Nothing But Words

Hidoi Otenki Desu Ne

I’ll probably be posting sporadically for the rest of the year, as I’ve started my Japanese class, and one thing that’s already clear to me is that learning Japanese will be time consuming. The title of this post means “the weather is terrible, isn’t it?” which I picked partly because it’s raining out right now, but mainly because my vocabulary is so limited at this point that I can’t yet say much that’s particularly relevant to anything. The class has met three times, and the teacher is already conducting the class mostly in Japanese, so keeping up is a challenge.

The grammar we’ve covered so far is simpler than the equivalent English rules: verbs have a comparatively small set of conjugations and very few irregular forms (the main thing to note is the lack of a future tense - you figure it out by context), there is no distinction between singular and plural (again, you figure it out by context), there are no masculine and feminine forms for nouns (like English), and Japanese has a concept of “particle” words that serve as modifiers for the preceding word, making it very clear, e.g., what the object of a verb is (so Japanese is much less dependent on word order than English).

All of the above would seem great for an analytical thinker like me, but the relative simplicity of the rules we’ve learned so far means that understanding what is being said requires really following the fluid context of conversation, which actually isn’t so great for an analytical thinker like me. But it’s learning the vocabulary that’s the biggest challenge - unlike the Romance languages I learned in high school, there are no common roots with English, so it’s an exercise in sheer memorization (not counting the borrowed words from English, which are surprisingly common, e.g., door is “doa”). But I’m actually doing fine so far - from what I can tell in class, I’m doing just as well as everybody else.

Then, of course, there are the 3 different writing systems. My class will cover the Katakana and Hiragana syllabaries, each of which has between 50 and 100 characters, depending on how you want to count (many are just slight variations on others). We just started with Hiragana last night - wish me luck in mastering all the squiggles and curvy lines!

What’s funny is that I’m the only one in the class with a clear reason for being there. When we went around the room and introduced ourselves in the first class, the teacher asked us all to say why were interested in the class. The most common answer was along the lines of “I’m really into anime.” At 20 students, the class is full right now. I’m curious to see how many people stick with it. I would think that, without a really concrete reason for being there, it would be difficult to maintain the motivation to keep up.