I'm learning more and more Japanese. Of my base knowledge of the language, I'd say I'm probably able to access about 30%, and of that I can readily use about another 30% in daily exchanges. So I figure that if I keep increasing the base knowledge, those percentages will slowly become a larger and larger percentage of the expressive capabilities of the Japanese language. Soon I'll be able to order sushi!
It's been an interesting process to go through. I've read about how children start to parse the sounds and syllables of a language and I can identify with that process. I feel as though it is taking a long time just to get accustomed to the possible sound combinations of Japanese. What has been surprisingly helpful, and what speeds up my process of aural deciphering, is becoming more familiar with the kana syllabary (alphabets). As I practice my workbook and become faster at reading, I'm also able to hear words and groupings of sounds more easily. Nice to be able to bring them together, the written and the aural. I'm hoping that the synthesis will just keep getting faster and faster. I start lessons on Sunday!
It's so much fun to decipher this language, through phonetics and context. And I'd like to share just a small portion of the game. There are two large parts to written Japanese. Kanji are the characters derived from Chinese, which are largely phonetic, but also have semantic meaning. Kana is the completely phonetic component of written Japanese.
For instance, the city where HPAC is located is called Nishinomiya, and in kanji it is 西宮市. The first character is "nishi" which means, "west." The second character is "miya" which means "palace." The last is the character for "city", "shi" which may or may not be used when saying the name. The "no" between "nishi" and "miya" is a possessive particle and thus I live in the "Palace of the West (city)." So there are both sounds and meanings to the kanji and they can be rearranged in various ways to make new meanings. Characters can even be squished together to produce new characters.
Kana is composed of hiragana (primarily used for Japanese words) and katakana (used for words taken from other languages). It's fun to sound out words in hiragana, but generally I'm left with a Japanese word that I don't know. It's even more fun to try to figure out words written in katakana, because they might actually be words that I can recognize. But this is essentially the same as shopping at IKEA. Just because you get the right sounds doesn't mean that you will understand the word. It's a lot of fun so here are a few from my workbook decoded from the katakana and turned into "Romanji" (our familiar friendly alphabet), for you to further decipher. Few rules: Rs are hard, similar to a "D" sound; "E" as in "egg"; "I" as "eat." Take your time to sound out each vowel separately. At the bottom of this post are the answers.
Terebi
Rajio
Supa
Depato
Resotoran
Aisukurimu
This says a lot about the way that Japanese hear things. I think that they are very sensitive to vowel sounds and length. For example, the words for beer and building are essentially the same–bidu–but for the alcohol it is biidu. You just hold the first syllable a little longer. So there are shadow vowels in a lot of words that just extend the length a little longer. Verbs often end in what a western ear would hear as "s" but to the Japanese it is "su." They hear and pronounce that extra "u," but it doesn't come as naturally to the western ear or tongue. So much for our superiority complex over "r" and "l."
I hope you've enjoyed this Japanese lesson. It's an increasingly important thing to me for survival (i.e. "I'm going to faint." "Do I take my towel with me to the pool?") as well as being a part of the community ("How are you?" "What did you do this weekend?" "How is your family?" "Did you get rid of that pigeon problem in your apartment?") so I think about it a lot and try to practice in my own introverted way.
And now here are the answers:
Television
Radio
Supermarket
Department store
Restaurant
Ice Cream
It seems similar to learning to play a new style of music -- like learning a particular style of jazz. When you learn the vocabulary, it changes the way you listen, and you are able to perceive where the boundaries are -- how it is that the producer of that is thinking and moving (their mouth). I say perceive instead of hear because it probably has to do with the ability to simulate the actions -- you can make the sounds, so you can understand when others are making the sounds.
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