1564: Study Resume

Japanese classes started again this evening. I was a little nervous about going back, as I frankly haven’t done as much independent study as I intended, but I was pleased to discover that I had actually retained a fair amount of knowledge — including, to my pleasure, a significant amount of the hiragana and katakana character sets required for basic reading and writing in Japanese. (We haven’t looked at kanji at all yet; that’s something I’m saving for when I’m thoroughly familiar with the kana sets and basic sentence construction — I’m getting there.)

So, if you’ll excuse me practicing for a moment…

はじめまして。わたしはピーターです。(I had to look up how to spell my name in katakana, but now I know. Yay me.) どうぞうよろしくおねがいします。

わたしはさんじゅさんさいですそしてジャーナリストです。わたしのかぞくはよにんです。ちちとははとあにとわたしです。

Or, you know, something like that.

It was actually a rather interesting lesson this evening as there was a second native Japanese speaker in the classroom for the second half of the session. Our teacher is a native Japanese speaker herself, but the addition of a second person — who, naturally, we all had to introduce ourselves to using something similar to the phrases I clumsily (and possibly incorrectly) constructed above — added an interesting dynamic to the mix. She was a teacher, too, so she was evidently well-versed in the clumsiness of English people attempting to speak Japanese, and thus supported any unfamiliar words and phrases she used with plenty of gestures and the like, allowing us to discern the overall meaning of what she was saying even if we didn’t quite know the exact words or would be able to recreate the sentence ourselves.

Language learning is really interesting. Despite my joking with school friends about German lessons slowing time down (I swear, those lessons always felt like they were twice as long as every other class at school) I actually quite enjoyed gradually picking up an alternative means of communication. Of course, the one time I went to Germany and attempted to speak the language to a vendor, they responded in perfect English, much to my chagrin. Now, school German lessons are literally half my life ago and I haven’t retained a huge amount of knowledge; the German I still know today is pretty much limited to Zug um Zug (the German name for the board game Ticket to Ride) and proudly singing Essen mein Scheiße whenever university music friends get together. (Don’t ask… and yes, I know it’s gramatically incorrect.)

Japanese has the added interestingness of not only having to learn a completely new spoken language with completely new grammatical structures — actually quite a bit simpler than English in its basic form, though I’m aware I’m still very much at “beginner” level — but also a completely new written language, too. Sure, German had umlauts and whatever the ß thing is called, but Japanese doesn’t have anything even vaguely recognisable. And those things that do look like English characters are almost inevitably something else. You think ヒ might be “t”? Wrong, it’s “hi”, unless you write it ビ, in which case it’s “bi”, or if you write it ピ, in which case it’s “pi”. Obviously.

I exaggerate for comic effect; knuckling down and actually attempting to translate and read these characters gradually burns them into your brain. I was delighted to find myself able to complete a revision sheet using entirely hiragana earlier this evening; granted, it was considerably slower than if I just wrote in Romanised characters, but in the long run it’s going to be beneficial to get as much practice as possible using the kana characters. And, when the time comes, kanji.

I’m currently torn on whether to continue classes in the new academic year, though — assuming a more advanced class is actually running, which I don’t know as yet — or simply to study myself. The book we’ve been using in class — Japanese for Busy People — has proven to be a well-designed textbook with plenty of good supporting material (the Kana Workbook in particular has been invaluable in drumming those characters into my mind) and that is suitable for both classroom and independent study.

Either way, though, this is something I’d like to take further. And who knows, it might even push me in the direction of a new career one day. But that’s a long way off as yet. For now, then, おやすみなさい！