Studying Japanese definitely calls on a wide range of parts of my brain. So much differs from English, though sometimes it seems like a very large percentage of words have in fact been borrowed from other languages, primarily English, since English has long held primacy as the dominant language of seafaring and Japan, Great Britain and the UK have, after all, been very much seafaring nations over the centuries.
But the writing systems wrench the old noggin more than anything. There's not one but three systems of writing, after all:
- Kanji -- Chinese symbols adopted into Japanese -- the most complex of the darned things
- Hiragana -- a syllabary (not exactly an alphabet, that would be too simple) used primarily for native Japanese words
- Katakana -- yet another syllabary, primarily used for foreign words
Not infrequently the same words can appear in both Kanji and Hiragana, and DuoLingo helps us learn how to translate from one to the other.
Oh yeah. There are no spaces between words! As in semitic languages. Thanks a lot.
Then there's learning how to write the durned things. Like I'm ever going to actually do that! But I have to to proceed forward in the app. When forced to do this, I just have to submit to the process and accept that there must be something to it.
After all, in the end I am in it for the work and the growth that comes from the work.
2 comments:
クラーク-sama. Have you tried using Hiragana and Katakana inputs/keyboards on your computer? This allows you to type in an "a" and it becomes an "あ" or an "ア" with no effort. It removes the strokes/direction stuff so you just focus on the sounds and the syllables. Also, I have heard that learning Katakana first makes sense for English speakers because most of the time you know what word you are writing (unlike Hiragana).
I don't really care that much about learning to write them. I'll never end up spending that much time in Japan. My wife has zero interest. I can only allocate about 20 minutes a day to language study because I have to earn $ and keep a blog going so I just have limited bandwidth.
Post a Comment