Learning Japanese

I first studied Japanese in junior high school for three years. At the end of that time I could read and write [kana] (hiragana and katakana) and around 40 kanji. Now, 16 years and two trips to Japan later… I’m pretty much at the same level, even though I’ve taken several short courses in the interim. My broader understanding of the language has improved but my speaking, writing and reading are more or less where they were in high school.

As I learn more about the language I’m convinced that Japanese is the English of Asia. Not so much for its ubiquity in the region but rather for its tendency to be a linguistic bower-bird. Like English, Japanese happily assimilates and mutates foreign words with little regard for consistency. This makes it endlessly fascinating but also very difficult.

Fortunately, I’m currently working in Sydney at a Japanese owned company that offers free language classes. Through these classes I met a number of collegues who are also studying Japanese and who have managed to get a lot further with it than I have. One of the best tips they gave me was putting me onto James W. Heisig’s book “Remembering the Kanji”.

Remembering the Kanji

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the most daunting aspect of learning Japanese is its written form. All Western languages I can think of use a small alphabet of 20 to 30-odd characters that are composed sequentially to indicate how a word is to be pronounced. In constrast, the Japanese use over 2000 ideograms borrowed from Chinese, each representing a different concept. Learning to recognise the concept each of these complicated little pictures (some involving 20 or more strokes) is the key to reading Japanese.

The main “trick” to Heisig’s book “Reviewing the Kanji (Vol. I)” is a simple one: separate the learning of the meaning of the kanji from their pronounciation (which, from my limited understanding, is as bad as English). The meaning of each kanji is remembered through small stories which link the component meanings to the composed. For example, the kanji for “sun” (日) and “eye” (目) are combined to form “risk” (冒) through the story “looking at the sun with the naked eye is a risk”. It’s like the way complicated English words (e.g., “mankind”) derive their meaning from their parts (e.g., “mank” and “ind” - apologies to Steven Wright).

While the stories can get pretty tenuous - a magic wand on top of a sunflower is “eminent” - it’s surprising how rapidily the associations can form in your mind. Using this “build your own etymology” approach I’m picking up more new kanji faster than I thought possible. In the last couple of weeks I’ve probably spent around 3 to 4 hours studying the book and can safely say I’ve (re-)remembered more than 50 kanji.

The book has an immensely useful and beautifully designed sister site called Reviewing the Kanji. Each kanji in the book has a “frame number” which used for cross-referencing. As you learn new kanji you enter their frame number into the site and it creates a virtual flashcard for you. When you’re ready to test yourself the site flashes the meaning of randomly selected cards. Once you think you have written the corresponding kanji correctly you hit the space bar to check your answer. If you get it wrong the card is put aside and you can later add a story to help you remember it better. Correctly remembering a kanji moves it to the next “box” and schedules it for later review in a system that encourages long-term retention. As an extra bonus, the site has a strong community focus, allowing its hundreds of users to share kanji stories and discuss tips in its forums.

Japanese and the Mac

As you may have noticed, I’ve also discovered how to set up computer to accept Japanese input. The “International” part of OS X’s System Preferences comes with a lot of support for non-English languages. To set up my machine for Japanese input I simply went to the Input Menu tab and checked the Hiragana and Katakana boxes under the Kotoeri group as well as the “Show input menu in menu bar” option at the bottom of the window. This last option displays a small icon in the menu bar which, when selected drops down a list of input modes including Hiragana, Katakana and whatever your default language is (in my case, Australian).

Once in Hiragana input mode I simply start writing Japanese words on a standard keyboard in romaji (e.g., “watashi”) and it gets converted as you type into hiragana (e.g., わたし). Words are underlined as you write them and at any point you can press the down arrow to display a list of kanji that are pronounced the same way (e.g., 私). It’s just like predictive text for mobiles but much less annoying. As an extra bonus, pressing “Apple-Space” switches between the last two input modes you’ve used (e.g., Hiragana and Australian).

私の名まえはマークです。日本語べんきょをします。