John McGehee

The subtle distinction between Japanese particles は (wa) and が (ga) makes it difficult to choose between them. Here I will show you a simple way to get it right every time. Professor Eleanor Jorden of Cornell University taught me that we actually have the same thing in spoken English. We stress words in a sentence to emphasize them. Consider: " THIS is delicious " emphasizes that this one is the delicious one, as compared to others. In this situation you use が (ga) ; これ が おいしい。    (Kore ga oishii.) Be careful to offer kind words about the others so that nobody feels left out: それも食べたいですね。    ( Sore mo tabetai desu ne.) " This is DELICIOUS " emphasizes the taste; the thing being tasted is already established. In this situation you use は (wa) ;  これ は おいしい。    (Kore wa oishii.) Since the thing that is delicious is clear, Japanese speakers commonly drop これは and just say,  おいしい。   (Oishii.) As demonstrated by the above examples, が (g...

When you try to install files for East Asian languages, you are asked for a Windows XP installation disk. New computers have shipped with Windows pre-installed for a long time now, so few people have a physical Windows XP disk.  Here’s how to install without the DVD/CD-ROM.

In this article I show you how to use multilingual UTF-8 strings with standard, unmodified OpenAccess oa-22.04p028 release. In the last  article , I introduced UTF-8, the popular 8 bit encoding of Unicode into multibyte character strings that can represent virtually every written language in history.  I presented the OpenAccess software changes required to fully support UTF-8 and showed you how to convert your existing application software to properly manipulate UTF-8 in the OpenAccess oaString class.

I once had a job scrutinizing Virtuoso schematics that contained many useful annotations written in Italian.  EDA tools generally support only ASCII strings, but the Italian designers were lucky–theirs is one of the few languages that can be written naturally using the same characters as English. Wouldn’t it be nice to annotate designs in OpenAccess databases using any of the world’s languages?  You can do it right now, using any OpenAccess release.

The PA system at work announced that I had a call. It was from Dr. Steve Butner, my graduate advisor at UC Santa Barbara . He was very excited. “John, I got some information here about this program that was just made for you.”

If you speak a foreign language, you would naturally like your children to learn it, too. However, look around you, and you will find that only a few children actually become fluent in their parents’ language, and fewer still can read or write it. We reared a Japanese/English bilingual daughter in the United States. To help you formulate a plan for your own family, I will describe the strategy we used.

I was profiled in the cover story for Japanese magazine Engineer Type .