FIGURE 2a: The Devil's language?
2.2.2 The big written challenge
Overwhelmingly the single biggest challenge for most Western students lies in the writing system. As you will see in detail in Part Four, it is one of the most complicated writing systems in the world. To read a newspaper you will need to know not only the two phonetic kana scripts of around 50 symbols each, but also around 2,000 kanji, each typically with two or three readings which may be based either on ancient Chinese or native Japanese, or in most cases both. It takes considerable time and gray matter to remember meanings and readings, and then on top of that, whicn readings are used in which circumstances.
This contrasts strongly with French, for example: native English speakers take a short time to learn correspondence patterns between spoken sound and Roman script, plus a few accent-signs, and they are able to read and write very quickly almost anything they speak or hear in that language.
As cold comfort for Western students, even Asian learners who are already familiar with Chinese characters are only partly advantaged by their prior knowledge. They are generally able to understand simple signs written in Japanese characters, such as for "Exit" or "No Smoking"; they can probably make an educated guess as to the basic gist of some formal Japanese texts heavy in characters, especially if there are lots of nouns (even though character forms nowadays often differ to some extent between Japanese and Chinese). However, for further understanding they would still have to learn the kana scripts, since the characters are used only for stems of words and not endings such as tenses, nor for particles. And they would also obviously have to learn the rules of grammar.
In addition, they would find the pronunciation different, even when it was meant to be a "Chinese" reading. For example, the characters for China, are in Chinese spelled Zhongguo and pronounced rather like jong-guwo, but in Japanese are spelled Chūgoku and pronounced chew-gockoo. (We will explain the letter ū in Part Two.)
Also, in some cases the same characters have evolved rather different meanings in each country, and likewise, some compounds do not necessarily have the same meaning in Chinese and Japanese. A classic example is combining the characters for "hand" and "paper." In Japanese this means "letter" (correspondence), but in Chinese means "toilet paper"! So, in some regards, prior knowledge of Chinese characters—or at least their Chinese pronunciations—might even be considered counter-productive.
FIGURE 2b: Now then, which one should I choose?
So, what can you do to lessen the challenge? First of all, as suggested in the previous section, you can postpone learning the writing system, maybe even indefinitely. This would mean that when it comes to having to write something in Japanese you would be stuck with romaji (or nothing). Most Japanese can manage to read romaji, if slowly, though few are really comfortable with it, so you would not be terribly popular.
A far better alternative is to communicate in the kana scripts (or even just one of these), which can be learned in just a few dozen hours or so as both kana scripts are based on the same sounds in the same sequence, comprise only a few strokes, and have only 46 basic symbols each.
An even better way, for those prepared to make the next step, is to learn a few basic kanji, such as the 80 that are taught in the First Grade at elementary school. These are generally quickly learned (again within a few dozen or so hours), easy to remember (many being simple pictographs), comprise only a few strokes, and are among the most commonly used. This means you will get maximum output of communicative ability relative to the input of time and effort. Unless you are a professional who requires a full command of the written language, few Japanese will think badly of you if you have only a very limited ability to write kanji. They too know the challenges involved! On the contrary, they will respect the fact that you have made an effort to communicate in something approaching proper written Japanese. Of course, when it comes to reading, you will still not be able to read newspapers, or indeed anything but Grade One elementary school texts! However, to get to that newspaper stage is a bit of a quantum leap, and everyone understands that.
If you want to go further, a good way is to concentrate on learning kanji passively rather than actively, that is, simply to recognize them rather than write them. Many students try to learn actively each kanji they encounter, which is a great strain on the memory cells, and they all too often end up after several years being able to recognize something like 1,000 and being able to write about 700 of those. It would be far better, after the same period of time spent studying, for you to be able to recognize all 2,000, even if you could only write a few hundred. The key thing is to understand what is put before you, and Japanese written material typically involves a liberal use of kanji, so you need to be able to know their meanings or at least be able to look them up quickly in a dictionary. You can use a smaller number of kanji, writing words in kana when you don't know the kanji for them.
And, when it comes to using a kanji dictionary, it will be much quicker if you can just make sure you remember at least one reading for each, since with modern dictionaries this will usually enable you to look up that kanji more quickly than trying to work out stroke count or radical component—a radical being the key element in a kanji, the traditional way of listing and searching for them. (Of course, this doesn't work for characters you encounter for the first time, unless you recognize a phonetic component.)
One plus about the kanji script is that, once you understand the core meanings, you can actually make fairly accurate guesses when you encounter new kanji compound words. This is not always the case with newly encountered words in English, unless you are familiar with Latin and Greek. Some advanced students even feel that speed-reading can be easier in Japanese than in English. For example, the meaning of the English word "glacier" is not immediately apparent to those encountering it for the first time, whereas the Japanese term hyoga involves the two kanji for "ice" and "river"—much easier to understand, provided you know the core kanji meanings.
2.2.3 The strangely worded challenge
The second major challenge is the lack of familiarity with much of the vocabulary, meaning that it is in that sense "strange" to the typical English speaker. If the English student of French or Spanish hears or sees the word liberté or libertad for the first time they would almost certainly understand this straightaway as "liberty," or similarly the German frei as "free." By contrast, the Japanese for both "liberty" and "free" is jiyū. That is, there is no clue for the English speaker.
Jiyū is actually a Chinese-derived word, one of many that have become an integral part of Japanese since the introduction of Chinese script many centuries ago. But pure Japanese words are no more helpful. For example, English cat-lovers would soon overcome language barriers in identifying a French chat, Spanish gato, or German Katze. They might need more time, however, to become familiar with a Japanese neko.
FIGURE 2c: Answer me a riddle
| "I'm not a Spanish gato | "What am I? |
| Or an English cat. | I'm a Japanese NEKO, |
| I'm not a German Katze, | And I'm very proud of that! |
| And not a French chat." | —And I'm famous too!"* |
* I am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru) is one of Japan's best-known novels, written in 1905 by Natsume Soseki. (Wagahai is an old word for "I"; wa is a subject-marker; de aru means "am.")
It is true that you don't have much control over the vocabulary the other party uses, though many Japanese people, recognizing the obvious fact that you are foreign, will often make a special effort to use loan words that they assume you will probably be familiar with. And certainly when it comes to speaking Japanese yourself, because Japanese has in recent times absorbed