Biete Seele Such Gott!

The Friendly Atheist has got his book translated in to German.

The English title is "I Sold My Soul on Ebay". The German is "Biete Seele Such Gott!"
From the comments:

It is an odd title indeed. It’s two imperatives: “Offer (your) soul; Seek God!”

“What an atheist experienced in Christian Communities.”

Is that really what you want to have as the initial impression for people who pick up this book in the store?

The conversation is rather interesting. I don't know a lick of German, unfortunately.

tiếng Việt

I have decided to start learning Vietnamese.

This is mainly for pragmatic reasons. My study of Thai was precipitated by a visit to Thailand. I continued studying basically for the hell of it- I enjoyed it. But Vermont is a long ways from Thailand, and I don't currently have the means to return there. Basically, my Thai is useless for the time being. After a long period of consideration, I've decided to take a stab at Vietnamese. I like Vermont, and Vietnamese is spoken in my area by a considerable minority. It's simply more practical in the short term than Thai. If I have to "force" myself to study a 2nd language, it is the obvious choice. There will be more opportunity in learning it and more opportunity for using it. Also, it's geographically close to Thai, and shares many traits, like being tonal and analytic/isolating. I should have some familiarity with most of the grammatical concepts, although they are used differently.

I'm going to try and approach Vietnamese differently from Thai. Perhaps I can learn from my mistakes? I'm going to try and emphasize the spoken language. With Thai, my reading far outstrips my listening. I don't want to repeat this imbalance. I also will look in to formal instruction, and adopt a more structured (and more social) study regimen.

I plan to continue my Thai study as a serious hobby (this blog will still be titled ฝรั่งงง) but I'm going to attempt, for the time being, to put the majority of my effort into tiếng Việt.

In search of 一番

I am rather ashamed to admit I bought a shirt at a thrift store which had a "Chinese character" blazed across the front. I first felt guilty for not knowing the meaning of the character, but then I became worried it was just fake. How does one go about looking up Chinese characters? Or could it be Kanji? I have very little knowledge of either Chinese or Japanese. I only know the basics of the structure in Chinese- each character is (usually? always?) one morpheme and one syllable. I also know that characters are broken down in to "radicals" for collation purposes.

Searching with the radical 由 plus 5-7 strokes, I found 番. The definition given is "take turns, repeat." A Kanji search gives ばん as the Hiragana form. It means "many". But wait- this character, 番, isn't correct- my shirt has a horizontal line above it.

Breakthrough! The character for "one" is a horizontal line (in both Chinese and Japanese, apparently.) If stacked vertically, 一番 is my character. In Japanese, it means "first, top, best", written in Hiragana as いちばん and pronounced "ichiban". The same two characters don't seem to form a word or phrase in Chinese. (Perhaps it just means "one turn"- but that's a wild guess.)

So in conclusion, my shirt apparently says "Number One" in Japanese on it. Also: logographic writing systems are scary, but apparently not impossible to figure out.

For the record, "first" in Thai is ที่หนื่ง or แรก.

ภาษาดางๆ

I find these mystery language quizzes very amusing.
Reminds me of House.

Translations of "My Hovercraft is full of eels."

The Thai version is:
โฮเวอร์คราฟท์ของผมเต็มไปด้วยปลาไหล
It uses the masculine pronoun ผม, a female discussing her hovercraft infestation would say:
โฮเวอร์คราฟท์ของฉันเต็มไปด้วยปลาไหล

I assume that you could use เรา to be non-gender-specific. เรา can represent both 1st and 2nd person, singular and plural. I don't really know which way it would be interpreted in a hypothetical sentence with no context.

Also I have to note that the transliteration given for ไหล is "lhai". This is an over-literal transliteration. The ห [h] is silent; It only lends the syllable its inherent rising tone. Which is normally transliterated with a diacritic. (This youtube video has a great explanation of ห.)

This is why I generally avoid transliteration. I know I should use it on this site, to make it more accessible. But it's simply much easier for me to use อักษรไทย.