JAPANESE LANGUAGE

Sorry I’ve been absent---Christmas was very busy.

I thought some of you might be wondering how our language study is going. I’m sure that by now you are saying, “Well, he was there for a year and now he’s been there for over 4 months, so I’m sure that he has mastered reading, writing and speaking Japanese.” My reply would be, “hay, I been workin on me anglish four over 6o yers an I aint mustered it.” Japanese is muzakashi (difficult—you know the saying about old dogs and new tricks).

Wikipedia says, “The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: modified Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters called hiragana and katakana. The Latin alphabet, romanji, is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Western style numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional kanji numerals are commonplace.”

The kanji alphabet is the most difficult. It is claimed that there are 50,000 kanji but only about 2,000 are commonly used. It would be very helpful to learn all kanji, but the basic 1,000 characters are sufficient to read about 90% of the kanji used in a newspaper (about 60% with 500 characters). So needless to say, I read about 0% of a newspaper, although I can recognize the kanji numbers 1-10.

I think I read in a book that the syllable “to” (pronounced toe) can be represented by over 60 different kanji. Also, many times Japanese is written vertically and read right to left; words are not always separated by spaces and little punctuation is used. The picture above was taken at our train station and gives the name of our town in kanji, hiragana and romanji—in that order, top to bottom.

Japanese, like most languages, is spoken vey fast by native speakers and many words kind of flow together to our ears. A few Sundays ago Daisy wrote down the words we recognized from a 45 minute sermon, and we came up with: God, please, now, same, sixteen, # 1, where, but, group, twelve, and, “there isn’t any.” (We hope you find this condensed sermon as edifying as we did.) However, in my opinion, if you were to attempt to learn Japanese or English from scratch, Japanese would be easier. Their vowel sounds are as follows;

a as in father, e as in men, i as in see, o as in boat and u as in food

The basic vowel sounds don’t change. Meanwhile in English we have:

a as in hat, a as in hate, a as in about and I’m sure there are others, and like wise for the other vowels. And read the following list:

thought, enough, through, though, cough, bough

All have “ough” in them and all are pronounced differently. You know them because you grew up with them, but there is no rule to teach them.

But I digress—back to us. The hiragana and katakana alphabets each consist of 46 characters which were originally kanji but were simplified over the centuries. You can clearly distinguish the usually complicated kanji characters from the simpler hiragana and katakana characters. Katakana is used mainly used for writing words borrowed from other languages, and the names of persons and geographical places that can’t be written in kanji.

Daisy is learning the hiragana sounds and is doing quite well at singing the hymns on Sunday. She doesn’t necessarily know what the words mean, but they use many of the old familiar hymns so at least we know the tune. I on the other hand, am getting quite skilled at humming in Japanese or any other language that I attempt.

I am working on the katakana, and it’s rather fun since if you play with the sounds you can “sometimes” come up with the meaning. For instance, the first three lines of the picture show the name of an event that took place here a few weeks ago, written in katakana. The bottom line says the same thing in kanji on the left and hiragana on the right—so I am told. There may be some slight variations but for the most part the sign says in Japanese:

fe su te bar u

o bu

ra i tsu

Now you need to know that all consonants must be followed by a vowel (except for the n) and that the Japanese do not have an l so an r is used and they do not have a v so a b is used. So if we apply these rules to the first line we get…

Fe s te va l or festival

Line 2 would be ovu and if we drop the u we get ov which we would pronounce “of”.

For line 3 we also need to remember that the Japanese language does not have anything that makes a word plural, so changing the r to l we get lai which has a long i sound, add the t and drop the u and we get lits or all that to say:

festival
of
lights

Of course you don’t always know when to change the r or the b or when to drop the vowel, but it’s fun in restaurants to try to figure out what we do or don’t want to order.

So we are working on the language, but long ago a thought occurred to me. Before we made our first trip to Japan in 2001, we took some Japanese language classes at the YMCA in Grove City to learn some survival phrases like “Good morning.” “How much does it cost?” “Where is the bathroom?” etc. The problem is this: Let’s say I go up to a Japanese person on the street and ask them in, not perfect but understandable, Japanese, “Where is the bathroom?” They would probably answer me in Japanese using words that I haven’t learned yet and speaking at a speed that I can’t follow. So I still have a problem. My solution to this is to go up to that Japanese person and say “English?” Then I proceed from there. Most times it works and most Japanese can speak some English. When it doesn’t work, I just hope that the question was “How much does it cost?”

By the way, where IS the bathroom????