A Challenging Language

Nothing has been more motivating in my first ten days in Japan than my inability to communicate with those around me. Work has been great, and all of the teachers and staff have been wonderful to go out of their way in their efforts to introduce themselves.

The JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English) generally speak enough English for us to usually at least mostly understand each other (at least I think so). However, often the conversation is a noble attempt from a teacher who does not speak English to introduce him or herself in English, followed by a broken Japanese introduction from me, and generally ends in a brief period of silence before we both bow multiple times and mumble something generally incoherent in both English and Japanese before walking away from each other.

I am beginning to do self-study, but the language offers a number of challenging elements. For one thing, Japanese consists of three separate alphabets, the kana (hiragana and katakana) and kanji. The kana are simpler symbols that stand for sounds. There are two kinds of kana: hiragana and katakana.

The hiragana characters are written in a curving, flowing style. They are used for writing some native Japanese words and word endings.

The katakana are more angular characters. They are used mostly for writing foreign-derived words. Words adapted into Japanese from English or other European languages are usually written in katakana.

They both represent the same syllabic sounds of the Japanese language. Here is a chart outlining hiragana and katakana:

This wouldn’t be all that difficult, and just involves rote memorization. With a little effort, most people can memorize Hiragana and Katakana within a month. The tricky part is Kanji.

Kanji are Chinese characters that the Japanese have borrowed that represent ideas. There are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 Kanji. That right, between 5,000 and 6,000 characters. The good news is, to be able to understand Japanese, you only really need to know regular-use or common Kanji. There are only 2,136 of those. Here are some examples of Kanji:

The kicker is, Japanese text uses a combination of all three of these alphabets, and so you need to have a strong command of all of them to be able to read anything.

So that’s where I stand as of right now. However, I am undeterred! The good news for me is that many of the teachers want to learn English; today three teachers and I spent over an hour communicating in English and translating the words that were difficult for them in English into Japanese, allowing me to beginning learning more Japanese definitions. Cross cultural learning to the rescue!

My favorite thing about this language is that it is fascinating. Studying the Kanji and the Kana doesn’t really get boring, I just start seeing double and my brain stops working so I have to stop. It will be awesome to read this language someday, and I can’t wait to be able to start paying back my co-workers by someday being able to speak to them in their native language.

Side note: Heather (my lovely wife for those who don’t know) will be here tomorrow! Now we can really start exploring this place and showing off this beautiful city and eventually this beautiful country. Much love to all,

Clint