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.
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4 comments:
Hiragana really is rather hard for me to get a grasp on. So many characters look alike. Not to mention each character seems to be unnecessarily difficult with unnecessary squiggles and dashes which confuse the heck out of me. Reading and writing continues to be pretty hard for me too.
But they sure look pretty.
aha, my philosophy teacher mentioned that strange book as well! i would really like to read it and see what it is really about.
It's not easy but I have noticed now that it's a lot simpler to write a word using hiragana rather than spell it out in romanji. I guess, that's progress.
Try writing sentences looking at pictures in the book. It's a better exercise than generic examples from homeworks.
And good luck with your translation! You will do well.
That's amazing! I didn't think the French could go one sentence without an E. That truly is a scientific accomplishment.
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