The heading explains it all. I have no particular preferences besides length (10 lines or more). I just need some things to recite when I can't do SRS or listen to Japanese.

It'd be cool if someone were to scan some HS text book on poetry with passages explaining meanings of sentences etc. I'd love to get my hands on something like that.

Poetry eh, if Japanese poetry is similar to English poetry as in it almost doesn't make sense grammatically in its own poetic sort of way. Then I personally wouldn't want to learn poetry at my current level, maybe when I get to a better level in Japanese It'd be cool.

I'm interested in what others may have to offer though^^, thanks for the idea.

You might want to check out http://japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/. Many of the poems are in audio. Unfortunately, the words are graphic files, but you can at least see them. This site features modern poetry. I'd love a site with traditional Japanese poetry plus audio. Good idea.

I don't think you really want audio. Properly recited traditional Japanese poetry sounds awful - like a cat in a blender.

linda,
this looks very good. Thanks a ton!

liosama,
there's really no such thing such as grammar. It's just an attempt to make sense of an ever-changing language. Supposing said I this, understand would not you? I mean, it's messed up but you probably have some clue of what just went on right there. Most poetry is more sophisticated than that but it's certainly relatively consistent. Poetry is basically broken up phrases. "Grammatically", those those poetic phrases for the most part are still correct. So, I would say don't prohibit yourself from something right away. If it sounds fun, engage it. Japanese is learned by plain ol' hard work. Everything that needs to be learned will be learned. Believe me, I learned this the hard way.

I mean take a look at this very simple poem.
http://japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/...d=7849&x=1

I'm not sure what level you're on but this should be right in any beginner's alley. If recited, over time, could help solidify a lot of beginner sentence structures.

jarvik,
How about modern stuff? I'm look for stuff without too many antiquated words.

fairykarma Wrote:there's really no such thing such as grammar. It's just an attempt to make sense of an ever-changing language.

Nor is there such thing as language, culture, or macroscopic matter.

To put it another way, if speak like Yoda you do, yet Jedi Master be you not, taken seriously will you be?

~J

Quote:Nor is there such thing as language, culture, or macroscopic matter.

Don't strawman me.

What I said was that grammar is an inadequate attempt to structure language. It's not inherent within a language but rather an attempt by people understand the structure of a language. Language came first. I don't think people in the early Neolithic periods were busy thinking about grammar. The language just evolved haphazardly with the cultural environment. There are plenty of irregularities within any specific language that you would never find in a grammar book. I was being silly when I pointed out Yoda example. But the fact that I can mold language to my own likings shows that there is no actual structure, just preferences of how people want to speak. Try speaking English with someone fluent in ebonics or some other nonstandard dialect and see what I mean.

I mean. Would you bother speaking English the way it spoken in the Middle Ages and except to be taken seriously? Yet, some serious literature came out of those times.

fairykarma Wrote:

Quote:Nor is there such thing as language, culture, or macroscopic matter.

Don't strawman me.

What I said was that grammar is an inadequate attempt to structure language. It's not inherent within a language but rather an attempt by people understand the structure of a language.

I'm really not seeing how my examples are straw men relative to what you're actually saying. "Solids" are a woefully inadequate way to structure matter, even that usually referred to as solid—quantum tunneling alone shows that. It's not inherent within physics but rather an attempt by people to understand the structure of physics.

You sure you just haven't thought through the logical consequences of your argument?

~J

Here's one from UPenn with audio files. Factorial is a trilingual magazine of poetry in English, French, and Japanese.

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Factorial.html

Number 3 is particularly good.

I'm about to make a post about another poet who uses Kanji in interesting ways.

fairykarma Wrote:liosama,
there's really no such thing such as grammar. It's just an attempt to make sense of an ever-changing language. Supposing said I this, understand would not you? I mean, it's messed up but you probably have some clue of what just went on right there.

No ajatt bible bashing please. I won't respond to this.

fairykarma Wrote:I mean take a look at this very simple poem.
http://japan.poetryinternationalweb.org/...d=7849&x=1
I'm not sure what level you're on but this should be right in any beginner's alley. If recited, over time, could help solidify a lot of beginner sentence structures.

