Hello! Today's post will focus on language. Now, if you're anything like me (which is doubtful, but just go with it), you have a hard time deciding which languages you would learn if you could and why. What's easier for an American English speaker to pronounce? To write?
As you may know, I've been studying Japanese for a little while now. I'm not a beginner, but I'm nowhere near fluent (when asked, I say I'm about 1% there). My vocabulary is probably over a hundred words, and I have a pretty good understanding of pronunciation, but my interest in the language has recently died out, partly thanks to school stuff. But! now that I'm less occupied with homework, I took the time to seek what I could focus on next to keep moving forward.
The product: reading and writing.
Now, I've known for a while that Japan has more than one alphabet, knowledge that deterred me from learning it; I told myself I'd just learn to speak it first. But as I progressed I realized that most of the best teaching materials are in Japanese writing, not to mention the understanding that would naturally come with knowing how the words are composed. On top of all this, a well recommended book to teach one of the main Japanese alphabets was already in my possession, so at this point it was a "why not?"
The Part With the Information
So! First off, Japanese writing consists of three "alphabets," so to speak: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana (both referred to simply as Kana symbols), are more like the English alphabet in that they represent phonetics and pronunciation. Meanwhile, Kanji characters are based on Mandarin (Chinese) characters that have been integrated into Japanese to express ideas or concepts. Scary already right?
(Note: most of this is a paraphrasing of "Let's Learn Hiragana," by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura, p.9.)
On the contrary! Learning Hiragana with "Let's Learn Hiragana" is very satisfying and simple at only a few pages in (so I highly recommend this book!). While difficult to write the comparatively abstract characters, it's much faster going than when I learned to write in English. Heck, after three years, most English writers' words can still hardly be deciphered (I'm thinking 2nd grade here). I've had years to perfect English writing, so I'm making myself be patient with Japanese.
If you look at the top row, you can see that the symbols start with the basic vowel sounds. As you move downward, you see that each row has one consonant sound attached to the vowel at the top of its column. It's really quite easy to memorize these with just a bit of help (for me it's my book), in fact I learned 10 symbols (2 rows) in the first day. And do you have any idea how awesome it is to read and write all the words I know in real Japanese? Example: take the very first two symbols on the chart from left to right, a and i, and you can write "ai," or "love," although once you start on kanji, you'll learn it has its own symbol, and isn't really spelled out with Hiragana. In fact, very few things are.
Now, just for the heck of it I'd like to add a little bit about my 2nd and 3rd favorite asian languages: Korean and Mandarin. You know, just in case you were trying to decide which one to learn.
They say that pronunciation wise, Japanese is easier than Korean. But, writing wise, Korean is easier than Japanese (we've had a glimpse at why). Grammar wise, they are very similar, something I was happy to find out as Korean is my second choice in language. Now for Mandarin, you may have heard about the tones. Just to clear things up Korean and Japanese have none, while Mandarin has four different types.
For example, the word "ma" can mean mother, hemp, horse, or scold based on which tone is used. For this reason, most people, including me, consider Mandarin one of the harder languages to learn for an English speaker. But you might want to consider it anyway. Despite English being the current "world language," Mandarin has the most native speakers by far, simply because of China's high population.
So! There's my little spiel on language. I really don't know much, but I was happy to learn what I do, and hopefully you are too. If this article was on a test where one had to select what the author's intention was, I'm aware it'd be an awfully hard toss up between convincing the reader to learn an asian language, informing the reader about some asian languages, and relating their (small amount of) experience with learning Japanese, buuut I hope you enjoyed it all the same. Good luck in your own explorations! And I hope you enjoyed the pics
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