The Bloggart 2: Learning Japanese

The Bloggart 2: Learning Japanese

Dear All,

Thank you for all the commentary I have received  on the blog! I’m glad you enjoy reading it. I heard that a couple of you had difficulties with commenting directly on the site, so I will look into that and get it fixed asap (or, you know when I feel like it). 

Basic news for the week: my wallet was stolen on the train on Friday*, giving me a chance to experience the Japanese transit authority in action. Within an hour of me noticing it was missing it was tracked to Otemachi station and returned to me. Considering that I had cards from eight different governmental, educational and financial institutions (not to mention spanning two countries) it was a huge relief to find that only the cash and my passmo had been taken. I got the card stopped and a new one issued for just over a hundred rand, making this by far the easiest, least painful theft I’ve ever experienced. I mean, I’m not recommending the experience exactly, but it was a lot less hassle than I had any reason to suspect.** Now, on to the main event! For this weeks’ exciting installment, I present…

 Learning Japanese!

Learning Japanese is not that hard. I mean, it is really difficult, and has lots of homework and a quiz almost daily. But difficult is relative – as opposed to, say, me becoming an athlete, or building a rocket, it’s actually quite manageable. The biggest difference between Japanese and other languages I’ve studied is obviously the writing system. Japan uses three writing systems – hiragana, katakana and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are very similar in their usage: both are syllabic systems, meaning that each symbol represents two letters/one syllable (although vowels also get their own symbols for when they stand alone). Thus ohayo gozaimasu would be broken into o-ha-yo-u go-za-i-ma-su***. The difference between these two systems is that hiragana is used to write all Japanese words and words that contain kanji, while katakana is used strictly for lone words. 

Kanji, on the other hand, are units of meaning, like whole words are in English and Afrikaans. So if you wanted to write volcano, you only need two symbols, fire-mountain. To make things even more complicated, each kanji has two pronunciations that don’t correlate at all – the Japanese pronunciation, for when kanji stand alone or as part of a word with hiragana, and the loaned Chinese pronunciation, for when two or more kanji are joined to form a new word (like volcano). 

After all that, the basic grammar is actually quite simple. Other than the verb always standing at the end of the sentence, Japanese isn’t fussy about sentence structure, as long as each bit has the correct particle as a suffix to identify it. So watashi-wa conbini-de kohi-no pan-(w)o kaimasu literally means I (subject) convenience store (at) coffee(and) bread (object) buy. I hope.

There’s a bunch more interesting grammar that we’ve learnt, but I’ve probably bored everyone to death already, so I’ll stop explaining. Needless to say, Japanese is completely different to any language I’ve studied so far, and that makes my six weeks of Middle Egyptian much more useful than all the time I spent studying German and Latin. Once you can distinguish between the superficial meanings of a specific language and the underlying bones of grammar that languages share, the whole thing becomes kinda fun. Except vocabulary. Learning vocab is terrible. 

* PLEASE, don’t all bombard me asking me if I’m okay and all the rest; it was just a minor hiccup and read the main text.

** It was also the perfect excuse to eat lots of snacks, take long naps and play games all weekend, you know, to cope with the “emotional trauma”.

*** A polite way to say good morning.