And I suppose understanding doesn’t hurt either.
Barring anything really crappy happening in my life, I’ll be living in Tokyo about six weeks from now – a fact I’m very excited about. I’ll get to see Tracey every day, I’ll have a whole new city to explore, Akihabara and all it’s geeky wonders will only be a short train ride away, and, you know – it’s Tokyo!
^.^
There is one slight problem though. I know maybe 15-20 words in Japanese and can’t read a single word – or character!
That’s changing, though.
I started learning today. (Hmmm, so I guess that comment about not being able to read a single character doesn’t really apply anymore…oh well!) I scored a good deal on a batch of books on learning Japanese last weekend, and finally got around to using one of them today.
I’m taking a similar approach as I did with the Korean I’ve learned (only I’ll be trying to learn more than I did with it). That is, learning the language in the language itself, and not using romanized versions of it. Romaji is Japanese written in English letters, which can make it easier to sound things out, but isn’t very helpful when shopping for onigiri and trying to figure out what varieties the store has.
So I began learning Hiragana today, and it’s not as tough as I thought it might be. I’d heard from more than a couple people “you can learn it on the plane on the way over,” but since it’s only a two-hour flight from Seoul to Tokyo, I think I should give myself more time than that. The book I’m using, Remembering the Kana, is well thought out and the memorization method seems to be working pretty well. The book claims to be able to teach the HIragana in three hours, using six 30-minute lessons.
It would seem the author is not full of crap.
I did the first two lessons today and the information seems to be sticking. Granted, that’s only 17 characters, but it’s a start. I picked up some manuscript paper (with little boxes on it for character writing) at the store last week and am using that for writing practice, which helps grind the info into my brain. That method worked well for remembering the Korean alphabet, so it should work well here too.
Except that Japanese doesn’t have an alphabet.
Which, on the surface, is a bit annoying. But if that’s how they do it, then that’s how I have to learn it. So instead of learning letters to string together, I’m learning phonic characters (okay linguists, give me the real word to use here) to string together. Not all that different. Actually, it’s a bit easier in one respect. None of that funky “same combinations have different pronunciations” like in English. (My students hate that. Examples such as tough, cough, plough and dough really screw with them.) Of course, that means there’s more to learn instead of just 26 letters. It’s not that hard though. I covered 17 characters today, which is a pretty good bit considering there are only 46 in Hiragana. Plus the dipthongs. And then there are the doubled-consanants. And the long vowels. Oh, and then there’s Katakana. And Kanji! And…Anyway, it’s a start. It’s not like I expected to learn the language in a day –
though that would be nice! ^.^