Digitizing My History

I’ve spent hours and hours since this morning to digitize my old photos using COOLPIX. Only half way through, I needed to charge the battery. Photos of my childhood and baseball games, but there are still so many more to go. Those taken in the US, Korea and Taiwan, and of my working days in Japan also should be processed. While the macro mode is a very useful function, I realized, with this mode, some photos become blurry even if they are originally well-focused. I believe that an image scanner will do a better job. And I recognized (once again) my father’s nice skill in photography, looking at those he had taken. After all, he was a man who was developing photos he had taken in the darkroom, though it was before I was born. In his days, cameras didn’t have an autofocus function. My Olympus OM1, which I got when I was thirteen, didn’t have it either. It was your own skill that counted.

*

I think about creating a website exclusively committed to the Hawks photos and memorabilia. As far as I know, the sites that now exist are mostly (or all?) about the post-Nomura era. I would upload the photos I’m still keeping alive. Perhaps one reason why the existing sites are about the last few years of the club is that people who created and are managing the sites are quite young. And those folks who still remember the Nomura-era seem too old even to imagine creating a website. (Hahaha! I’m too young to know the Tsuruoka-era.)

*

再読だが、今年最後の１冊。「外国語としての日本語：その教え方・学び方」（佐々木瑞枝）。

形容詞や動詞の変化は、自分も教えていて経験したことだが、それ以外にいろいろと重要な指摘がある。例えば、「継続動詞」と「瞬間動詞」。「車が走っています」（現在進行形）と「車が止まっています」の違いだ。自動詞と他動詞の差異。「お金が儲かる」と「お金を儲ける」や「コップが割れました」と「コップが割れてしまいました」の違い。

さらに日本語で使われる「漢語」について、著者は「漢語には四拍語（大学、結婚、解約、状態など）が最も多いという調査結果がある。……「高校卒業」を「高卒」と言ったり、「特別急行」と「特急」と言ったり、短縮することで、また新たな四拍語を作り出す。……漢語は四拍語にしたほうが落ちつくといった、語感に対する無意識の作用も働いているのではないだろうか。

『外人は差別用語だと聞きました。なぜ、正式に外国人と言わないのでしょう』と留学生から言われたことがある。……日本人の側に立って弁明すると、差別の意識など微塵もなく、単に四拍語だから落ちつくといった原因があるのではないだろうか」とも述べている。

*

I received an invoice from Mt. E Hospital. Why? I’d already paid directly to the doctor…