Scooping loads of sentences

Scooping lots of reading and listening is part of the unending training of better usage of the languages, be it with clients or not. There is an interesting correlation between a max 140 signs sentence in Twitter and the inflating number of English sentences offered in recent "conversation" books in Japan. A recent one is shoveling in 10,000 sentences of daily life. As far as I know, it is the second one to dare cross the 10,000 altitude (they put a "+" in the title). The first 10,000 landmark book came with the audio CD included. The latest one is opening up a new trend and possibly a new stream of revenues for the publishers, that is, selling the 6 CD pack apart. It doubles the cost of the book, which make the previous 10,000 mammoth look like a bargain as the books are still priced under the ¥3000 psychological threshold. Above, you enter the twilight zone of specialized books (daily life is not specialization).

.... CD? Why no DVD? ... ha, yes! We are in Japan.

Anyway, what's the link with Twitter? It's the length my dear, because - I would have to check - probably if not certainly - most if not all of these sentences fit each under the 140 signs hood. Speed comes with a shortening of utterances. This is not new but here, it is vividly exemplified. Yesterday, we worked - a first time - on short sight-translation of Kyodo News headlines. It was a brainy and motivating exercise I will had to my bag of tools. Each sentence is a story by itself requiring to get a quick mental perception of the context and adding here and there liaison words of expressions that are "naturally" missing in press article titles architecture rules in Japanese. a very challenging stuff that allows to swim into a large amount of vocabulary and stress the need for deduction in liaison interpreting so often under partial contextual settings.

But all this is done again using not sliced texts, but collections of short sentences. I mean, there is no coincidence here that the Twitter unit of max sentence size and a focus on learning the language based on consuming short sentences encounter. Obsviously, "10,000 daily Japanese Sentences" is the obvious missing book.