For the past month and a half I've been back in school, formally learning the language I've muddled with for the past few years. I've never really sat down to learn Japanese properly, which is a sign of my laziness, but also a sign of my financial situation.
Learning is not cheap.
Learning should be cheap, but it is not.
As a result, I've penny pinched my way to Shinjuku Nihongo Gakko. This is not an advertisment for them, but I thought you might be interested in where I've ended up.
I chose them for two reasons. Firstly, they're on my line which means a forty minute ride with no changes, giving me ample opportunity to do some work to and from school. This is great, because a lot of the busy work when learning language is memorisation. There really isn't a lot of logic, problem solving or argument construction when trying to learn a language. This is obvious if you think about it, but you can't argue your way out of a grammatical error until you get into exceptionally high level arguments over the correct usage of obscure particles or whatever the case may be.
Unfortunately, the stuff I loved about studying in university is the construction, deliberation and execution of a well (sometimes not so well) thought out argument that oftentimes ended in me looking like a pillock. For the sake of coming to understand the impetus behind a particular literary trend, I will suffer that indignity.
The astute among you may have come to realise that I am (in a long winded way) saying that language learning is boring.
There is literally no challenge in it. I have to memorise verbs, nouns, adjectives (of two varieties) and a smattering of other stuff, then learn how to put them together. Learning a language is more like learning a bizarre alternative maths, where all the rules are already known and you are told to plug in components to get an already known outcome. The most rewarding part comes when poking at the boundaries and seeing what sticks and what doesn't, which is absolutely infuriating as a teacher, particularly when you're teaching a low level class like mine.
Coming from the other end of the profession, I know how tempting it is for a simple 'BECAUSE IT JUST IS,' to slip out of the mouth without really thinking about it, but to their credit, the teachers do their best to explain their way around the problem.
Being one of the oldest, if not the oldest student, and coming from the workforce, has also had a profound effect on my understanding of the learning experience.
I haven't stopped working. I am working so much. This past month my schedule has been as follows: Wake up. Study. Get on train. Study on train. Study at school. Get on train. Study on train. Get home. Study at home. Make dinner. Study. Clean clothes, then study until bed. Sometimes there's a shower in there.
One of the facets of learning Japanese is learning Chinese too. Their writing system is based on 2 alphabets of their own, and Chinese. It's difficult to explain without spending hours on the who's where's and why's for's, because I'm not sure of the rules myself, but the upshot is that there are literally thousands of characters to learn.
Each one of those characters will have up to four different sounds attached to them. If we're counting, we are already up to very many thousands of sounds and meanings and whatnot. Combining this smorgasbord of characters gets you the words that are used every day.
The Japanese and Chinese will tell you there is logic behind the way the kanji are constructed and subsequently combined, but that's utter bollocks. It's all a hodgepodge of lines and squiggles.
Anyway, I have to learn about 2,000 I think? I'm going for a specific test, and while I have done the research, I can't remember off the top of my head what the requirement is. Those 2,000 will then combine among themselves to give words and meanings and make an entire language. So I'm told.
So far I have about 300 under my belt, from a month or so of trying to memorise them. If you say the meaning, or show me how they are spelled, I will be able to write those 300 kanji, with about a 5% error rate. Reading those kanji is harder, but is what I am focussing on at the moment. Next week, I start on the next 300 and then so on and so forth until I die, or learn the 2,000. There are way more than 2,000, but that's what they decided is the level for competency.
All in all there's a long, long way to go. I've not even mentioned the grammar which is bonkers. How many ways can you conjugate a verb? You would be surprised.
I'll leave that for another post though.