Okay see, perfect example. This seems simple at first, but a quick google

This film shows the Japanese poet Ito Hiromi reading her poem "The Maltreatment of Meaning" at Western Michigan University on October 3, 2008. The translation is by Jeffrey Angles and will appear in a collection of translations of Ito's writing forthcoming from Action Books in 2009.

This poem draws inspiration from American artist Bruce Nauman's 1985 video installation "Good Boy, Bad Boy" in which two video monitors are placed opposite one another, each showing a sixty minute-long video loop. In them, two actors recite alternating phrases, such as "good boy" and "bad boy," with an increasing degree of emotion. Ito's poem, written at a time when she was traveling back and forth between the different linguistic worlds of the United States and Japan, shows her interest in (and resistance to) the signifying process by which people learn language and make meaning. In fact, the poem's structure is not unlike the grammatical drills that language learners use to master new patterns, yet by the end of the poem, the neat grammatical patterns have broken down.

In the last few stanza's I have absolutely no idea what that crap even means. That being said, I don't find this poem enticing at all. The only interesting part is the concept of language learning embedded here and whatever else it was that the writer tried to express.

And ice hit the nail on the head.

Poetry has its own set of rules in that it doesn't really have any rules. One can even say that a writer sets his own rules. Poetry is something that requires a contextual understanding; of the poet, the time the poem was written in, the reason it was written, the contemporary attitudes of language at the time etc. I can't just read a poem and expect to 'get it', I'm not that smart. I need 10 page thick explanations detailing every stanza and what it means.

I do like poetry, and the things I took from poetry from my high school days were probably the nice metaphors, and what have you.

To Jarv:
I actually like the way Japanese poetry is recited it sounds awesome and it only makes sense to listen to it in that fashion. I love the way def poetry/prose is spoken, and the way classical Arabic poetry is too. Just like how most of us here hate listening to dubbed drama/anime I have to listen to poetry in its original form. I love listening to Buddhist and Shinto prayers, they sound awesome.


And thanks for the link by the way, I'm sure i'll find something I like here, thank you coverup too.

Quote:No ajatt bible bashing please. I won't respond to this.

Lol. AJATT? The ideas he presents are not exactly new. My ideas on the issue stem from Kojin Karatani. Grammar was developed as a way to studying old, classical languages. I'm not denying the lack of structure in language. Languages does have what I would call, regularities, and grammar as a discipline does attempt to describe some of those regularities. But knowing the grammar does not equate to knowing the language.



As for poetry. It's hit or miss. I mean they come out with a new literary theory every few decades or so. I'm guessing we're currently living through the end of the post-modernist phase and the beginning of the next one. I'm learning Spanish myself through Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth. It's very accessible. Modernist poetry on the other hand is a whole other monster. Even most people fluent in the language don't study that trash. Not that I'm saying that's it's trash, of course. I'm supposed to respect what I don't understand apparently. So I would say it's a matter of taste.

I don't think the medium is the problem. If you spent time with a poor English speaker and a rich English speaker, you would certainly learn English, even though both people have their own set of rules for speaking the language. Just, your vocabularies and speaking mannerisms would be different. Methinks it's the same with poetry. Just depends on the poet and their accessibility.

If everyone wrote like Hemingway or Beckett, I'd know 500 languages by now. Haha.

fairykarma Wrote:Try speaking English with someone fluent in ebonics or some other nonstandard dialect and see what I mean.

I mean. Would you bother speaking English the way it spoken in the Middle Ages and except to be taken seriously? Yet, some serious literature came out of those times.

But ebonics, nonstandard dialects, and Middle Ages English all have structure. Things like parts of speech and sentence structure are in our brains; sometimes the methods used to describe them are incomplete or wrong, but that doesn't mean the whole thing is useless.

What Karatani may be getting at (I'm not sure) is that much of the grammatical apparatus used by non-linguists is inherited from old study on Greek and Latin, and doesn't always work to describe modern languages, even ones descended from Latin. I do think this is particularly unfortunate when dealing with Japanese, since most grammar guides to Japanese just use English (i.e. originally Latin) word classes and terms and try to shoehorn Japanese grammar into it.

Some people do find playing with language barriers and disentegration of meaning to be quite enticing... even sexy. Definitely a matter of taste, but sometimes taste can be very, very tasty.