weird way of getting language exposure
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
It turns out that studying Japanese has helped me learn to read Italian. Or at least Italian police reports.
Through a series of events that still defies comprehension, I got myself involved in a battle between an Italian scammer and a Russian spammer. The scammer convinced me and a few others to contribute articles for a phoney fashion magazine (I still haven't sorted out how he planned to make money), a trick he managed by sewing a business-oriented social networking site with fake users who both chimed in on the project and of course had good things to say about the scammer in his profile.
He looked legit, and it lended some credence to his project. I managed to get my project removed, but it wasn't before I'd run afoul of the spammer as well.
I never got the full story, but it seems that the scammer engaged the spammer for some "PR" work (I was sent a contract outlining the relationship). After that, something went wrong between the two involving non-payment. The (Italian) scammer wound up filing a complaint with the Italian police along the way. And the spammer decided that to warn me (and anyone else who'd donated articles, if there were any such people) that I should see a copy of the broken contract, the police report, and some other documents.
I glanced at the Italian police report and to my amazement was able to parse the meaning from the thing. Five years ago little of it would have had any meaning. But with some hints to word meaning from shared roots with latin words in English, I was now able to see clues to the grammar hidden in the words (noting how certain endings turned up on words in the same parts of different sentences).
I may still be useless at Japanese, but my brain's clearly been set on the path to improved language comprehension. And to think I have a duel between two European lowlifes to thank in showing me that I've made progress.
(For anyone interested, my inbox is now still getting hit with crap but the admins of the business SNS website involved have taken notice of the scam and have been aggressively wiping out fake user accounts all over the place.)