Relearn Japanese

Annoyed at myself for not keeping with it after Uni.

This goal may take a while, but will be well worth doing. Japanese is a beautiful language and fun to speak!

ひらがな　カタカナ　漢字も！

Oooooh man…it’s been 6 years since high school. I surprisingly still retain a lot of it. Today I made out hiragana and katakana flash cards. I wrote all my hiragana and katakana twenty times each. Tomorrow: more practice with the basics and pick up on some vocabulary. From there, repeat and add some kanji. Once I’m pretty fluent with my letters again I’m considering picking up that Rosetta Stone software. Anybody else tried that yet? The commercials are quite persuasive. Once I’m up to speed again I think I’ll write a letter to my old high school sensei and ask for a letter of recommendation for college(in Nihongo of course). :)

Well, it turns out that I qualify for entry into the 6 month advanced Japanese course at my university. It will begin mid year, so I have a few months to brush up on my skills… Very excited!

Still haven’t looked into advanced classes – should really do that…

On the way back to our hotel in Hiroshima, I treated the girls and me (David declined) to soft ice cream at a convenience store. There were 5 flavors offered: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, sure; and two Japanese flavors, green tea and black sesame. The place was manned by two young women, probably in their early 20s. I already had a somewhat jolly conversation with them trying to identify what goma (= black sesame) was.

After making two fine soft ice cream cones for the girls, the one they made for me was too long and was in danger of flopping over, so, with lots of giggling and carrying on, they put a little mini cone on top to hold it in place.

I said to my daughters that it was like a condom (it really did sort of resemble a condom), which produced laughter. I then attempted to repeat the joke to the clerks in Japanese, but I didn’t know the word for condom. I gave it another whirl, using a crude word I had learned at one point for male procreative organ, but its pronunciation for English speakers is tricky.

One of the clerks suggested in Japanese that my joke would only work in English. No, I said, I thought it would work in Japanese, and in my spotty vocabulary I tried again. I indicated that the ice cream cone was a “man thing” and that the mini-cone on top would be put on “for safety”. The shop girls immediately started shrieking with laughter at my sukabe joke as we left the store.

Of course in two weeks, I am not going to get the language up to where it was after living her for more than a year. But by being forced to use the language over and over again, and having nothing better to do on the train but practice my reading skills on the advertising, it’s amazing how much has come back.

I feel like I really do know all the kana now, solidly, and a good number of basic kanji are back under my belt. I had tea with the o-sho-san (so many stories yet to tell!), and although he speaks zero English, we were able to communicate.

I don’t think I’m going to formally study Japanese further, for so now, on my second to the last day here in this country, I am marking this one as done.

It surprises me how much it matters to be completely immersed into the language. I was thrilled to have so many characters come back. All the kana now is completely automatic – like, I could tell we were at Ueno station without having to see the romaji.

My interaction with the hotel clerk in just 24 hours was so much less stumbling. I used to be able to live my life in Japanese, never using English all day. I do not know how long it would take me to return to that level, but it is gratifying to find that it has not completely evaporated.

1. Find an on-line tutor to boost my vocabulary – I’ve forgotten a lot of words.

2. Recapture at least all my kana, and it would be nice to feel like I have a reading (if not a writing) vocab of at least 200 kanji.

3. (Re-)Learn words I really didn’t need to know before that I’ll need to know for our trip. Some of these are like the words “younger daughter” and “older daughter”, which are much more important to me now that I actually have two daughters. Or “hairy”, to describe my husband :-) Other words are travel-related: reservation, passport, etc.