Japanese Language Learning

Hello!

Not too much to write about this week but maybe I will share some of my recent experience with learning Japanese.

Even though learning goes slowly, I do notice progress.

The hard part about learning is the initial inability to read due to there being three types of Japanese written characters - katakana, hiragana and kanji. Other languages, like Spanish or French, use roughly 26 roman characters (like a,b,c,d etc.) which makes reading for those languages much easier.

Katakana and Hiragana both use 46 basic characters (92 total) then there are over 2000+ kanji symbols that a fully educated Japanese person is supposed to know.

At this stage, I can read pretty much all hiragana characters. I still struggle a little bit with katakana as it is not used as frequently and there are some characters that look very similar.

For instance, these katakana characters cause many Japanese learners trouble - ソ (Japanese sound "so") and ン (Japanese sound "n") and シ (Japanese sound "shi," sounds like "she" in English) and ツ (Japanese sound "tsu," sounds almost like "two" in English).

Put them side by side - ソ ン シツ - the first two and last two look very similar to one another which makes it difficult to figure out which one you are looking at. Especially when you see a word like パン (pronounced like "pan" which means "bread" in Japanese) or a word like ソース.

ソース is the Japanese word for sauce - it sounds like the English word but with Japanese pronunciation it turns into something like saying "so" plus something like that sounds like the name "Sue" so like saying So-Sue.

So if you look at パン and ソース in isolation, it is difficult to figure out the ソ and ン part because they look so similar. But from looking at the letters around it (パ and ス), plus repeated exposure to the words, and seeing those words within context helps you figure out what you are reading.

For example, you see パン and you are standing outside of a bakery, you are more likely to figure out that is "pan" or "bread". Whereas, you are in a restaurant and you see ソース on what looks like a sauce bottle, then you know what letter you are looking at.

You would also eventually come to learn that it would be very strange to see a katakana word start with "ン" (the "n" sound), so if you are seeing it at the start of a word it is more than likely ソ and the "so" sound.

If you see words that you are unfamiliar with containing ソ or ン without any context, it is difficult to figure out what word you are reading. To help in these situations, there are some visualization tricks to use.

For ソ, one I learned is that this one looks like a person's face saying the word "so" with a crooked smile - the small stroke on the left points a little more straight down which you can imagine as an eyeball and the longer part from left to right is the person's crooked smile going up.

Yeah, I know this might not make sense - it is hard to describe in writing. There is a whole webpage here that talks about different visualizations to learn katakana characters - https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/. This page uses a different visualization for that character than the one I learned.

Keep in mind, though, that the visualization is usually just a "crutch" to get you started. Over time with repeated exposure to the characters, you start to recognize the letters without using the visualizations.

You also get used to words and usually see them within context (like I mentioned with パン above) so you end up not needing to read each individual character to know what it means.

Overall, the similarities between the characters ソ, ン, シ, and ツ are not a huge deal, it is just something interesting that you run into while learning Japanese.

And this is just katakana, which makes up a small part of the Japanese written language. The majority of writing (that I see) is hiragana combined with kanji characters. For example - 私は学生です (I am a student).

私は学生です - the red parts are kanji characters whereas the black parts are hiragana characters.

I could write more about kanji, but I will save that for a future week.

Until next time,

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