Japanese Class Take Two...

Well, the second Wednesday of Kanji and language classes definitely went better than the first for me. That definitely does not mean that I understood everything, or even most things, but at least I understood more than the week before. Definitely my biggest improvement was in reading Hiragana. This time I could generally recognize a good portion of the Hiragana that were written and, when given the quiz in language class, I was able to write some from memory. (We got our papers back from last week and I got a whopping 5 points out of a lot...At least there is no where for me to go but up!)
Indeed my improvement in recognizing Hiragana in just one week was decidedly measurable. Yay.

I know that my Japanese is getting better also because I was able to go into a book store and ask if there were any English books. :) I have also been able to say, “no thanks, I have a bag” at the check out counter of stores. Another :). I still have a really long way to go before I can communicate somewhat decently, but at least if I were to write all the words I can now say, it would take a paragraph or so. I owe this improvement in language mostly to our daily Pimsleur (computer) lesson. Jim is relentless about making us do a lesson a day—even on weekends and even late at night. He really is a fantastic language student. He comes home from work and studies a book we have and also studies Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji online. Whew. No wonder he learned so much Mandinka when we were in the Gambia—he is disciplined!

Okay, perhaps it's incredibly insensitive of me, but I find it very funny that, because there is no “l” in Japanese, foreign words spelled with “l” end up being spelled with an “r”. As a result, many Japanese do not seem to be able to hear the difference between our spoken “l” and “r”. (Jim was asking a postdoc in his lab who spent two years in the US and speaks English well and even she couldn't hear the difference between “er” and “l”!) Thus, the jokes about some Asians not being able to say “rice” but “lice” instead...Of course, I have no doubt there are loads of sounds we can't hear—especially tonal ones in Mandarin, etc. It's interesting the role that language plays in our brain development. I'm sure Vygotsky wrote something about this, but I digress. You may recall from an earlier post that Katakana is a separate syllabary that is only used for foreign words. (Unbelievable to me that Hiragana can't just be used, especially since the syllables represented are the same, just with difference symbols—eek.) Anyway, as there is no “l”, some foreign words end up looking really funny. In class I was reading (yes, reading!) a word “ko” “a” “ra” and I thought, I have no clue what that word is. Since it's Katakana, generally these words are taken directly from English, so technically I should recognize them. Alas, I had to refer to the picture and “koara” means “koala”. Teehee. See what I mean?

Here's another “foreign” word that we looked at in class. The Katakana says “u” “i” “su” “ki” “i”. So, can you guess what “uisukii” is? That's right! “Whisky”! (Yeah, I didn't guess it either which lead to my exasperated face, which then lead to our teacher coming up to me to see if she could help. How could I explain my frustration that these were supposed to be the easy words for us?! Oh well...)

As if the written language wasn't bad enough, probably the most difficult thing about Japanese (or at least that we know about) is the counters. It turns out that having a single word to represent one, two, three, etc. is just not sufficient. We already knew from talking to friends who spoke Japanese that there were all sorts of different words to count by. But, in class this week our teacher gave us the counting sheet of doom. I have to call it that because it was perhaps the scariest piece of paper I have ever seen. Here's why: there are different ways to call one, two, three, etc based on the type of object. Here are the categories on our sheet that have unique counting words:
things, persons, order (as in sequential), thin/flat things, machines/vehicles, age, books/notebooks, clothes, frequency, small things, shoes/socks, houses, floors of a building, thin/long things, drinks/stuff in glasses, small animals/fish/insects, large animals
So that makes SEVENTEEN CATEGORIES of different words to count from 1-10. !!! (And I think there are actually many more counting categories that weren't on our sheet...)
It turns out that there is one “catch-all” category, so guess which one we'll be sure to learn...
And, oh yeah, did I mention that the words for one-ten for each category were all written in Hiragana only!!! It seems it's not as “easy as one, two, three” in Japan...