昨 - Zuo2 - Yester-

昨天 - Zuo2 Tian1 - Yester- Day — Yesterday

昨晚 - Zuo2 Wan3 - Yester- Night — Last Night

睡 - Shui4 - Sleep

睡覺 - Shui4 Jiao4 - Go To Bed, Go To Sleep

刑 - Xing2 - Punishment

刑事 - Xing2 Shi4 - Punishment Matter — Criminal, Penal

But it appears that 刑事 means Detective, for some reason, in Japanese. We spent part of this weekend watching スケバン刑事 - Sukeban Deka — Delinquent Detective, and the sequel. They’re both pretty old movies about teams of Japanese schoolgirls who fight crime using weapons you’d imagine schoolgirls would have handy, like yoyos and origami cranes and marbles. Despite how AWESOME that sounds, they just weren’t that good. It is interesting to find out that they’re making a new movie, coming out later this year. I guess Japan is just as out of new ideas for movies as the US.

國 - Guo2 - Country, State, Nation

Another word I’ve mentioned a lot but has never officially been Word of the Day.

草 - Cao3 - Grass, Straw, Draf

草地 - Cao3 Di4 - Grass Earth — Sod

Pulling up sod is harder than you might think. Or harder than I might think…. or thought. Whatever.

去 - Qu4 - To Go, To Leave, To Remove

Oops…. I think I thought that this word and 出 were the same!

信 - Xin4 - Letter, True, To Believe, Sign, Evidence

信息 - Xin4 Xi1 - Letter News — Information

信息時代 - Xin4 Xi2 Shi2 Dai4 - Information Time Era — Information Age

心 - Xin1 - Heart, Mind, Center

One of the first words Jenny taught me how to write back in college, along with 小, 大 and her name. I mostly remember how to write 心 and 小 and 大, mostly, but I never did memorize how to write her name! We decided to focus more on the talking and less on the writing.

電 - Dian4 - Electric, Electricity, Electrical

Strange, I’ve mentioned 電 so many times, but it has never officially been “Word of the Day”.

A brief exercise using GNU Make:

submake :
  ./subMake.sh

#!/bin/sh
make -f Submakefile

STUFF = a b c d e

all : $(STUFF)

$(STUFF) :
  @echo making $@
  @sleep 1

Run ‘make’. You’ll see a, b, c, d, and e get made serially, one per second. Want to parallelize? You’d think ‘make -j5′ would do it, right? You’d be wrong. The Submakefile complains that there is no jobserver available, and still makes them serially. The reason is that the toplevel Makefile doesn’t “think” that subMake.sh is a sub-make, and doesn’t pass along the necessary magic environment variables and file descriptors for the jobserver stuff to work. But, by merely adding a COMMENT:

submake :
  ./subMake.sh # $(MAKE)

IT WORKS!

出 - Chu1 - To Go Out, To Come Out, To Occur, To Produce, To Go Beyond, To Rise, To Put Forth

I always, always pronounce this wrong. I tend to say it as “Choo” but the “oo” is really is an unpronouncable sound, like the middle part of “Eeeeewwwww!”

我 - Wo3 - I, Me, Myself

我們 - Wo3 Men2 - Me (plural) — Us

We’re back! Well, actually we were back some time ago, but Word of the Day was on a somewhat extended vacation to help rebuild its 氣. Embargo off!