Back to School: Japanese 101

  I was home for the summer, so I thought, “Why not?” I looked up my local junior college; the university enrollment was much too complex, though the college wasn’t a picnic either. An old timer like myself actually prefers going to the Admin Hall, filling in the forms and talking to the receptionists and secretaries. It’s the flirt in me. But today, surrounded by snowflakes and where trigger words are ready to destroy your soul at every turn, everything is online, from the safety of your home because, after all, who wants to interact with people? (Yikes, where’d that come from?? I might be dealing with some residual anger here.)

  Forms uploaded, reviewed, revised, re-sent, I get the code. It’s all about the code. I have power now. I have the code and I'm in the system. I glance at the summer course catalog. What do I feel like taking? There’s beginning guitar, that could be fun. What about tap dancing? I always wanted to move like Sammy. I daydream a bit, then realize that I'm so heavy on my feet that I would sound like a stomping elephant in the back of the class - pass. I see art classes, literature classes, but in the end I opt for Japanese 101. I’m generally good with languages and I like Japan. I’ve been there several times and found it rather difficult to communicate with the locals, even though they all learn English in school, several years in fact, but won’t speak to you for fear of making a mistake. You know, losing face and all. And the further away from Tokyo you go, less and less Romaji is used (that’s those Japanese words spelled out using Latin letters: think of brand names like Toyota, Suzuki, etc..)

  The class is intense: 4 days a week, 2.5 hours a day! I complain but it was a lovely challenge. My brain was working overtime and I needed naps every afternoon to compensate. And boy, is this language difficult. The Romaji I got. But then came the other alphabets: Hiragana - for Japanese words, Katakana - for foreign words, Kanji - old Chinese pictographs. I was floating along fine with the Romaji and the Hiragana but when the other two were added, I think that’s what sank my boat. And unfortunately, all four alphabets are used concurrently in everything from metro signs to movie posters. 

  That was only the alphabet. The structure of the language is quite unique too. I’m used to the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence syntax. Throw in a conjugation or two and I get it. This, this is something different. You don’t really use subject pronouns as comprehension comes via context: so if I’m talking then the implied subject is "I". The subject pronoun “you” is practically nonexistent. If I’m talking to, say, Robert (Robaato-san in Japanese…this was my favorite name and made me giggle every time) then you use his name, in essence saying: “How is Robert today?”, as you are talking to Robert. 

  And conjugations don’t really exist. It’s mainly suffixes that are added to the verbs, which themselves are placed at the end of sentences. I’m so ingrained to find verbs, that every time a sentence was spoken, I’d have to wait until the end of the sentence to find out what was going on but by then I’d forget the beginning of the sentence. 

Example (using Japanese syntax structure): 

Robaato-san, on Thursday, at 4 pm, with Yuki-san, at the cafe, coffee drank. All I would get was Robert ..something.. something.. drinking! 

  So yeah, it was tough. But I enjoyed it. It was a wonderful glimpse into another culture so foreign from my own. Will I continue it and go on to Japanese 102? Nah, I think it’s time for me to tap dance my way up and down that staircase. Maybe learn to sing too!