93 Days into learning Japanese

Published: 2024-04-07

Edits:

2024-06-29: grammar and formatting improvements I also mention things the post leaves out.

This band did the opening for the Scott Pilgrim Anime!

こんにちは！　こんばんは！

ジェイデンだ, これが私のブログ！

私の日本語がよくない。。。

I plan on going on exchange to Tokyo in September. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to pick up on Japanese, I’m taking classes in English but I’d be in Japan so I’d have lot of opportunities to practice.

If you’ve heard anything about self studying language it’s that it’s a horribly ambitious endeavour fraught with hardship, especially one as different as Japanese. I’ll get into the perceived (and actual, there is a lot of actual) difficulties of learning languages later on, but why subject myself to such hardship? Why I want to learn Japanese?

Well I like Japanese things, lot of my favorite media and technology was made in or inspired by Japanese things. I think the language would be a step in trying to demystify place, and get a better understanding of the culture. Our thoughts are restricted in only being able to think things that can be expressed in the words we know. Maybe Japanese will allow me to unlock new Japan-y ways of thinking?

Japanese is also a language, the function of a language being to communicate thoughts and ideas with other humans. Having a “hobby” (I’ll elaborate on the quote use later) like Japanese, something that is based in interacting with people, could help me connect with others (and go outside more).

Also being able to view the unfiltered version of a creators artistic vision would be cool. I’ll play Tokimeki Memorial 2 someday (certainly before Tim gets to reviewing it).

This post will be about my observations of the language based on what I’ve encountered so far. I expect things will be incorrect, as my gaijin-ahh opinions are based in (as of writing this) only knowing about 306 Kanji, 613 Words, and 78% of the grammar points needed for the N5 certification, the simplest “knowns some basic Japanese” certification you can get.

From my time with the language so far, Japanese is a tremendously interesting, logical, and compelling language to want to learn and to want to use. It’s a lot of work, but It’s been very fun :)

However it’s based in a logic very different from that of English or other European languages.

So what’s up with Japanese?

仮名 KANA: Japan’s Alphabet (or lack thereof)

The first thing you’ll notice about Japanese is that the squiggles we’re used to deriving meaning from aren’t present. Instead are wildly different looking runes we must decipher. The alphabet we know is gone, and there is no alphabet to replace it. Instead, Japanese is built on a syllabary. A syllabary is a collection of symbols that represent syllables. Each symbol (kana) in Japanese is a Syllable, with a constant at the front and a vowel at the end.

some examples are:

K + A = か(KA)
N + A = な(NA)
かな = Kana!!!

(Wow it’s been 3 minutes and you can already read Japanese!?)

Japanese is also phonetically consistent! That means every Kana is pronounced the same way no matter what word it’s used in. There is no guesswork in how a word sounds, unlike english and it’s 7 ways to pronounce the letters “ough”.

Wow! Japanese seems like a well thought out language free of any redundancies or needless complexity!

Well…

Two sets of kana

The example kana I wrote were in the Hirigana Kana Set. It’s the default Japanese character set and the first one you’ll learn. There is also another set of Kana, Katakana.

It behaves exactly the same way as Hirigana, but is commonly used for loaned foreign words and food. It comes with a few extra sound combinations to help.

Foreign words are frequently lossy converted from their language to Katakana. Japanese might not have all the sounds needed to pronounce that word exactly, so they’ll need to get compressed to fix into Japanese syllables. My name for example:

Jayden in Katakana is ジェイデン.

The Katakana written in Romanji (Japanese written with the english alphabet) is ジェイデン = JIEIDEN.

Learning the syllabaries might seem like a lot more work compared languages that use the roman alphabet, but it’ll only take like, a day each. You’ll also get a lot of practice with them so they’ll become grokked pretty quickly. Hirigana faster then Katakana though.

So just learn two sets of like 46 symbols and then I can read whatever I see right?

…right?

Remember how I alluded to redundancies earlier?

漢字 KANJI

Kanji are chinese characters that are a hold-over from when Japanese was forked from Chinese. Each Kanji is a unique symbol that has a kana reading and meaning attached with it.

For example: the Kanji for “I” (as in the first person pronoun) is 私, and it’s reading is し.

There are about: 47,000 Kanji in total according to this big old book..

That’s a lot to learn.

However there are only 2136 Kanji in the Jōyō Kanji guide used by the Japanese ministry of education.

