Well it’s been well over two months since I made my first post, and now my voyage to the land of the rising sun feels much closer. My visa arrived in the post a couple of days ago – which was a huge relief because it was with my passport, and without that I wouldn’t be able to go on holiday in six days time! Since I last wrote here, I’ve sat all of my final A-level exams, and in under three weeks I’ll find out how well I’ve fared in them. They’ve been shoved into the back of my mind for the time being, and will hopefully stay there until the fateful morning I have to pick them up.
Since I’m somewhere in the middle of my summer holidays I’ve sort of lost track of time, but I recently came back from an awesome holiday in Cornwall, where whilst in typical British fashion it was pissing it down for most of the time, there was enough sun to burn, enough waves to make fools of ourselves and probably a bit too much cider. I drove down with a big group of my friends in my trusty Toyota Yaris, and it was the last time we would all be together, so I’m both happy we had such a fantastic time, and a bit down that it’s all over now. There were some things we were more than happy to be away from however, like the screeching seagulls who thought 5 AM was a reasonable time to wake us up in the morning.
Either way, that’s over now and that means I’m getting ever closer to saying goodbye to everything here and taking off for Japan. I’ve begun to think a lot more about the language side of things – I don’t want to find myself there and not even be able to find a toilet (although operating one may also be of some difficulty, see the Wikipedia article here)! There’s a steep learning curve with Japanese, or ‘nihongo’, as with any language. Fortunately there are many people who want to learn Japanese, at least partly due to increasingly popular Japanese anime, manga and videogames. This means there are many good and free learning resources on the net, the best of which I’ve included in my links section. Most start with the very basics, particularly the kana system. Understanding this is paramount to understanding Japanese, as it is the phonetic alphabet that shows how to pronounce the different kanji – the chinese characters which make up words. Kana is split into two sets of symbols; hiragana and katakana.
The english letters represent the way these characters are actually pronounced. For example, looking at the katakana table, the characters ‘to’, ‘ma’ and ’su’ spell out トマス, the name of this site if you haven’t noticed. So why have two alphabets with no difference in pronounciation? The different alphabets are used for different purposes. Hiragana is used for particles such as は, the topic particle, and also used to show how to pronounce kanji. For instance, the Japanese for ‘friend’ is 友達, but so people know how to pronounce it, ともだち may be written alongside it, showing it is said: “to mo da chi”
Katakana on the other hand is just used for foreign words for anything that isn’t Japanese in origin. That’s why I used it for this site, since ‘Tomasu’ isn’t really a Japanese name, just an attempt at converting my name into japanese. Apparently in Japanese restaurants the menus are often written in katakana, so I expect it’ll be invaluable when I get there. Although I don’t want to ramble on about this too long because I doubt it’s very interesting for someone not learning the language, there are some really frustrating nuances here. The characters for ‘n’, ’so’, ’shi’ and ‘tsu’ are fiendishly similar: ン, ソ, シ, ツ. However it’s just a matter of seeing it so many times it sticks. Some of the katakana and hiragana are similar to each other which helps
If you think some English people are picky about grammar and spelling, the Japanese are definately worse. Not only are there two seperate alphabets (each with 47 characters in modern usage), but in all of the learning material I’ve come across there’s been a big emphasis on learning the correct stroke order for each character! It’s not so bad with these simple characters, but some of the kanji have more than ten strokes and it’s a bit of a nightmare remembering which one goes first and the direction of strokes. There are some general rules to follow – lines usually go from left to right, top to bottom – but there are frequent exceptions. Maybe I’ll find out what the importance of learning stroke order is when I’m out there.
I’ll make more posts about the language as I learn more of it. As a sort of incentive and as a guage of how I’m doing in learning it, I imported the newest Pokemon game for the Nintendo DS a few months ago, hoping that by the time I actually went to Japan I’d be able to understand it… well I haven’t made it past the start menu yet so I have quite a hill to climb!