www.davynextdoor.com

Japanese. I’ve never really written too much about the language itself or how I’m studying it but I figured I’d do that real quick as it’s a pretty big part of my life these days.

Japanese consists of 3 alphabets:

1) Hiragana - A phonetic alphabet consisting of around 50 characters. Used to write Japanese words.

2) Katakana - Another phonetic alphabet consisting of around 50 characters, pronounced the same way as hiragana. Used to write foreign words.

Hiragana and katakana are not particularly difficult to learn and anything in Japanese could be written using either of these alphabets. The characters have no meaning. The equivalent of the English alphabet for English, any word could be expressed in hiragana or katakana by simply writing out how the word sounds. This would make things easier to read, but this is never actually the case. Everyyyyything is written in kanji.

3) Kanji - Crud. Kanji are the Chinese characters that consist of the real meat of the language. Words are expressed as either 1 kanji, or combinations of kanji. Kanji generally have multiple ways they can be read and pronounced. They all have meaning, be it concrete or far more vague. There are any number of thousands of them, although only around 2000 to be learned for everyday use in Japan.

When I got to Japan I couldn’t say or write pretty much anything. I didn’t know any of the phonetic alphabets in Japanese (they are generally the first thing a person learns when studying the language). Only knowing the polite forms of verbs, I didn’t know how to say anything casually. It was quite frustrating to be left out of conversations. I felt there was a huge barrier between myself and most of the people in Japan and started working to eliminate it.

Written and spoken Japanese are 2 entirely different beasts, and being in a rush (1 year) I chose to concentrate solely on spoken Japanese. Whereas most people learn vocabulary by learning the character(s) used to write it, the kanji, I ignored that aspect of things as completely as possible and learned all my vocabulary without learning the characters for them. This means that most of the words I knew I could not write down, nor could I even read them if they were written down in front of me. After doing this for a year my Japanese was (and still is) quite imbalanced. In short: I need to learn the kanji. You cannot read or write anything without knowing them. And you need to know a lot of them. With 1250ish of the most commonly used kanji you can read 95% of things. Add an extra 800 kanji for that last 5% and you’ve got the 2042 “standard use” kanji as decided by the Japanese government.

Traditionally kanji are learned by repetition. Copying, copying, copying each character hundreds of times until you have it learned. Japanese people do this for a good number of years, from elementary school up through junior high school. I did it for my year in Japan while taking Japanese classes. Copying, copying, copying over and over and over and yet after the whole year I was supposed to know only 400 kanji. I say “supposed” to because if you learn kanji using this method in the end your kanji recognition is going to be way better than you ability to write them. I could probably recognize about 400 kanji, yet the amount I could write was pathetically few.

But alas! Soaring down from the heavens like a beacon of hope comes the book Remembering the Kanji. Using the unique study method found in this book I’ll soon be done (50 left) learning how to read and write the meanings of the 2042 standard use kanji in the Japanese language.

This book only teaches you the meaning of each kanji. This means that if you learn all 2000 kanji using this book you still can’t “read” anything in the sense that you can’t read them out loud and pronounce them. You will understand the meanings of many things, but will still have to learn the readings of the kanji themselves.

So the next step in my language learning process is to link all the words that I already know how to say to their respective kanji, enabling me to read and write them, and at the same time learning new words that I can’t say or read.
In other words, now that I’m finally done learning the meanings of all the kanji I can finally concentrate on other aspects of Japanese, primarily vocabulary. Huzzah! I’m excited as I’ve been studying only kanji for the last 2 months and not really progressing any with the spoken language. Mad props to the guy at www.alljapaneseallthetime.com, I’m basically following in his footsteps.

Oh, and just a quick blurt to say that I finally became an NCSU student last weekend by attending my first sporting event here. I was invited along by a group of Japanese friends to a football game, which was a fun time. I must admit I enjoyed the tailgating more than the actual game itself, but it would have been more exciting had we not already been predestined for certain doom from the beginning.

Also, I’ll be in Asheville for Fall break starting next Wednesday if anybody wants to hang out. Rockkkk.