Whitey Learns Japanese

2010.05.19 / Japan / posted by idrawgood

Many have asked, "Ryan, you've been in Japan for about 8 months...are you, like, fluent in Japanese or what?" Short answer: No. Long answer: Maybe one day, if I win the lottery and can afford to study it nonstop for several years.

Here are some interesting (read: pain in the ass) things about the language, through the eyes and ears of a foreigner.

1. Three different sets of characters comprise written Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. It's four if you count romaji, which describes the use of the latin alphabet (like English uses) which are often incorporated into signs and other things that want to call attention.

2. Hiragana, used for small bits of connecting language (particles), word endings, as well as distinctly Japanese words, is composed of about 46 basic characters, like か (ka). Those basic sounds can be modified in various ways, such as vocalizing consonants, which brings the number of characters up to about 70.

3. Katakana, used primarily for approximating words of foreign origin, has roughly the same number of characters as hiragana. Save a few bizarre combinations of characters, katakana expresses nearly the same sounds as hiragana, but signals the use of a foreign word. Do you recognize these sounds as an English word: テレビ (terebi)? Well, it means "television."

4. Another note on katakana: if you haven't noticed before, the Japanese aren't renowned for their pronunciation of English. What's the deal with that? One reason could be they often use katakana to TEACH English words. Imagine how messed up you'd be if you knew "allergy" as アレルギー (arerugi-)? Well, it's the closest Japanese sounds can get.

5. And then there's kanji, which is a system borrowed from Chinese containing several thousand characters, like 花 (hana), meaning flower. So how many do you really have to know? It varies depending on what you read, but the standard for literacy is around 1,945. That'll get you to a point where you can read a newspaper. Beyond that, the number for a studious Japanese high school graduate is around 4,000.

6. Q: What's worse than having to know around 2,000 kanji to read a Japanese newspaper? A: Each kanji character has at least TWO ways to read and understand it: namely, the on'yomi 'sound' reading, and the kun'yomi 'meaning' reading. So, a reader has to use context, use in compounds constructions, location in a sentence, and predictive skills to determine the intended meaning of the author.

7. A kanji example: the simple character 中 can be read in two basic ways, "chuu," meaning middle or medium, and "naka," meaning inside. This is the simplest kanji I could think of. Some kanji have up to TEN different readings. Seriously?

8. Despite the thousands upon thousands of characters and combinations in written Japanese, the language has a startlingly small number of unique sounds. For Japanese learners of spoken English, this in particular makes fancy english dipthongs like th and ~ng, as well as differentation between R and L partcularly challenging.

9. What does this lack of unique sounds mean to a learner of spoken Japanese? I can utter two syllables in succession, like かし ("ka" and "shi"), and I could mean any of the following terms: grant, song lyrics, flaw or defect, legs, asphyxiation, loan, noncommissioned officer, false tooth, visibility, Fareinheit, pastry, a flower's filament, or evergreen oak. When I point this out as one of my difficulties in learning the language, the Japanese quickly point out: 'Yeah, but the KANJI is different.' How exactly does written kanji help when speaking?

10. So, we've got a limited set of sounds, several different ways for the same set of sounds to be understood, several thousand written characters with multiple meanings and combinations...what's the final mindf*ck of this edition? Japanese, especially when spoken, often grammatically omits the doer of an action as well as the object in a sentence. One of my favorite examples is when someone says 飲む (nomu). We'll take it at face value, ignoring other meanings, and say that, based on context, it means "to drink." Now, without a subject or object, our little friend "nomu" can take on a variety of meanings, like "Do you want a drink?", "I drink [insert unnamed beverage]", "What do you want to drink?", "Can you drink [insert unnamed beverage]?", "Drink this", or "Do you drink alcohol?".

Forgive me if I sound coarse, but I really don't think Japanese students have a whole lot to complain about when learning English.

My advice to them in learning English is the same as their advice to me in learning Japanese: 頑張って (Ganbatte)! Do your best!

Learn more about Japanese writing here. Do you have interesting facts about Japanese you want to share? If so, contact me.

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