entry nº 4 // 20160912

anyway, wow, japanese, huh? definitely seem to have taken on quite the task for myself, here. in the midst of reading some new yorker excerpt from some translator’s memoir, i got hyperlinked to this u.s. foreign service institute list of many of the major foreign languages that americans might need to learn for whatever diplomatic or int’l ends the u.s. foreign service institute is dedicated to. anyway, the languages are grouped into categories by average number of classroom hours needed to reach some measure of fluency; way down at the bottom was the “‘hardest,’ as in, ‘most time needed’ category,” which includes arabic, cantonese, mandarin, and something else i can’t remember maybe? and japanese. but THEN japanese had a little asterisk next to it, and i was like “what’s w/ this asterisk” and then i read down and it said that the asterisk denotes a language that is particularly difficult for english speakers to learn compared to other languages in that category. oops! 

but i’m not trying to make it sound like, “wow, look at this cool hard thing i’m doing,” because that’s the thing about learning a language: your body+brain just kind of do it; all you have to really do is show up. babies do it. and heck, there all sorts of people out there in the world who might considered super smart or way dumb by whatever measure you could possibly use, and they speak multiple languages just because they grew up that way or moved around or listened enough to pick it up. 

anyway, yeah. here’s some facts about JAPANESE:

•there are three different alphabets: hiragana + katakana, which are two separate syllabaries w/ 42 (i think?) characters each; and then kanji, which are chinese characters imported from over there way back whenever. there are… i dunno, a couple thousand of these in common daily use here, and then many many thousands more that are used occasionally, rarely, almost never, or somewhere in between. oh yeah and technically there is a fourth alphabet – romaji – which is just the english alphabet so that one’s easy. 

•each kanji has multiple pronunciations (“readings”): a kun’yomi reading that comes from the japanese origin of that word (and which is used when a given kanji occurs by itself as a word, or is combined with hiragana to make verbs, adjectives, etc.), and then the on’yomi reading, which derives from the japanese interpretation of the chinese pronunciation of the character whenever the language was making its way over here – this reading is the one that’s often (but not always, haha, oops) used when multiple kanji are used to form a single word. and then many characters have multiple on’yomi readings, so add that in the mix. and then many words are just plain old exceptions, too. plus it seems like many proper names are mixtures of the two that you can’t really predict unless you already just sort of know i guess? darn it.

BUT the cool thing is that many kanji (esp. the simpler ones) kind of look like their meaning, and even if they don’t, when you come across a word made of multiple kanji, you can often infer the meaning based on the meanings of the individual parts. it’s like being up on your latin word roots in english. i actually don’t know if “cool” was the right word to use, at the beginning of this paragraph, here – more like, “the thing that at least somewhat tips the scales in your favor in terms of your being able to like actually make some sense of what you’re looking at maybe every once in a while.” 

either way, feels pretty nuts to learn a language knowing that probably for the first year or so, you’re not going to really be able to read anything you see. 

selected memory from about a month ago: shoko took me out to eat at this awesome bar/restaurant that specializes in chicken. over-the-top delicious cheap multi-course meal and lots of beer + sake + good conversation + deep eye contact. we pay and leave and then s realizes that if we hurry hurry hurry we can make it to akasaka station in time to catch our train home. so next thing you know we’re running running running down the middle of a bustling little street downtown, people all over having their own friday or saturday or whateverdayitwas nights, all a drunken blur, and s + i can’t stop laughing because for some reason whenever we run to catch a train (which seems to happen fairly often?) we start giggling, and this time i’m half-shouting “itadakimasu!” (which is what you’re supposed to say before you start eating a meal) as we run down the street, dodging people + slow-moving taxis, and we make it to the station with a little bit of time to spare, and we catch our breath, and it’s great. 

i would say that overall the liquid hand soap here is of a much more watery consistency than that of the united states. 

love,

kevin