Japanese Review

I've taken Japanese off and on for several years. It's fun and I enjoy it, and I realistically don't expect to become fluent. I would be thrilled with a junior high reading and speaking ability. Heck, reading and speaking at the elementary school level would be great!

I took Spanish in high school, but didn't take the class seriously. As a result, I didn't really learn anything. When I lived in Germany, I used my electives to play in the band, which I enjoyed doing, but that is a decision I would redo if I could - I would have taken German instead! I didn't have a language requirement in college and would have had an extremely difficult time squeezing a language in if I had one.

You always hear how children pick up languages quickly. This may be true, but I personally think most of the reason for this is children are often immersed in a language, either through school, their parents, or where they live.

Japanese is difficult but not too bad. Pronunciation is far easier than Mandarin, a language famous for subtle and difficult pronunciation. Japanese has an alphabet - actually two alphabets, each of which is properly termed a syllabary - the hiragana and katakana. Kanji characters overlap with Mandarin.

Anyway, another Japanese class started up so I'm reviewing while in Orlando. I've reviewed the hiragana (ひらがな), the katakana (カタカナ), a few simple kanji, vocabulary, and verb and adjective conjugations.

An example of a verb conjugation will illustrate how the kanji and hiragana are used.

The verb "to go" in Japanese is iku, written in "romanji" (i.e. roman script). In hiragana that is いく. But it would be normally written as 行く using kanji - 行 is pronounced い which sounds like a long E in English. In Japanese, each verb has a root and a stem: the root is written in kanji, and the stem is written in hiragana. All grammar (including conjugations) is written in hiragana. iku (いく or 行く) is called the plain form or dictionary form. From that, the polite form is ikimasu (go; いきます or 行きます) and past tense is ikimashita (went; いきました or 行きました).

Something else interesting in Japanese is the adjectives conjugate. That's right, in English something is red or is not red, and the adjective "red" is unchanged. In Japanese, that would be in plain form, akai (red; あかい or 赤い) or akakunai (not red; あかくない or 赤くない)!