Many people ask me if I teach every day, to which the answer is simply this: No. I teach classes at Hirosaki High School only on Mondays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, I sometimes have school visits to other schools as a guest English teacher. I haven’t done that yet, though, so I can’t comment on that. However, whether not I have class, I am in the school for at least 8 hours every day. So the logical follow-up question is, what do I do with all that time there? Well, of course (as you read before) I make up lesson plans. But because I teach the same lessons with the JTE to many different classes, I only have to come up with a few activities and then use them over and over with different students. So, I haven’t really answered your question yet. What do I do with all that extra time? The answer is: study Japanese, of course! So, I figured this might be a good time to briefly introduce you to the language, since I think most of you reading this blog wouldn’t do so in your spare time. Learning Japanese, as an English-speaker has its easier points, which are nice but few, and its more difficult points, which are numerous. First, the easy points:
- EVERY SINGLE WORD in Japanese is made up from a relatively small set of syllables, and the pronounciation of these syllables is consistant. So, for example, every syllable that ends in an “a” sound is ALWAYS pronounced “ah”: “nah”, “kah”, “rah” etc. This makes it very easy to pronounce most words, because we have almost all those sounds in English already. You won’t run across something like this: “hajtagrfroff” and have to pronounce it. It’s usually very easy: “Ta-ka-mu-ra” (pronounced “tah-kah-moo-rah”) or “To-mo-da-chi” (pronounced “toe-moe-dah-chee”). The only more difficult sounds are those like this: “ryo” and “tsu”. However, once you’ve got them, there are no more difficulties.
- Japanese is not really tonal. I say not really because obviously there is SOME tone to the phrases, but it is almost duo-tone: either up a bit or down a bit. I don’t have to worry about saying the wrong word because my tones weren’t in order, usually. There are a few exceptions, just like how in English “dessert” and “desert” rely mostly on the stress to get it right.
- Most verb conjugation is consistant. Unlike French and English, which love their irregular verbs, Japanese only has 2 verbs that are conjugated irregularily: to do and to come. Once you’ve gotten those down, which is still very easy, you have what you need to conjugate any verb. That’s not to say it’s always easy to do it on-the-fly, but rather if you follow the pattern, you’ll get it right.
- For the purposes of speaking, Japanese usually requires less words to make a grammatically-correct sentence than English. For example, in Japanese “itta”, which means “went”, is a perfectly acceptable full sentence for “I went there.” This is assuming that both the speaker and listener were already talking about a certain place. This often makes the burden of creating a sentence much easier.
How for the hard parts:
- Reading and writing. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Here’s a quick explanation of how it works:
Japanese has 3 character sets that they use. 2 are phoenetic (like an alphabet) and 1 is symbolic. The 2 phoenetic sets are “hiragana” and “katakana”. Each set contains 46 characters, and they look like this:
Hiragana: 
Katakana: 
As you can see, hiragana is more curvy, while katakana is a bit more ridged. As I mentioned, these characters are all phoenetic. So for the first example, 
is always pronounced “tah”, 
is always pronounced “be” (as in “bed”), 
is always pronounced “moe”, and 
is always pronounced “no”. Altogether, it is “ta-be-mo-no”, which means “food”. This character set is used for native words. In the second character set, we have “
which is “su”, 
which is “pe” (as in “pet”), 
which is “ee”, and 
which is “n” (the ONLY non-vowel syllable in Japanese). Together it is “su-pe-ee-n” or, when pronounced quickly and properly, “spain”. This character set is used mostly for foreign words. After having memorized both character sets of 92 characters total (and many are just variations of each other), you can write out any word in Japanese phoenetically. This is the same with English: if you know all 26 letters, you can spell out any word. The main difference is that in English we have weird and inconsitant spellings for things, while Japanese is consistant, as mentioned before. However, anyone who has actually ever SEEN Japanese would quickly notice that they don’t spell out everything phoenetically. They spell out some things phoenetically, but mostly use a lot of Chinese characters, called “kanji”, to replace them. For example:
Which is pronounced “nihongo wo benkyou suru” and means “I study Japanese” turns into:
As you can see, this doesn’t look the same at all except for 
in the middle and 
at the end. This means that even knowing all the phoenetic characters, you’d still essentially illiterate, since the meaningful words 
which means “Japanese” and 
which means “study”, are unreadable.
