Japanese Class

The Japanese Class is over for the quarter - this morning we had the final exam.

This is the fifth class I've taken here in Washington. All have been taught by a Japanese woman who runs a small business named the Y&Y Language Institute. Classes have always started out with 20+ students, and are whittled down to a dozen or so by the end.

The first two classes were largely devoted to learning vocabulary and the basic writing systems (hiragana and katakana). In the third class we started learning kanji and spent more time on grammar, while the fourth class was a review session that covered a few new grammar topics, but no new vocabulary. In this most recent class, study shifted to grammar. We still learned a few more adjectives and verbs, but the majority of the class was spent learning new grammar.

When I was in school I always found English class to be dull - we read novels or essays, and then had to write our own essays. I don't really remember studying grammar - I'm sure I did, but it has been a long time. Or, maybe I got a jumbled version as I moved around quite a bit. In any case, I only found English class to be interesting when the book or essay we had to read was interesting, and this only happened occasionally.

One of the things I find interesting in Japanese is grammar, and how it differs from English grammar. Until I began studying Japanese, I never really thought about English grammar much. I mentioned Japanese grammar in a previous blog entry, and here are a few more examples (I'm just going to leave the Japanese romanized rather than look up all the hiragana unicode codes):

1) In English, the adjective doesn't change when connected in series.

The car is new.

The car is expensive.

The car is new and expensive.

In English, new doesn't have to be modified. However, in Japanese, it does. (in Japanese, atarashii is new, and takai is expensive):

kuruma wa atarashii.

kuruma wa takai.

kuruma was atarashikute takai.

Here, atarashii needs to modified to be atarashikute to be correct. (Both takai and atarashii are "i" adjectives, and I'll just skip the "na" adjective case).

2) In English, it is usual to say

I don't think it is cold.

This may be in response to a question about the weather, and the speaker indicates, in their opinion, it is not cold.

In Japanese, the negation would occur on the adjective:

samukunai to omoimasu.

Which would translate to "I think it is not cold."

3) In English, all the verbs in a sequence are conjugated to the same tense. For example, a description of my morning might be:

This morning, I got up at 7, ate breakfast, drank coffee, and went to work.

In this sentence, all the verbs (got up, ate, drank, went) are in past tense.

In Japanese, only the last verb is in past tense. The other verbs are in "te" form, which is related to past tense but is not past tense.

kesa, shichi ji ni okite, asa gohan o tabete, koohii o nonde, kaisha ni ikimashita.

Here, the te forms of the verbs are used (okiru, to get up; taberu, to eat; nomu, to drink), and only the last verb is in past tense (ikimashita, polite past of iku, to go).

As much as I enjoyed class, I look forward to a break. I'm not sure when then next class will be taught - sensei usually waits for critical mass so it could be several months.