I successfully managed to get up early and do some Japanese self-study today. I’m glad I finally managed to make myself do it, because with a month off from my classes for Easter, I really, really need to undertake some independent study if I’m going to continue to progress.

Today I prioritised the reading and writing aspect, as those are areas where I’m weak. I want to get away from reading in romaji (Japanese words spelled using Western characters) as soon as possible and into being able to parse and understand hiragana and katakana before moving onto the more complex matter of kanji.

I’ve been gradually building up my hiragana knowledge in particular quite a bit for a while now, but I’d somehow convinced myself that I only knew about half of the characters involved. Actually, I knew a whole lot more than that, with it only really being the characters for ね (ne) and ぬ (nu) giving me a bit of grief — that said, writing them down like that will probably help me remember them a bit better.

I’ve been working through the companion Kana Workbook for the series of Japanese coursebooks we’ve been using in class (Japanese for Busy People, if you’re curious), and it’s proven to be quite a good resource. It walks you through how to draw each of the characters accurately, and highlights common sticking points such as characters that look similar to one another (ぬ nu and め me, for example, or ね ne, わ wa and れ re for three even more confusing examples) as well as little quirks such as the ability to change the basic sound of some　characters with a smaller character following it — に ni plus や ya becomes にゃ nya, for example — or the ability to double a consonant by adding the つ tsu character in small format — for example, いつ itsu versus いっつ ittsu. And then there’s the times where characters don’t mean what they normally mean — は is normally ha, for example, except when it’s being used as the particle wa, while お is usually the character for the vowel o unless you’re using the particle o, in which case you use を instead because of course you do.

I’ve hardly touched katakana as yet and I was a bit concerned as it’s a whole new set of characters that refer to the same syllables but which, in many cases, look completely different. For those unfamiliar with Japanese script, katakana is used both as a means of highlighting text similar to how we use italics, and also to denote “loan-words” from other languages such as English. For example, you’d write the Japanese word for “computer” — konpyuutaa — in katakana rather than hiragana since it’s a loan word from English, and the two character sets make the word look rather different: こんぴゅうたあ versus コンピューター, to be exact — note how katakana uses a long dash for long vowels rather than the extra vowel characters hiragana uses. Confusing, non?

However, then I thought back to learning English and how we effectively have to learn two alphabets — lower-case and upper-case, not to mention how different fonts depict certain letters such as “a” — and it suddenly didn’t seem quite so bad after all. I mean, what’s another forty-something characters to learn? Yeesh.

Still, I’m getting there. I’m making good progress and I’m confident I’ll be able to read at least some Japanese script a bit more fluently in time if I keep practicing. In the meantime, it’s back to studying.