Karaoke to ka

On Monday I went to karaoke. I sang a few Japanese songs. Now, usually I can only sing Japanese songs if I have properly memorised them beforehand. But this time, I was able to sing several songs that I know only fairly well. I haven't memorised them; I can't sing them without reading the words. But I was able to read the Japanese characters on-screen, fast enough to sing. I made quite a few mistakes - sometimes I couldn't get the right character quite quickly enough. But I could *mostly* do it!

I remember when I first sang Japanese songs in karaoke; I could just read the first couple of characters on the screen before the sentence was gone, and a new one appeared. There was absolutely no way I could have sung even a slow song just by reading it.

I am still a slow reader, but much improved, so I am happy. ^_^

One reason for this is that now my vocabulary has improved, I can often see the first couple of characters and 'predict' the rest of the word or phrase. Or if I'm reading a whole sentence, I can make sense of the sentence, and thus my brain will more quickly interpret the characters.

This is one reason my katakana has improved only partially. I can fairly quickly read common katakana words - system, campaign, campus, cappuccino, sawa (^_^) - I see these words on lots of signs and ads. But katakana can also represent names, company names, foreign words, etc, in which case I am sadly slow at mentally translating each syllable. Another problem is that you rarely see whole passages of text written in katakana - just words here and there. It's not like you can read a whole passage and get the gist of it. All the words are unconnected...

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One of the nice things about having high-speed Internet constantly on tap here in my house is that any time I encounter a word or reference I don't understand, I can look it up on the 'net. There are a lot of pop culture terms and references which I have heard before but never really understood.

Two recent examples - read some article where they described this guy as looking 'like Ted Bundy'. I'd heard this reference before and always thought he was the hapless goof from 'Married with Children'. Then I realised, hang on, that's AL Bundy; and I looked up Ted and he was a serial killer!

Another example, today, was a reference to Rip Van Winkle. I know he had some connection to sleeping, from Gershwin's 'Bidin' My Time', but finally looked him up and found out who he was.