Kanji Tree

I still haven't caught a fish.  Let's just get that out of the way up front.  I still haven't caught a fish.  I actually saw some fish at my local place though.  They were jumping around like madmen, flip flopping all over the place trying to escape a predator.  The reason I know they were trying to escape a predator was because I saw said predator also jump out of the water, presumably chasing the smaller fish - possibly showing off.  Hard to tell without asking.

So there are definitely fish out there, now all I need to do is catch them.  I've bought some floats so I'm going to try float fishing next.  I'm going to shell out the 5 quid for some spam (bleurgh) and try using that next.  I'm loathe to use fish, crab or other sea food because there are few enough fish left in the sea as it is - using fish to catch other fish sits poorly with me.  Besides, if I use all the fish for bait, there will be no fish left to catch.

Can't argue with that infallible logic.

I'm moving onto the next level of Japanese classes soon.  It turns out Japanese is a difficult language to study, particularly for westerners.  Everything that could possible be different is, making the entire exercise a frustrating and slow process of retraining decades of thought processes.

Yeah...

This is a picture of my Kanji tree.  I think it looks more like seaweed, so I'm calling it my Kanji Kaiso.　漢字海草。 That's probably wrong, but whatever.

This represents so many hours of my life that I don't want to think about.

Each card is a word.  Each word has an English translation and the Japanese Kanji equivalent.  Kanji is chinese characters that have been repurposed by the Japanese for use in their language.

Each single character can have a few different pronunciations, so one kanji might have up to 4 cards in this monstrosity, each with a different word (as an example of the pronunciations).

As far as I can see, there are two basic ways of learning kanji.  One is to learn a single character and every reading of it, then move onto the next and so on.  This has two advantages.  Firstly, you only need to remember a single kanji when writing and reading, and know all 3 or 4 pronunciations.  This makes reading new words a lot easier, because you can puzzle them out with the different sounds, just like in English.

'A,' when read like this is pronounced 'eɪ,' but can also be read as 'ɑ:,' 'eə,' or 'ɑ:,' depending on the letters around it.  This is a stupid way of making of a language, but that's English for you.

Using this method of kanji learning, you know all the variables of a single character, and can just go through each pronunciation until you get the right one.

There are downsides however.  Firstly, how do you know if you've got the correct pronunciation?  If it's a word you've never seen before, you can probably guess the meaning (each kanji sort of represents an idea, concept, verb, noun etc. so seaweed is literally two kanji, 'sea,' and 'plant,' which combined make seaweed) but the pronunciation is more difficult.  After a while you can intuit what is likely to be correct, but not as a beginner like me.

The second downside is personal.  It is physically impossible for me to learn the kanji this way.  I have spent hours over the course of weeks trying to learn half a dozen kanji in this way.  I do not know why it is so hard for me, but taking sounds in isolation and learning a bunch of different pronunciations for a single character is very difficult.  I can't think of an equivalent situation in English, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's why it's so difficult for me.  It's completely alien.

The second method, and the one I'm having more success with, is learning words.

In this way, instead of learning individual pronunciations, you learn entire words based upon the individual kanji.  Sometimes the words are the individual kanji, with an extra character or two afterwards.  More often however, they are strings of kanji.

This has a gargantuan downside that is immediately obvious.  I am basically trying to learn a dictionary.  This is patently stupid.  Unfortunately, it's the only way I can even begin to retain the information.

The other downside is recall speed. 

When reading this, you won't be consciously thinking of the words you're reading - the eyes present information to your brain, bypassing a ton of active thinking areas, presenting the processed information for your consideration with little fuss.

When you're learning, every single word is a struggle.  Every single word has to be considered by various parts of the brain, and processed, and then presented, which takes ages.  Eventually you start understanding a few words here and there on an innate level, and you can read a little more quickly, at a slightly more advanced level.  This continues until you're (theoretically) fluent.

If you learn individual words, really learn those words properly, this is an enormous boon when reading.  You can read passages much more quickly than someone who has to puzzle out sounds for each word as they go.  BUT, when you come across a new words, you have to reach into memory, pull up an entire word with that single kanji in it, break off the useless information, take that sound you've just found, then apply it to the new word.  This takes the grey matter equivalent of an eternity and is a pain in the ass.  To make matters worse, you have a 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 chance of picking the incorrect pronunciation, which makes the entire process even slower.

I suppose the two methods are basically indexing versus some kind of web.

If you can file away a neat, ordered list of sounds directly related to each individual kanji, you have them stored away to pull up whenever you need them.  But they won't be as fast as a native speaker, until you've used them enough to assimilate them.

If you are a moron like me and throw words into your brain blender wholesale, you'll pick up some words more intuitively, and given enough time be able to puzzle together the semblance of normality through the jumbled web of connections.  But it will take forever.

Oh, and writing uses a completely different part of the brain, so knowing how to read a kanji != to knowing how to write a kanji.  It also takes me longer to learn how to write a kanji than read one...

AAAAARGGGGHHH!!!

Good God, Is This What Being an Adult Feels Like?

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.