Nihongo, oh no!

Japanese is now officially super hard. I have memorized hiragana characters a-ho. That's 30 plus characters. While that's nice, that's sort of like memorizing only a sliver of the Latin alphabet. I can write simple Japanese words, but instruction takes place, at this early stage, in romajji--Japanese written phonetically in our alphabet.

ねこ becomes neko (cat)

いぬ becomes inu (dog)

borrowed words in Japanese are also written in romajji--

San Francisco becomes Sanfuranshisuko

Smith becomes Sumisu

engineer becomes enjinia


We're learning motion verbs, and two out of three bear no relation to anything in English (that I know of).

ikimasu--to go (away from the speaker) kinda like hingehen in German

kimasu--to return to the place where you currently are/to invite someone to your house this is some strange circular shizz that I can't plug into anything I already know

kaerimasu--to go home (whatever 'home' means to the speaker) sorta like kehren/zurückkehren in German


The negation of the these verbs, or any verb in Japanese, is pretty easy. The verb ending drops its -u and adds an -en.

ikimasu/ikimasen    (Watashi wa) Ashita Oosaka ni ikimasu. (I am) going to Osaka tomorrow.

kimasu/kimasen  I am at school now when I say: (I am) Asatte gakkoo ni kimasu. (I am) coming to school day after tomorrow.

kaerimasu/kaerimasen (Watashi wa) Korekara uchi ni kaerimasu. (I am) going home afterwards. 


I need to find a language partner, but, maybe more realistically, a language tutor given I can hardly say anything yet.

Nihongo

Kon'nichiwa!

a, i, u, e, o

I just started taking a Japanese course last week. It's a challenge, but a fun one. We're being taught both the romanji (Roman alphabet) and Hiragana (one of three alphabets used) writing systems at the outset. I've only a few short Hiragana words committed to memory. And if I had a Japanese keyboard, I'd show you! Writing the characters is like creating little, tiny pieces of art. Our Latin alphabet isn't so difficult to render, comparatively speaking. This is especially so if one is using block letters. Japanese, by contrast, looks as if it were still written by brush--there are little tales on many of the end strokes. One is meant to reproduce the characters in this way even with a pencil or pen.

Japanese sentence structure is also different from English.

English is: S-V-O or subject-verb-object.
Japanese is: S-O-V.
It also seems that word order in Japanese is less fixed than it is in English. For example, word particles sort of like our prepositions following the noun refer back to the noun, if that makes sense. It doesn't yet make a bunch of sense to me.

Bea (s) san* wa gakusei (o) desu (v). Bea (s) is (v) a student (o).

If one wants to ask if Bea is a student, then the question word 'ka' is simply tacked onto the end of the statement. That's pretty cool & not too difficult to remember.

Bea san wa gakusei desu ka?      Hai, gakusei desu. Yes, (Bea) is a student. The subject in the answer is omitted.

*san is an honorific

Anyway, it's all pretty interesting and full-on. We can already count to 100, use basic greetings & dabble in basic negations. Woot!

It's a good stretch for the old brain. I'm grateful to be there.