I Think I'm Learning Japanese

Last August, a couple of my friends and I decided (perhaps in vain) that in exactly one year, we should save enough money to take a two week trip to Japan. Sounded like a great idea; none of us have been out of the country and the three of us have been consistently fascinated by Japanese culture since we were in grade school. We wanted to be able to draw a line between this image of Japan that is perpetuated by the American otaku and, you know, what it really is. Something beyond Naruto and Pocky.

At first, I didn't take it too seriously. My friends are great, but they are not, ah...punctual? Not to say I'm any better, but three broken wheels don't get the gravy train a rollin'. But this year, I've been all about bettering myself intellectually. I'm gonna try and read a lot more, learn a lot more, worry a lot less, and learn to love the bomb.

I've already done a lot of reading this month. It's a lot for me, in any case. I've been cracking open old textbooks and digging out classic SF/F literature to burn through. My goals this year are to read twenty books, go to a foreign country, and learn a foreign language. Japanese is shaping up to be that language, though I'm beginning to think I might have jumped the gun. I haven't learned a ton, but I wanted to talk about what I did.

I'm pretty good with Spanish. I'm no conversational speaker by any means, but I can understand it pretty well. Learning it, it was really only a matter of word replacement, conjugation, and sentence structure. Looking back, it wasn't too difficult to get a basic grasp on it all. It also helped that if you could speak it, you could write it, and vice versa. The biggest thing I've learned whilst trying to tackle Japanese and knowing absolutely nothing to begin with is that it's really, really, really not like learning Spanish.

If none of this is news to you, bear with me. I know I'm late to this centuries old game.

With Japanese, there's a process to it. Learning how to speak it does NOT mean you can write it, but learning how to write it might do the trick. The problem is that there is a lot to learn, because there are three different "alphabets" that you'll have to learn if you want to have an understanding of Nihongo.

Hiragana: This is pretty much the phonetic alphabet of the Japanese language. They are the building blocks of words and phrases - and most children in Japan learn a lot of it by the time they're out of the first grade. Learning Hiragana is essential, and it then segues into...

Katakana: Which is used to translate foreign words into Japanese. It's how Japan is able to write out words like "taxi" and "toilet"; they have their own words for those. My little book here states that 80% of the words used in Japanese advertising are those produced through Katakana (gairaigo). If Hiragana is the base, then Katakana is the structure built upon it. For Westerners, at least.

Kanji: I don't know a lot about this yet (haven't gotten the book) but it's supposedly the last part of this language that you should learn. Instead of writing things phonetically, Kanji supplies symbols that represent entire concepts, like "sea" or "bird" or "cat". It sounds difficult, in that you pretty much have to learn a new symbol for every concept, which has to set off some kinda weight limit in your mind at some point.

I've learned a few speaking phrases in Japanese (the basics) but can only write them out in Romaji, which is how you spell Japanese words in English. But I've been slowly making my way through my Hiragana book, and I've learned to write out my first word:

Comb.

Yeah, suck on that, America.

Sorry. Anyway, I've been having a lot of fun. It feels like this new world is steadily opening up to me, word by word. I may have only taken the first step, but I'm keen on taking a few more.