Japanese

[noahgibbs]

I've been taking Japanese lessons for about six months now, as part of the new job.

Sometimes I can *feel* my brain protesting the strain of doing something. I'm making good progress, as gaijin learning Japanese go. But as my brain tries to decode simple utterances like "between what time and what time is the bank open?" (ginkoo wa nanji kara nanji made des ka?) I can definitely tell: this is not what the old brain wanted to be doing this morning.

Similarly, I can write okay in Japanese once I've figured out the syllables. But I can feel my brain strain to come up with the right bits of hiragana and katakana at any speed.

(Not kanji, of course. I'm only six months in. I know, like, two kanji.)

Comments

[queen-elvis.livejournal.com]

Three alphabets is a little much to ask of non-native speakers, ESPECIALLY when one of them is kanji. (I took a Japanese class in 2003 and have forgotten almost everything.)

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Kanji's gonna be tough. Luckily I'm mostly interacting on a computer, where the cognitive load of thousands of commonly-used kanji is a slightly less imposing thing... I'm still gonna be *writing* like a kid, but it won't keep me from participating in conversation :-)

whee

[(Anonymous)]

from Pam :-)

Kanji is not an alphabet. Those are full on words. But they do have components just like alphabet (and I'm not talking individual characters, I'm talking the components inside the characters) but there are far more than 26 of these components. I'm guessing I maybe know 100-200 building blocks that make up the characters?

Anyway I feel like you said you were mostly learning reading and writing and less oral communication? I really really like Benny Lewis's language hacking blog though I think it's less easy to navigate than five years ago. And he generally focuses on oral communication because that's his area of interest. Personally I prefer his articles to everyone else's articles, so you might check them out, starting at the bottom of this first page.

http://www.fluentin3months.com/?s=japanese

There's several good apps (I don't know if DuoLingo has Japanese) but as far as oral communication, he says nothing beats actual practice with a Human Being, and if talking to native speakers is too stressful, there are places you can find other Japanese language learners to practice speaking with who will also be slow and patient. And I like his philosophy about language learning which is extremely non-traditional and eschews perfection especially in the beginning.

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