Not an apocalyptic incident, just that my Japanese course has finished for the summer, which is a shame because I was enjoying it and now I have to keep that momentum up myself before they restart in October.

So, I thought I'd write something about it to encourage myself. Also if you live anywhere around Exeter (Devon, UK) then you should sign up at Exeter College, because we could use the numbers and Noriko's classes are excellent.

Learning Japanese

When we first started we were told about "how easy it is to learn Japanese" and some of the arguments are quite convincing. I studied Latin at school, which is about as complex as I thought a language could get. A lot of the things that surprised me about learning Japanese is just how different the structure of the language is to anything I had seen before (i.e. Romance and Germanic languages).

Why Japanese is easy to learn:

  1. There's no articles (i.e. a book, or the book, just "book")
  2. There's no gender or plural. Objects just are, they have no male/female/neuter preferences and the word for one is the word for many.
  3. There's only 2 tenses, past or present/future.
  4. Questions are formed form statements by simply adding the word "ka" at the end. No re-arranging of words / sentence structure.

Which was great and we're were all thinking how good this was going to be. Then we actually started learning...

Why Japanese is difficult to learn:

  1. They have 4 differents character sets:
    • Romaji: Japanese transliterated into Roman characters
    • Hiragana: 46 symbols indicating sounds, some of which can be combined, and some of which can be accented, making about 100 sounds. These characters are used to write "Japanese origin" words.
    • Katakana: A different set of 46 symbols, as above, but used to write words of "non-Japanese origin".
    • Kanji: the pictograms adapted from Chinese that represent ideas, there are about 2000 standard Kanji, but many, many more exist.
  2. The structure of the language is nothing like any language I have learnt. For example they have no verb "to have", so instead of saying: "I have this thing", they say "This thing exists" which doesn't really sound right to me and I can't get my head around it.
  3. Verbs are strange. They have 4 basic forms, which I don't really understand at all.
    • the "dictionary" form is only used in a dictionary as far as I can tell.
    • the "-masu" form is a polite form
    • the "-tai" form indicates a want to do the action of the verb
    • the "-te" form indicates some other meaning, and is also used when using more than one verb in a sentence to "and" them together.

And there's probably some more I can't remember right now. Basically it means that learning is pretty hard for me. I like structure and rules. I leanr languages by understanding the grammar and I don't understand Japanese grammar.

This is by no means a critisism of our Sensei, she's been excellent, but because of the complexity and just how different it is, Japanese is not taught by grammar, but in a more fuzzy way, particularly to start with.

In turn this then means that I have been learning it for an academic year, yet can say very little, and cannot form anything but the most basic sentence, and only with predefined verbs. It's very frustatrating.

On the other hand, it is an absolute joy to be able to read and write in a brand new alphabet and learning hiragana and katakana has been very rewarding.

To aid my learning I fell back on my other skill, code, to create a web based Kana Test, to practice learning the Kana. Unfortunately, Julie, on our course completely obliterated any score I was able to manage and now reigns at the top of the scoreboard, no-one able to budge her off...

You can try it out if you want: Hiragana/Katakana Recognition Tests

Still, I am looking forward to continuing next year, and if I'm up to it, I might enter myself for a GCSE!