Significantly less! but still over two thousand.

Kanji feel redundant. Every Kanji could be written out as it’s equivalent hiragana, and it sometimes takes many more strokes to write a kanji then it would to write out the equivalent Hiragana

The Kanji for “embroidery pattern” (they get very specific) is 黻, 17 strokes. the reading for that Kanji is “aya” (あや), which is only 6 strokes.

But Kanji does make reading a bit easier, and you do gotta learn them to be literate to any capacity.

Another not-in-english issue we run into with these Kanji is how to look them up. Each Kanji is unique so We don’t have the luxury of just typing in the characters we see unlike with unfamiliar english words.

Some Kanji are written with with Furigana (the Hiragana is written on top), which makes looking them up simple, but that’s the exception and not the rule.

Kanji are generally organized by stroke count, but that just puts them in groups, and you’d also need to be familiar with the stroke count of the Kanji to know where to look, and if you’re familiar with the stroke count then you probably don’t need to look it up.

But there is another system that we can use to break down and identify Kanji:

Radicals!!

Radicals are the individual symbols used to make up Kanji, know your radicals and you can use them to not only look up Kanji based on the radicals they use, but also use the names of each radical to help make mnemonics to help with memorizing all those Kanji.

Some radicals are Kanji by themselves like “person” (人) and “mouth” (口) being used to make “prison” (囚).

Kanji are a major hurdle in Japanese learning, and being able to identify and recall them will take a lot of deliberate practice and memorization.

But it’s simple!

And common Kanji are quite frequent, I only know around 306 but that’s more than 50% of the Kanji on Wikipedia and Twitter, obviously not knowing every other Kanji is annoying, but that’s pretty good so far!

Sure it might take time to learn them all, but it’s not a complicated process.

Just put about 2100+ characters in your head and now I can ACTUALLY read everything I see?

…kinda.

訓読み VS 音読み KUNYOMI VS ONYOMI

Kanji are not words. They are used to make words, and some words are just single Kanji, however Kanji are not inherently words. This makes Kanji sound even more cumbersome then they already were, and some even promote the idea of only learning Kanji through their use in vocabulary and skipping learning them by themselves.

When Japanese was forking from chinese they ALSO to resolve the merge conflicts between the existing Chinese Kanji meanings and the new Japanese Kanji meanings they were coming up with. Instead of choosing to reject or embrace tradition, they simply chose to not choose, and kept both meanings.

Surprise! Each Kanji has a Kun Reading and On Reading.

Which one do you use?

The general rule is:

If it’s a word that has two or more Kanji next to each other, it uses their On (The Kanji reading you already learned) reading.
If the Kanji is alone or separated by a particle like (の), use the Kun (The new reading you haven’t learned) reading.

Person (人)‘s On reading is じん, but it’s Kun reading is ひと

So the word for “Person” would be 人＝ひと, because the Kanji is by itself it uses it’s Kun reading, but The word for “Black Person” would be 黒人 = こくじん, because it’s two Kanji together they both use their On readings

So you need to memorize 2136 * 2 readings? No. Some Kanji thankfully have the same Kun and On Readings, while some have multiple different Kun and On Readings, the Kanji for life (生) has 20 different ways it could be read depending on the word it’s in. reading it is as confusing as it seems.

Rendaku

Going back to Hirigana and Katakana quickly, some Kana can have the constant before the vowel modified by adding a ” or ° to it: さ = SA ざ = ZA

Rendaku is when these modifiers are added to a kana in a word that usually doesn’t have one, in a seemingly inconsistent manner.

The word People, 人人 (although it would actually be written 人々 because　々 repeats the Kanji to it’s left)　you think would be written as じんじん, but not only does it use the Kun reading, ひとひと, but the second ひと get’s rendaku’ed to ひとびと.

Although it isn’t completely random, you’ll likely just end up memorizing which words get rendaku’ed or not.

Grammar

so you’ve memorized 2100+ Kanji and 6000+ vocabulary words!

Time to use them!

(although front loading all your kanji and vocabulary study before you try any reading is a bad idea)

There (traditionally) are no spaces in Japanese , So Reading Japanese can sometimes be a nightmare. Because there is no separation between where one word ends and another one begins, you need to become a regex algorithm that trys to chunk together which kana are parts of which word, and which kana are used as grammar particles.

