Today was the first day of the school season (school started on August 17) that I walked to school. It has been much too hot to walk 15 minutes to school, stand at a sunny crosswalk for 30 minutes and then walk back home (uphill!) between 7:00 and 8:00 in the morning and that is why I've been doing my walking at 5:00AM and using the car to get to and from school. This weekend there is a typhoon approaching Japan and so it was too rainy early this morning though the rain has temporarily had a cooling effect so I chose to walk at 7:00 dressed in my sweat-suit of rain gear.
I did study Japanese when I was in college but even when I arrived in Japan after 4 years of study I barely spoke Japanese. When Tetsu and I got married people shook their heads because my Japanese was still so poor and he didn't speak English... What were we ever going to do?! In the early days of marriage I would spend the morning poring over recipes books with a dictionary, spending all afternoon shopping and then cooking. By the time Takumi and Leiya arrived my spoken Japanese was pretty good (I think!) but I remember struggling to read the simplest children's books to the kids and wondering if I'd ever be able to smoothly read the stories. (And it was a blow to the ego when the kids got better at reading than I was). I guess over the years I've studied some and I've become comfortable enough with Japanese to read magazines and craft books.
But writing? Writing Japanese is a horrendous process!!!! There are over 50,000 kanji (Chinese characters) in Japanese plus two easier syllabaries and the syllabaries are about as far as I got!
An example... The bottom right character is part of the word for school... In college I used this huge kanji dictionary and spent hours counting strokes and trying to memorize combinations. Oh dear... even in this example we don't get to the second half of the word for school! That is on the next page... 10 strokes away! Anyway, you get the idea of how hard it is to read Japanese and then to write any of it? Ooh-la-la! That is so beyond me! But over 40 years I have learned to recognize some of the characters and that is why I can choose characters when I write Japanese on my computer...
(photo from the Internet)
The computer for Japanese was the greatest invention! When I first came to Japan I worked at a Christian Center and they published a quarterly newsletter for the prefecture's churches. I was fascinated watching one woman who was the "typist" as she maneuvered and deftly used the moveable type in order to do the printing. It felt like I'd gone backwards in time to the era of Gutenberg type! She'd pick out the tiny metal blocks from slats and slats filled with thousands of other metal blocks and set them in the right order for printing.
And remember, all the blocks are reversed so she'd have to imagine them backwards! I one time asked her what would happen if an earthquake upset all her slats and sent the zillions of blocks to the ground.
"Well, we'd have to buy a new set of blocks. It would take too long to try and set them back into the order I've remembered them."
And I thought I was doing well with the QWERTY typewriting of English!
So I hunt and peck and write my Traffic Safety log and feel somewhat proud of myself. At the beginning I also had asked Tetsu to read through my entries and correct any major mistakes but that ended up putting our marriage to the test (much like a husband trying to teach a wife to drive in the olden days) and now I turn in my log mistakes and all! I'm still employed so it works!
Wow - how hard that must be to learn all of that. The thought horrifies me!!! Memorising all the characters and then learning how to write them correctly must be a nightmare. What age do the children start learning how to read and write??
ReplyDeleteI admire you, I couldn’t do it. Our daughter learnt Mandarin in high school, instead of writing the characters top to bottom, she wrote them backwards, bottom to top. I learnt a German at high school, went to Germany and they couldn’t understand my Australian accent.
ReplyDeleteWell, I am completely and totally impressed! Being able to speak fluently is in itself a hug accomplishment that very few people achieve. I'm also impressed that you find the discipline to do your walking, come what may. This weather is brutal.
ReplyDeleteSo glad I can still say, "wakarimasen". My everyday Japanese is good enough to get in trouble and back out again. I can recognize a lot of kanji and it helps to find places and the like but even those I once could write, I can no longer do easily. There are too many ways to pronounce one character when combined with another that I just give up. Good thing I don't need to write a log... instead I correct my head teacher's English.
ReplyDeleteOh, is that the Nelson dictionary? Mine is from 1976 and very well worn. I spent years and years learning to read Japanese, but my written Japanese is so awful that I, too, rejoiced when it became possible to write using the computer. My ex-husband (Japanese) always made me do the nengajo (New Year's cards) because his own writing was bad and he said that if I did it, relatives would just accept that the writing was sub-par! I still read Japanese fairly well (no trouble with recipes and fiction) but writing.... not if I can possibly help it!
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