My interview questions...

[shadowspar]

...as composed by caffeinatedelf. (meme alert)

1. How long have you been going to Penguicon and any other cons? If you've been to others, what are/were they and when did you go?

Penguicon 1.0 was my first (and only other) con; I was looking for work, and thought it was going to be something more in the vein of a "professional" linux con -- you know, networking opportunities, job stuff and all that. Boy, was I wrong. I didn't find a job, but I did find something better. =)

2. What will your next tshirt have (or say) on it?

I think that this one looks a little bare since it only has a 1.5" square image in the top right corner. Next time I think I'm going to put four or five of my favourite Wesnoth icons in a horizontal line across the front at chest level, and "wesnoth.org" across the back.

3. Did you like the chocolate chupaqueso as much as I did? Explain.

No, but I think anybody would have been hard-pressed to like it as much as you. =) I actually found it to be a bit sickly after a bit. The fact that I was trying to do something else at the same time, resulting in an overcooked chupaqueso, probably didn't help.

4. What is your favorite anime, and why? If you have several favorites, feel free to list them all.

You know, for a guy who lived in Japan, I don't really follow anime all that much -- certainly not as much as some of the otaku I've met. I liked DragonBall Z just because it was so over the top, and YuYu Hakusho (favourite character: Kurama, natch) though for some reason I never really did get the chance to watch all that much of it. Slam Dunk and Sailor Moon were really popular while I was living in Japan. Probably my favourite since I returned to North America is Cybersix -- I don't know how many folks have heard of it.

5. What is the best change in your Western thinking that you've experienced as a result of learning Japanese?

Wow. It's really hard to pin it down to just one, and sometimes they all kind of just clump together. Learning a new language isn't (truly) about learning new words for the same ideas; language is how people express thought, and concepts present in one language and absent in another really tell you a lot about two peoples' different ways of thinking. Probably the high points are:

• Change of perspective. The standard noun-verb-object sentence structure in English tends to star I as the noun a lot, which always seemed a bit self-centered to me: I'm doing this, I did that, etc. The sentences you string together in Japanese have a lot more things happening to you or around you, which (to my admittedly silly way of thinking) makes for a much more well-rounded worldview.
  By way of example: in English, understand is a transitive verb -- we understand a book; it's something we do that requires active effort. The nearest Japanese equivalent is wakaru (分かる), but that's best translated as "become clear": things do wakaru -- they "become clear", and if we happen to be in the vicinity at the moment, they become clear to us. It makes for an interesting change that kind of understates the effort required to penetrate a dense science text, f'rinstance.
  Another brief example: there's an interesting "passive" verb conjugation in Japanese, -rareru (-られる), that's often used when (bad) things happen to somebody. So, if you were caught in a sudden rainstorm, you wouldn't say "I got wet" or "I got rained on", you'd say "ame ni furareta" (雨に降られた) -- literally, "I was fallen upon by rain".
• Actions-as-items: you can sort of do this in English, but in Japanese the syntax for doing something for someone is the same as the syntax for giving them a physical gift. If you cleaned up someone's room for them, you would say "heya wo katazukete ageta" (部屋を片づけて上げた, which I'd literally approximate as "I gave them the cleaning of the room"); if you gave them a beer, it's "biiru wo ageta" (ビールを上げた). I just think it's neat that in this context, something intangible (an action) and something tangible (an object) are treated essentially the same -- in English, we tend to draw that distinction rather more forcibly.
  Another example that illustrates this is a polite sign that you may see in a shop window: "honjitsu wa yasumasete itadakimasu" (本日は休ませて頂きます) -- "today we receive your letting us rest", in other words, "Closed". (Or, as one of my Japanese tutorial books put it, "Gone Fishin'".)
• Subtleties and distinctions not drawn in English (and vice versa). One of the most pointed indicators of how different languages represent different ways of thinking (and not merely different words for the same concepts) is the fact that some languages draw distinctions that others don't. One basic one is the word 'is' -- it really has three senses: "exists" (as in "Fluffy thinks, therefore she is"), "is a type of", (eg, "Fluffy is a cat"), and "has the quality of", ("Fluffy is black"). English conflates the three senses into one word, 'is'. Japanese lets the difference between the last two slide (using desu (です) for both) but distinguishes the first one with a different word (two different words, actually -- iru (いる) for living things and aru (ある) for inanimate objects.)
  Perhaps more widely known is the fact that Japanese has different 'levels' of politeness, a fact that extends to pretty much all words, not just one or two special cases. If you're going out with your friends, you say ikō (行こう, "let's go") but with business associates, it's ikimashō (行きましょう -- again, "let's go" -- the same verb with a different conjugation.) There are seven different words that I know of which translate to either "give" or "receive", and they all convey distinctions in politeness and direction of giving. (For those keeping score at home, they are sashiageru (差し上げる), ageru (上げる), yaru (遣る), kudasaru (下さる), kureru (呉れる), itadaku (頂く), and morau (貰う).)
  This business of drawing subtle distinctions isn't a one-way street, of course: the English terms 'interesting' and 'fun' both get mashed together into Japanese word omoshiroi (面白い). Folks whose mother tongue is Japanese sometimes struggle with the distinction between letting someone do something and making them do something, because the Japanese verb forms are the same and the compulsion, if any, has to be inferred from the context.
• New vocab -- things that don't translate. An even more pointed illustration of the different concepts that two languages express comes from examining the words present in on and essentially absent in the other. There are probably too many to list, but a lot of day-to-day exclamations come to mind: yatta ne! (やったね), which I'd translate as anything from "you did it!" to "hooray!" to "kick ass!" depending on the situation; ganbatte! (頑張って) which sort of lies somewhere around the intersection of "try hard!", "go for it!", "keep at it!", and "good luck!", and baka (馬鹿) which pretty much ranges from "silly!" to "you dumbass!" as needed. (Interesting trivia tidbit, though: Japanese has a "word", ne(ね), that almost exactly translates into the Canadian eh. Go figure.)

There's more...I could go on and on (indeed, I think I already have.) The fact that there are no plurals. That there are only two tenses (past and non-past). That unnecessary words just get dropped, making the language the most efficient and elegant one that I know. That you write with kanji -- they're wicked cool. At first glance you despair of ever beginning to understand them, but before very long you start to pick a few up, then a few more...and before you know it you have a modest but quite useful kanji vocabulary. It seems like a very bizarre writing system (and after a fashion, it is) but because they're more complicated they're more expressive -- you can express a lot more with one or two characters. It's awesome when you realize that you can process this stuff with your very own brain.

(Anyway, those questions were pretty tame. I thought caffeinatedelf was going to throw me a couple of hardballs, like "When was the last time you wore womens' clothing?" or "What is the capital of Assyria?" =)