There are some helpful rules like verbs always end with “xU” vowel kana and adjectives always end with the い Kana.

and Kanji does make this regexing a bit easier, as the kana in a Kanji will never be used as a grammar particle.

…I think?

Also, words that can be implied through context are frequently omitted, sorta like how if someone asks a group of people their major, they would just say “Business” instead of “my major is business”, as the first part is implied. Or saying “Was Hungry. Eating Snack.” when you’re caught making kimchi fried rice in the middle of the night.

Is Japanese a Subject Object Verb language?

English is a Subject Verb Object Language: “I ate the apple”

I = Subject
ate = Verb
the apple = Object

Japanese is commonly labeled as a Subject Object Verb language, and it’s sorta like that, “私がリンゴをたべて” “Watashi ga ringo wo tabete”

watashi ga = “I”
ringo = “Apple”
wo tabete = “Ate”

In Japanese, the verb is the thing that the entire sentence is structured around, using words with grammar particles in between to signify how they relate to the verb. To steal an example from this great article:

Taro saw Noriko at the library.

たろうはのりこをとしょかんでみました。

Tarō wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita.

The verb in this sentence is “See” (みました), and it’s at the end.
The person who did the seeing is Taro, so he’s marked with as the topic with wa (は)
Noriko was who the seeing happened to, so she’s marked as the receiver of the verb with wo (を)
The Library is where the seeing happened, so it’s marked as the location with de (で)

The interesting thing is that these grammar particles could be structured in any order and still maintain their meaning, as long as the verb is at the end:

たろうはとしょかんでのりこをみました。

Tarō wa toshokan de Noriko wo mimashita.

としょかんでたろうはのりこをみました。

toshokan de Tarō wa Noriko wo mimashita.

のりこをとしょかんでたろうはみました。

Noriko wo toshokan de Tarō wa mimashita.

All mean the same thing!

There’s a general pattern all follow (you usually start with the subject marker), but it’s interesting that the meaning is retained regardless of order.

Hi! Jayden from the future here.

I completely forget to mention the concept of the politeness system that is baked into the language. To keep it simple, there is “casual” Japanese, and “polite” japanese. The primary differences are seen in how verbs are conjugated. There’s also Keigo, a system of honorifics and ways you say certain words and phrases.

this is a quick addendum so for more info check out this and this

Immersion != Learning

A little note on learning, not only Japanese but language in general. Languages are fundamental to the human experience, our brains are hard-wired to be able to pick up on them as fast as possible, as language is essential to communication, which is essential to survival. Language is nessicary to communicate important information your fellow tribe members to keep you all from from pre-maturely exiting the gene pool.

But then why is language learning so difficult for so many people? It’s because our brains only treat languages as languages when we treat them as languages, not just as a hobbies, or as things we do for fun, but as the means in which we must communicate ideas.

Immersion is great for language learning, because you will absorb the language though osmosis (you won’t), but because you have the opportunity to treat the language as the primary means of communication. There are lots of people who live in Tokyo for years and don’t pick up on any Japanese, because of the abundance of english along with the abundance of japanese, they don’t need to ever treat Japanese like a language unless they want to.

So is “genuine” language learning reserved for only those who have the luxury to spend time physically immersed in a country in which their target language is spoken?

No.

Of course being in a place where you language is spoken would help a lot, but you’re unable to be in a physical space, you can find places in the things you do that can be boxed off from english, to make the primary means of communication in that section of your life be your target language.

Some examples of this boxing off could be:

All video games/Anime/Manga must be consumed in your target language.
Follow Blogs or Content creators who only make content in your target language.
Make a Dungeons and Dragons party of other target language learners and only play in that language (I actually am interested in doing this, not nearly good enough yet, but HMU if you’re also interested)
Follow blogs or YouTubers that only post in your target language.
Go to language exchanges and make friends that only communicate in your target language.

You want to create spaces where your language is the primary means of communication, even if that “space” isn’t a physical one a place where it’s commonly used.

What I use to learn

Things I use to learn Japanese if you’re interested:

Wanikani: SRS Deck application for Radicals, Kanji, and Vocabulary.
Bunpro: SRS Deck application for grammar.
Jisho: Dictionary.
ichi.moe: Sentence Parser (does the regex for you).
Curedolly: Eclectic Vtuber who teaches grammar well, sadly passed away but her videos are all still great resources.

That’s all cya

Play Void Stranger.