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About Japanese Language My own interest in Japan began with an intense admiration for the Japanese language, which has often been described by Westerners as the Devil's tongue. It is true that Japanese is a rich and complex language, but it is by no means impossible to master. With years of dedicated study one can become conversational in Japanese, and using it can learn more about Japanese society and culture than you will ever find in a book. This page is intended as a primer for those interested in learning Japanese, just to make people aware of what they're getting into when they begin the study of this language. Like any language, it requires a serious dedication of time and effort -- so please don't let this scare you off! Even the most daunting missions can be accomplished, and learning Japanese is certainly something anyone can do if they put their mind to it. =)The Japanese Writing System The Japanese writing system employs three different alphabets. The first two are hiragana and katakana; these are phonetic alphebets that once memorized, will give the reader the ability to pronounce any word written with these systems without difficulty.Hiragana Hiragana is the most elementary of the Japanese writing systems. Using hiragana characters as an example, we can see that Japanese is extremely easy to prounounce for Americans in particular. If you read the first five characters in the chart from left to right, you should be saying them like the vowels in these words: father, evil, moo, hey, and oh. With each new row, just add the consonant featured using those vowel pronuncations, and you're doing it correctly. =) Hiragana was developed to accomodate for the differences between Chinese and Japanese linguistics. The Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system, called kanji around 57 AD. To accomodate for language structures that did not exist in Chinese language, and therefore did not exist in the Chinese writing system, the Japanese developed hiragana. Japanese makes use of particles, which do not exist in Chinese. Hiragana characters were used to write out these particles, and also for native Japanese pronunciations of words that did not necessarily exist in Chinese. It is rumored that hiragana characters were developed by women, since they are so curvy. Katakana Katakana was developed primarily to distinguish foreign words from Japanese words. For example, the word "terebi", meaning "television" would be written in katakana since terebi is a loan word from English. Generally speaking, words from Chinese or Korean that have been in Japanese since Chinese characters were introduced into the language are not denoted using katakana. Katakana characters are prounouced exactly like their hiragana counterparts. It is rumored that men developed katakana because it is more rigid and angular. Kanji Kanji are the Chinese characters that the Japanese adopted around 57 AD. They are ideographs -- characters that represent ideas or words instead of a particular sound. The subject of kanji is much too complex to go into great detail with here, but here are some basic facts about it: without knowing around 2,000 or so commonly used kanji (called the jouyou set in Japan) you are considered illiterate. Whereas in Chinese, each character has just one pronunciation, in Japanese the same character may have several pronunciations, depending on the compound a kanji appears in, the word it appears in, or just how it is used in different situations. Intuitively understanding how a particular kanji is prounced in any given situation takes years of intensive study, and it is something that even many native speakers of the language can not always do. To illustrate what kanji look like in comparison to hiragana and katakana, I have underlined where they appear in the following sentence written in Japanese: Kyou wa mokuyoubi desu. Today is thursday. As we can see, the 日 character is used twice, but it's pronunciation varies depending on its location in a kanji compound. Introduction to Japanese Grammar Japanese grammar follows a pattern different than that of English. In English, we follow what is called a "SVO" pattern -- subject comes first, then the verb, then the object. For example:dog = subject; verb = chases; object = cat In Japanese, the word order is "SOV", which means that the subject of the sentence comes first, then the object, followed by the verb. For example: The dog chases the cat. subject = 犬 "inu" / dog ; object = 猫 "neko" / cat; verb = 追いまわる "oimawaru" / chase The Japanese use particles to mark the different parts of speech within a sentence. In the above example, you will notice that the characters は and を go untranslated. That is because they are topic marker particles, for subject and object, respectively, and on their own they have no meaning. A very basic construction you can use to make your own sentences follows this syntax: "X wa Y desu" X is Y Let's try out a sentence using the above formation: "Neko wa kawaii desu." "The cat is cute. Of course, Japanese has many structures to signify different parts of speech and different conjugation patterns, just like you'd find in English. If you want to learn more Japanese grammar, I would recommend buying either the Genki or Yookoso series of Japanese language textbooks for English speaking students. About Learning Japanese Japanese is something that one can never master, not even a native speaker. It's similar to how someone who speaks English natively will probably never learn all of the words in the language (there are over 600,000 afterall!) or even understand it's complex grammatical structures; they just come intuitively if you've been speaking the language all your life. For a Japanese speaker, what is natural and what is technically grammatically correct often have a gap between the two in reality, just like for English speakers. Even after ten years or more or study, you may find that you have acheived fluency in speaking Japanese; mastering it's writing system and being completely literate in the language is quite something else.Studying Japanese is something you have to commit your entire life to. It isn't something you'll simply "learn" in a matter of a few years in college or abroad or studying on your own. You may acheive proficiency before fluency, but one must not confuse the two. I've found in my own studies of Japanese language in the last six years that there are two kinds of students: those who study Japanese for the sake of learning a foreign language, and those who study Japanese because of a passion for Japanese exports like anime, manga, TV shows, or video games. The latter group usually has a very difficult time balancing their love for anime or gaming with finding time to study Japanese. Japanese is a language that will require a few hours of study every day in the beginning years. If your passion lies with anime or manga, and you'd prefer to spend your time watching or reading it, then you might consider not beginning to study Japanese. It is something that should consume your life without having to compete for your time with a videogame. I have met very, very few anime or manga afficionados who have gone into the higher study of Japanese. Most lose