider or a fly landing on your arm.  And then your mom continues to text you and that spider is dancing on your arm.  Creepy spiders.

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone.

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Learning Japanese: Hiragana or Romaji? #japanese #japan

Yes, I love Japan.  No, I don’t want to sightsee The Epic Palace of the Kappa God or whatever, I’m just trying to learn it so that I can enjoy anime in Japanese.  That and if I ever go to Japan I won’t be caught by the 5 words that mean “you”.  Because some of those words are an insulting way of saying it.  Japanese is weird.

 

That brings me to what I want to talk about:  Should I go the hard way around and learn all the pictograms that make up Hiragana, or go the easy way first and learn how to pronounce and write the Latin alphabet version known as Romaji?

 

Here’s my problem:  Watashi no sore ga kuruma desu. (I own that car.)

 

And I can’t even begin to tell you what that would look like in Hiragana.  And I wrote that from memory.  I also studied Hiragana for a bit.

 

There seems to be confusion between guides about how to handle this.  The more serious guides seem to want to teach you Hiragana first, while the textbooks and less serious guides want to teach you Romaji first.

 

As you probably know, Hiragana is a series of strokes grouped into characters (kind of like the latin alphabet I’m using right now).  But these characters don’t stand for letters, these characters stand for sounds.  Like “ha”, “ga”, ra”, etc.

 

These pictograms don’t look like the latin alphabet at all.  In fact if you looked at Katakana (which is a different set of pictograms), you would think these characters were just random lines.

 

Now before we get into my specific issue, I’m going to draw a connection to something you will not see coming:

 

Gnommish.

Gnommish is a fictional language from the Artemis Fowl series.  It also uses pictograms, except these pictograms stand for each letter of the latin alphabet (actually, I think that the pictograms technically stand for sounds, but in the book that I read that teaches you the language, it was dumbed down).

 

I mastered that language very quickly.  And I could write fluently in it (I’ve since forgotten a lot of it).

But for Hiragana…I just can’t do it.  The only character I’ve memorized is “ro” which is probably because it looks like a stylized “3”.  If I think a bit I can remember “ya” and “ta”, mostly because it makes up the Japanese word “Yatta”, which is a general declaration of success.

 

Also, because the characters make up sounds instead of letters, there are way more characters than there are letters in the Latin alphabet.

 

Take the Latin alphabet, and double the number of characters.  That is pretty much the base sounds of Hiragana.  Now double that, and you have Hiragana.  Double that, and you have katakana as well.  Now just go nuts with the doubling, and you have Hiragana, Katakana, and the gigantic third set of pictograms.

 

I have heard that you can get by with just Hiragana.  I’ve also heard that if you don’t learn the Kanji (the general word for written Japanese) first, good luck reading anything in Japan.

 

Thing is, from what I’ve seen, there is a way more limited set of sounds.  Sounds as in “ha”, “ta”, “ga”, instead of pictograms.

 

That is mostly why I like to learn Romaji first.  Screw the massive set of pictures, at least until I master all the words.  Then I can transfer the sounds to pictures.

 

That’s my plan unless I find something better in that time.

 

And now a random Japanese lesson:

 

Watashi no sore ga kuruma desu.

Watashi = I, me

no = [Sentence particle.  Has no meaning; used to mark the object before it as owning something]

sore = That

ga = [Sentence particle.  Has no meaning; used to mark the object after it as being in the location specified before it.]

kuruma = car

desu = to be [Not a literal use of the english concept.)

 

 

Now, the 5 words that mean “you” that I stated at the beginning:

Anata = Most common word.

Anta = Used only by women.

Omae = If you are close to the person you are talking to, this is an affectionate way of saying it.  Otherwise it is slightly insulting.

Tenee = A pretty insulting way of saying it.

Kisama = A very insulting way of saying it.

 

 

I told you Japanese is weird.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I got some of that wrong…