For those who are curious and have Japanese script installed on their computer:
- 日 means “sun or day”
- 本 means “origin”
- 語 means “langauge”
- 日 + 本 (“sun” + “origin”) = 日本 (“Japan”)
- 日本 + 語 (“Japan” + “language”) = 日本語 (“Japanese”)
It is said that in order to read a normal Japanese newspaper, you must know about 2,000 of these characters, which is no small undertaking. As you can see, simply having a large enough “palette” to make sense of it all is a bit over-whelming for beginners. To make things more difficult, the pronounciation of the combined words is not consistant. Usually, for each symbol, there are at least 2 or 3 different ways you could pronounce it, depending on the context. So even if you know all the symbols, that doesn’t mean you would know how to pronounce a new word. At the same time, there IS an advantage to these thousands of characters, and that is: if you recognize them, you can guess what the word means, even if you have never seen it before! For example, let’s say I know that “今” means “now” and that “日” means “sun or day”. If I see a new word “今日”, it could either mean “now sun” or “now day”. Now day? It probably means “today”! And then you ask your Japanese friend “does this mean ‘today’?” and they say “Yeah, of course it does. Duh.” And you do a victory lap. This has happened to me a number of times so far, and it’s exciting every time. Oh, and also, they don’t use spaces in Japanese, so you just have to kind of know where one word stops and the next begins. Mericfully, they DO use punctuation.
However, even if you know all the thousands of kanji in existance by heart, you are still missing one important thing: grammar- that is, how sentences are formulated. Which brings me to the second difficult point of learning Japanese:
- Grammar!!! More specifically, the word order. The word order of a Japanese sentence is often VERY different than that of an English sentence. Here’s an example (without kanji):
If I translated this sentence word-for-word and directly into English, it would look like this:
“friend make whether-or-not worried am”
Before your mind explodes, let me turn it into a meaningful English sentence:
“I am worried whether or not I will make any friends.”
As you can see, not only do the words have to be COMPLETELY re-arranged to make sense, but I also had to ADD the words “I”, “will” and “any” to make it complete. This means direct translation from one language to another very difficult. With French, it’s easy, because you can almost do it word-for-word, save for some exceptions (for example, in French the adjective comes after the noun, so “car red” instead of “red car”). Not only does one learning Japanese have to worry about word order, but ALSO the words that they use at all. For example the following:
Directly translates to:
“went thing exists?”
But the meaning is:
“Have you ever gone (there)?”
As you can see, even if you know the right words AND you know the order to put them in, you might have to completly change the set of words you are using anyway just to say the correct thing.
- Finally, one of the other major obstacles in learning Japanese is the idea of politeness levels. In Japanese, you speak differently depending on whom you are speaking to. By different, I mean the way you conjugate your verbs, which verbs you use, which particles you use, etc. If you are speaking to someone with whom you are not well-acquainted, you must speak in “keigo”, which is the polite form of Japanese. If you are speaking to a superior (your boss or a customer at your store) you must speak in a manner that humbles yourself and elevates them. And if you are speaking with family in friends, you use “jisho-kei” or “plain form” to talk to each other. Plain form uses a lot less words per sentence than polite form, in general. This means that not only do you have to learn multiple words for the same thing (there are 3 normal ways to refer to yourself, each one with a different politeness), but you have to learn how to conjugate them differently based on the context. Also, when plain form is and isn’t okay is hard to decipher sometimes.
Although I could continue on the finer points of the Japanese language that I’ve learned so far, I’ll spare you the headache. But I hope you now see now only why Japanese is so hard to learn for an English-speaker, but also why English is so hard for Japanese-speakers to learn as well. Any Japanese person you meet who speaks English well (like Masashi and Yuuko) is exerting an INCREDIBLE amount of mind-shifting from their native language just to say what they want to say. They are obviously very smart and work hard.
But because I love mental challenges (why do you think I took programming?), I’ve decided, with the encouragement of my peers, to take the JLPT. The JLPT stands for “Japanese Language Proficiency Test”, which is done every year all over Japan. This year it is on December 6th, 2009. There are 4 levels for this test: 1, 2, 3, and 4. 4 is the easiest, while 1 means that you are fluent. Because I learned some Japanese years before I even came here, I already knew most of the material in level 4, so I’ve decided to go for level 3 instead. Even if I don’t pass that test, the amount of material I’ll be studying in preparation is sure to improve my Japanese abilities anyway. Luckily, for that test, it is only reading and listening, and then multiple-choice vocabulary, grammar and comprehension answers. You don’t have to write an essay in Japanese or have an interview or anything, which takes some pressure off. Even so, I need to be able to recognize 300 kanji (those Chinese characters), 1,500 Japanese words, and tons of grammical structures to properly put together Japanese sentences. Wish me luck! 
So, that’s it for now! Long post, hope you didn’t get bored! And if you are bored, why not try and find out what the kanji character at the top of this post means?