Edmund,

> Hmmm, the one thing an english-speaker needs to know about nihongo is that
> nihongo is reverse polish while english is more like infix. This solves a
> lot of the syntactic difficulties one may have with a particle-based
> grammar. After that, there are serious fundamental semantic issues - In
> particular, I seem to see meanings jump between "as", "in order to",
> "because" etc. whenever I attempt to read japanese texts - cause and
> effect are not clearly separated.

  I'm not sure what you meant by the word "issues", but the
texts you have chosen must be written in that way, then.
And I don't think it necessarily means bad.  I can't say
more "because" I have no idea what you have read and I
couldn't figure out from your article that you're saying
that the issues are related to the Japanese language itself
or not.

  The concepts like the causality or the dualitism are not
the only things that explain things.  Thinking about the
complex systems where it is impossible to mathematically
state the cause/effect chains, there can be an approach
where people understand the things as a whole entity, rather
than to be too analytic in detail.

  It seems to me that it is true that Japanese education
system are not doing well to let the people to learn the
latter approach, but I always want to be able to think in
both ways.

  This is now completely off-topic.  So, what do you think
about the eToy system?

-- Yoshiki