interest because the language is "too difficult"; others decide that they'd rather spend their time watching anime or reading manga, which is fine. Still others simply don't make it into the higher levels of study because they can't find a balance between studying Japanese and finding time for their hobbies. I have met rare instances of individuals who began to study Japanese because of an anime or manga or videogame, who later lost interest in their original hobby and instead shifted their focus to Japanese. If your main focus and interest is in learning Japanese, and not in something else, you will most likely succeed if you study hard and spend lots of time practicing. My advice to anyone looking to seriously study Japanese is to find a teacher, preferably someone you can see alone outside of the classroom when you have questions. Language is something that is passed from person to person on a very intimate level. It's very hard to absorb it in a classroom with 30 or more students present. If Japanese isn't offered at your high school, there are some things you can do to begin your studies before college. You can memorize the hiragana and katakana charts and how to pronounce those characters, because you'll have to do this anyway in the first few weeks of university. You can teach yourself some basic vocabulary words by buying a small Japanese to English dictionary at a bookstore. I would also reccommend buying a book for a basic guide to Japanese grammar and studying the grammatical structures it contains. Another thing that really helped me was to listen to Japanese music and read the translations of the words as they were being sung. If you have the opportunity, try to make friends with someone who is a speaker of Japanese and practice talking to them using it. Making mistakes is the best way to learn. If you can find someone online who speaks Japanese, and you are on friendly terms with them, try to ask them questions you're having about learning grammar or characters, and they might be able to help you out. The worst thing you can do to try to learn Japanese, in my opinion, is to watch subtitled anime. Fansubbed animation in particular is often extremely inaccurate. Anime in general uses the plain form of speech, which would be considered very rude to use in your day-to-day conversation. It also contains lots of slang words and lots of regional words that are not standard Tokyo-dialect, which is what is considered polite to speak. Even professionally subtitled anime often contains mistakes, and often times the translation patterns from Japanese to English are very awkward grammatically and not reflective of the original meaning. Anime can be good for learning a word here or there, but in general it is not an effective method to use in trying to learn a language. Besides, you'll find more often than not that if you try to talk about anime or manga with your Japanese language teacher, they will get very offended, and rightfully so. Anime and manga are not reflective of Japanese society and culture, despite what some fans will have you believe. Anime is as much a reflection of Japanese culture as Batman is a depiction of the average American. Suggesting that something as simplistic as a cartoon is your only interest in a vast and complex culture with an intrisically beautiful language is a real put-down and often reflects a certain ignorance about Japan and the Japanese. Imagine it as if someone were telling you that their only interest in learning English was so that they could follow gossip tabloids about Britney Spears, after you had spent much of your time and effort not only learning this person's language, but also after getting a degree to teach English. My Own Experience I don't claim to be fluent in Japanese, but I have studied the language intensely for almost seven years now. I began studying Japanese when I was around 13 years old, learning Hiragana and Katakana from the grandmother of one of my step-mothers who was issei, a native-born Japanese. Soon after I began studying, my family moved to New York, and I contented myself practicing Japanese just by learning new vocabulary words and keeping myself literate in hiragana and katakana. It wasn't until I was 15 that I found another teacher. Her name was Hasegawa Nobuko, and she taught Japanese classes at my high school. Unfortunately, my high school did not offer an introductory level to Japanese, and so I couldn't just jump into a regular classroom. Hasegawa-sensei was kind enough to spend time with me once a week after school catching me up on what I'd need to know to jump into Japanese level 2. It took an entire year, but in my junior year of high school I started taking Japanese in a classroom. I graduated high school having completed the "Regents" exams in Japanese with a high mark and having finished Japanese level 3. I owe Hasegawa-sensei a debt I can never repay. She now works as a teacher in a private high school somewhere in Brooklyn, New York.In college at SUNY Albany I started out in Japanese 101, because I hadn't studied any kanji at all during high school. I soon completed the 100 level, and began to study with Kuwata Yasuko and then with Mano Kyoko for the upper levels of the language. Most of my learning happened outside the classroom -- mostly with exchange student friends I made who came from Waseda University in Tokyo, or at work where I helped Japanese customers who had trouble speaking English to set up and manage their bank accounts. Even today I still spend a few hours of my day learning Japanese. I am conversational and Japanese and am proficient with reading and writing, but I'd hardly call that fluent. I own probably three or four different Japanese dictionaries to help me with my studies at home. Because I had the opportunity to learn Japanese in a classroom, most of my learning can be done alone at home, but this is almost impossible for someone just starting out on their path to learning Japanese. I use a lot of grammar textbooks to further my studies. I try to do simple translation projects when I can to keep myself immersed. I find that I am the kind of person who can quickly forget something if I don't study it for a while, and I believe that I have simply invested too much time and money into learning Japanese to forget it all now. Truth be told, I began studying out of an interest for this old Japanese animation called 'Sailormoon'. On a field trip to San Francisco's China Town in middle school, I happened upon a store that had an episode of Sailormoon playing, and I found it really interesting. But like most kids, I grew out of the cartoon after a while and my interests shifted to learning Japanese language, even thoguh I still have a soft spot for Sailormoon today. I just happened to be in a lucky place at the right time, as the area where I lived in California had a large Asian immigrant community where I could learn Japanese if I set my mind to it, even without a classroom. Right now I am finishing my BA degree in East Asian Studies at the University at Albany with a concentration in Japanese language. My own research focuses primarily on the development of Japanese religion out of influences from China, and also on Buddhism. |
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