There was a man I knew once. He was old, and he had this something about him that was just not right. Maybe it was that he had one ear bigger than the other, or that he didn't pronounce his 'd's. Whatever it was it was clear to all who saw him that there was something wrong. He never told me his name; I do not think he knew his own name. Sometimes his name was Dante, and other times he called himself Li Nanshin. It was rare that he used the same name twice. He was a foreigner who had come to our village to study. I always assumed he was from the capital or the backwoods of the country. After all these years I still remember him as the one who taught me how to read. This was many years ago, during the reign of Raikage Shinbatsu and several years before the return of the immortal Raikage Kagetsu.
I myself was a twerp. I could talk and walk, but I hadn't been taught the three R's (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) yet. I come from a noble family, but not a very rich one. We aren't in line to inherit a Daimyoship, or any land of worth. Our holdings amount to a townhouse in the Seki District, and a few silver coins in our bank account. I had not yet enrolled at the shinobi academy either. What my father did then was hire this odd old man as my tutor to teach me the basics of knowledge.
I learned arithmetic fairly quickly. The old man was good in teaching that two plus two equaled four. He told me that some of his friends insisted that the answer was five, but that I should ignore such people and remind them that the real answer was four. Anyone who said otherwise was a lily livered sandworm. I have no idea what a sandworm is, but I assume it must have been something ugly since the old man complained about them all the time.
My acquirement of reading and writing was harder fought. I mastered the common alphabet easily, but when it came to vulgar kumo I did poorly. At first the old man would make me write lines. For example on one day he would force me to write Η σοκολάτα είναι καλύτερη από τσιχλόφουσκα a hundred times, and on the next I would have to write Μου λείπει η γυναίκα μου. The sentences were always varied, to say the least. The purpose of this practice wasn't so much to teach me the meaning of the words, but to get me to be able to legibly write the script. At that point I didn't think that vulgar kumo and common were different languages. I assumed that they were simply using different scripts, similar to the difference between cursive and typed letters.
It was not till after I could readily write the letters that he began to teach me the syntax of the language. First he taught me nouns and verbs. Every week I had to make a presentation where I played out a conversation for him in vulgar kumo using the few words I knew. I still remember my first exam: he had me go to the market and buy groceries using only vulgar kumo. I got a C since I ended up buying custard instead of peanut butter. It wasn't all bad though. Jelly and Custard sandwiches actually taste okay after you get used to it.
Adverbs, and other descriptive language would not be included in the curriculum for almost a year after my first lessons had started. By then I had a large enough vocabulary that we could conduct our lessons completely in the language without resorting to common. It was several months after that when he began to teach me what he referred to creole kumo. He said that the vulgar kumo suffered in that it did not have words for modern things, which is why he had began to coin new words to describe them. So, for example, shinobi had no word in vulgar. Instead he proposed σκιά πρόσωπο, shadow person, when referring to shinobi. σκιά βασιλιάς, shadow king, meant Kage, and so forth.
My final lessons focused on what he described as practical sayings. In order words, he taught me how to curse in vulgar kumo. It is of course unsocial to repeat curses in polite company, so I shan't say anything further on that matter.
After a successful exam where I wrote a full essay in vulgar kumo he gave me a homemade certificate identifying me as 'kinda' proficient in vulgar kumo. He even treated me to some ice cream afterward! That is how I learned how to read and write in vulgar kumo.
As for the old man, I still see him around the library either reading or teaching others.
[Studying Post for Vulgar Kumo, yo.]
I myself was a twerp. I could talk and walk, but I hadn't been taught the three R's (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) yet. I come from a noble family, but not a very rich one. We aren't in line to inherit a Daimyoship, or any land of worth. Our holdings amount to a townhouse in the Seki District, and a few silver coins in our bank account. I had not yet enrolled at the shinobi academy either. What my father did then was hire this odd old man as my tutor to teach me the basics of knowledge.
I learned arithmetic fairly quickly. The old man was good in teaching that two plus two equaled four. He told me that some of his friends insisted that the answer was five, but that I should ignore such people and remind them that the real answer was four. Anyone who said otherwise was a lily livered sandworm. I have no idea what a sandworm is, but I assume it must have been something ugly since the old man complained about them all the time.
My acquirement of reading and writing was harder fought. I mastered the common alphabet easily, but when it came to vulgar kumo I did poorly. At first the old man would make me write lines. For example on one day he would force me to write Η σοκολάτα είναι καλύτερη από τσιχλόφουσκα a hundred times, and on the next I would have to write Μου λείπει η γυναίκα μου. The sentences were always varied, to say the least. The purpose of this practice wasn't so much to teach me the meaning of the words, but to get me to be able to legibly write the script. At that point I didn't think that vulgar kumo and common were different languages. I assumed that they were simply using different scripts, similar to the difference between cursive and typed letters.
It was not till after I could readily write the letters that he began to teach me the syntax of the language. First he taught me nouns and verbs. Every week I had to make a presentation where I played out a conversation for him in vulgar kumo using the few words I knew. I still remember my first exam: he had me go to the market and buy groceries using only vulgar kumo. I got a C since I ended up buying custard instead of peanut butter. It wasn't all bad though. Jelly and Custard sandwiches actually taste okay after you get used to it.
Adverbs, and other descriptive language would not be included in the curriculum for almost a year after my first lessons had started. By then I had a large enough vocabulary that we could conduct our lessons completely in the language without resorting to common. It was several months after that when he began to teach me what he referred to creole kumo. He said that the vulgar kumo suffered in that it did not have words for modern things, which is why he had began to coin new words to describe them. So, for example, shinobi had no word in vulgar. Instead he proposed σκιά πρόσωπο, shadow person, when referring to shinobi. σκιά βασιλιάς, shadow king, meant Kage, and so forth.
My final lessons focused on what he described as practical sayings. In order words, he taught me how to curse in vulgar kumo. It is of course unsocial to repeat curses in polite company, so I shan't say anything further on that matter.
After a successful exam where I wrote a full essay in vulgar kumo he gave me a homemade certificate identifying me as 'kinda' proficient in vulgar kumo. He even treated me to some ice cream afterward! That is how I learned how to read and write in vulgar kumo.
As for the old man, I still see him around the library either reading or teaching others.
[Studying Post for Vulgar Kumo, yo.]