When an engineer learns Japanese (Part 1)
Presenting the unnecessary analysis that is bound to happen when an engineer tries to learn an infamously “difficult” language.
Learning a new language can be an incredible exercise to your brain. It feels like levelling up and upgrading your mental resources to activate new parts of your grey matter.
And Japanese (Nihongo 日本語) is said to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. Here I share my experiences and impressions of trying to learn Japanese from scratch through a 4 month intensive course at a language school and through daily life.
Some basic information about the language and the Japanese writing system (Skip if you are already familiar with this)
The Japanese writing system has three character sets: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji.
- Hiragana and Katakana (collectively referred to as kana), each with 46 basic characters (and 71 including diacritics), are syllabic or phonetic scripts. That is, each character represents a syllable such as “ma” or “ku”. They’re purely phonetic, like Hindi or Malayalam i.e., each letter represents a sound. You ‘read aloud’ the words written using kana just by reading aloud the letters in it.
- In the current Japanese writing system, Hiragana is generally used for Japanese words when they are not written in kanji, and for all the grammatical glue such as conjugations and particles.
- Katakana is usually used for words loaned from another language and for onomatopoeia (The language words used for denoting sounds around us, like “bow-bow”, or “meow”, etc.). There is no strict rule though, so we can also see katakana used for other purposes as well, such as emphasis.
- Kanji or the Chinese character set is the most commonly dreaded part of Japanese, just because of its sheer number. Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn around 2000 kanjis which are necessary for daily life. It is basically ideographic writing, that is, each character represents a concept or an idea. For example, 川 (kawa) means “river” while 朝 (asa) means “morning”. And these characters, evolved from drawings. Each character also has one or more readings (the kun-yomi and on-yomi), and the correct one depends on which word the kanji is part of. Many kanji can also act as stand-alone words like the examples above.
For more details, please refer to the Wikipedia article on Japanese Writing system.
My impressions
First of all I would like to share some observations on the various dimensions of learning a new (second,or third) language:
Basic components of a language:
- Letters and sounds (which enables you to read out aloud from a written form of the language)
- Vocabulary and its mapping with meanings (which will allow you to understand a word when you hear/read it)
- Grammar (which will let you understand what people are actually saying and allows you to communicate with them. Also applies to reading and writing.)
Other nuances:
- Pronunciation and accent
- Knowing to talk according to situational vocabulary and the etiquettes of the language
What we understand by ‘reading’ has two dimensions, vocalising (or being able to read out aloud) and understanding what it means. As seen above, being able to read out loud doesn’t mean you will be able to understand what you are voicing. It falls in a different domain. To break it down even further, the process of reading a word in a phonetic language like Malayalam or Hindi or phonetic scripts like Kana looks somewhat like this:
Even when you don’t read out loud, but in your mind; you are doing the same process. This is called subvocalization. People who propagate speed reading techniques teach you how to speed up the process of subvocalization(Ref).
So now, my experience:
- Letters and Vocabulary : Learning the 2x46 alphabet system of kana and expanding the vocabulary was not as bad as it initially looked like. It is just a matter of flexing the memory muscles a little bit. When you have regular exposure to the language, it becomes more natural and easier.
- The sounds: Sound wise, learning Japanese is basically a downsampling for us speakers of Dravidian languages — Japanese language has far fewer vowels and consonants. Since there are fewer sounds, producing those sounds is not much of a challenge. However, the difficulty lies in other factors. Despite the lesser number of sounds, it is harder to catch up with pronunciation and to follow a natural length Japanese conversation.
- Distinguishing words : In Japanese writing, since they do not separate out the words with spaces sometimes, it can be particularly difficult if it is a ‘kana-only’ sentence. (It is still easier to differentiate between words if it is a bunch of kanji separated by hiragana particles and conjunctions). In conversations, often when you listen to Japanese, you can hear a series of flatly said sounds without being able to distinguish the borders of a word. Many a times I have to tell people to please repeat the words slowly for me to catch up (if at all those are words I know).
- Japanese is a pitch accent. English is a stress accent. Listen to the stresses in this snippet of British English and American English (0:35 to 1:10):
And now listen to the Pitch accent of Japanese in this link. Here intonation matters a lot.
Seriously can you differentiate ? I cannot. Neither my ears’ hearing nor my vocal resources are fine-tuned to differentiate or replicate this properly.
The highs and lows of the dreaded Kanji
Many people claim that kanji is far more convenient than hiragana once you learn it. This is why: the process of reading a kanji word is as simple as:
Compared to the process involved in reading kana, you don’t really need to know how to read it out loud. It’s like a cognitive shortcut for reading. Most of my Japanese friends admit to not knowing how to read some rarely used kanji’s out aloud. And sometimes they don’t know the kanji for a word either too. They just type it out in hiragana and computer converts it to Kanji.
It is said that the normal English vocabulary of an average person is around 10,000. This is also the vocabulary requirement of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) N1 level. On a whole, the neural circuitry of remembering the mappings of around 2000 characters to its meanings looks far easier than remembering how 71 sounds form around 10,000 words and then their mappings to what they mean.
One of the very interesting ways I try to learn kanji is by observing the station names and their meanings while travelling by metro(some of my classmates also used to do the same). Many places have interesting names and I try imagining why that place got named hence (like Kozhikode? Coimbatore? Hyderabad? ). For example, the Kanjis in my station Fujigoaka (藤が丘) stand for Wisteria(藤) hill(丘). And when my Japanese friend Kumiko explained that meaning to me we started wondering if there was after all a hill of Wisteria flowers in the area. And we ended up discovering some history about the area!
The kanjis for Fuji of Mt. Fuji(富士) and Fuji(藤) in Fujigaoka are not the same. That brings me to another thing that complicates the matters even further — a kanji has different pronunciations and many kanji have similar pronunciations!
…To Be Continued…
Read part 2 of the story here.
📝 Read this story later in Journal.
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