I find if I squint my eyes and think real hard I can sound out the hiragana, but it's not coming very fast. Strangely, I find these little one-to-five-stroke squiggles far more difficult than a 25-stroke chinese character. It's because they don't individually mean anything, and so they all get muddled together.
Oh, well. Nothing to do but keep plugging away. Heaven knows I'm spending the next 48 hours doing more or less nothing but language: in addition to the midterm, for which I am roundly unprepared, I have this translation to pull off in French: a passage from a book by Georges Perec which, over 200 or so pages, does not contain a single letter E. You try translating the past tense without using an -ed ending. Or any third person pronouns. It's fun in a demented sort of way.
I just spent the week in Italy. About seven years ago I spoke Italian pretty damn decently (being bilingual in French helped). I never used it, however, and now all I have left are the rags and tatters of a language. So all week, when I had to do all the talking for my family, stray words of Chinese and Japanese would slip out and make my already brutal Italian even more incomprehensible. It was cruel and unpleasant, believe me. The hardest thing about languages, I used to think, wasn't learning them but keeping them. Then I started this misbegotten, insane language and saw how wrong I was.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
kana adventures
I just discovered that Japanese is the language the US Foreign Service Institute ranks as number one on the list of languages most difficult for English speakers to learn, with Chinese, the other language I study, coming in a close second. So here I am thinking I must have been out of my mind.
I spent yesterday trying to suck down as many hiragana as I could. I hit on a good method: write sentences. Phrases like わたし の はは わ くのいち です。 That way I learn to associate them with sounds. If I can't remember a kana, I try and remember where it lives in one of the phrases I remembered. I find them much harder than Chinese characters, strangely, because they don't have the internal logic that Kanji have--no pronunciation, no radical and no meaning. No handy way to remember them. Where I can understand why, say, 頭 means head and is pronounced Tou, there seems to me no organic reason why ま should be Ma. So I have to find ways beside thinking to learn them. Thinking doesn't help.
I spent yesterday trying to suck down as many hiragana as I could. I hit on a good method: write sentences. Phrases like わたし の はは わ くのいち です。 That way I learn to associate them with sounds. If I can't remember a kana, I try and remember where it lives in one of the phrases I remembered. I find them much harder than Chinese characters, strangely, because they don't have the internal logic that Kanji have--no pronunciation, no radical and no meaning. No handy way to remember them. Where I can understand why, say, 頭 means head and is pronounced Tou, there seems to me no organic reason why ま should be Ma. So I have to find ways beside thinking to learn them. Thinking doesn't help.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Blog one
I titled this blog Watashi no chichi wa samurai desu because that was, until I started taking this class, pretty much the limit of what I could say. A guy named Kazu with whom I traveled in Tibet taught it to me, and I've been using it to make Japanese people giggle ever since.
I started taking Japanese for the same reason I started taking Chinese, for the same reason Kinky Friedman wanted to be the governor of Texas: why the hell not? I like languages. They come easily. If we count Chinese (and more and more, I feel entitled to), I only speak three: English, French (already bilingual) and Chinese. At one point, though, I spoke Italian, too (I can still speak some, but can't understand a word they say). There's also enough Spanish there to get by in Madrid. At various points, I've made abortive efforts at learning ancient Greek and Old English as well. My feeling is, as a irredeemable English major, I might as well suck down all the languages I can if I want to do anything but bartend when I get out of college. My goal is to speak three foreign languages fluently by graduation: French, Chinese and Spanish. Japanese I would like to be competent in, but the fact is that to try to take a full course of Japanese at the same time as Chinese is qualifiably insane behavior. So I'll settle for basic functionality.
The interesting thing about this class is, I've never started learning a language in a class without at least some background in it. With Chinese, Italian and Greek, I'd already taught myself enough to pass out of any introductory course by the time I actually took a class. All New Yorkers speak some Spanish, and French, which I learned as a child, makes any Romance language almost unfairly easy to pick up. Even Old English does contain a few recognizable English words. But when it comes to Japanese, well...I remember when I visited Tokyo for 48 hours en route to China. It was remarkable: I have never been unable to do anything with quite the same thoroughness and totality with which I was unable to speak Japanese. I had "thank you" and "yes." That was it. And it was terrifying. And so I suppose, in the end, that this class is more about revenge for those 48 hours of unutterable uselessness than anything else. Rock on.
I started taking Japanese for the same reason I started taking Chinese, for the same reason Kinky Friedman wanted to be the governor of Texas: why the hell not? I like languages. They come easily. If we count Chinese (and more and more, I feel entitled to), I only speak three: English, French (already bilingual) and Chinese. At one point, though, I spoke Italian, too (I can still speak some, but can't understand a word they say). There's also enough Spanish there to get by in Madrid. At various points, I've made abortive efforts at learning ancient Greek and Old English as well. My feeling is, as a irredeemable English major, I might as well suck down all the languages I can if I want to do anything but bartend when I get out of college. My goal is to speak three foreign languages fluently by graduation: French, Chinese and Spanish. Japanese I would like to be competent in, but the fact is that to try to take a full course of Japanese at the same time as Chinese is qualifiably insane behavior. So I'll settle for basic functionality.
The interesting thing about this class is, I've never started learning a language in a class without at least some background in it. With Chinese, Italian and Greek, I'd already taught myself enough to pass out of any introductory course by the time I actually took a class. All New Yorkers speak some Spanish, and French, which I learned as a child, makes any Romance language almost unfairly easy to pick up. Even Old English does contain a few recognizable English words. But when it comes to Japanese, well...I remember when I visited Tokyo for 48 hours en route to China. It was remarkable: I have never been unable to do anything with quite the same thoroughness and totality with which I was unable to speak Japanese. I had "thank you" and "yes." That was it. And it was terrifying. And so I suppose, in the end, that this class is more about revenge for those 48 hours of unutterable uselessness than anything else. Rock on.
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