“u” is for “uisukii”

Running just a bit behind this week, aren’t I? I assure you there’s a good reason for it. Totally not because I’ve been spending too much time on my computer playing Banished, building virtual settlements. Certainly not. (Okay, maybe I’m a liar.)

Well, in the time I haven’t been engaged in mismanaging the ill-fated citizens of the village Snellstochito, I have been continuing to work on my Japanese. I got through katakana (the other syllabary) on my own and purchased Japanese for Everyone to continue my studies. So far the choice seems sound. In the first chapter, the words for beer, wine, and whiskey were introduced.

I often wonder whether or not my handwriting in Japanese is terrible.

It’s a little bit odd getting back into the swing of homework, now that I’m the one who both assigns and completes it. It’s a strange duality. An odd bonus to all this is a dramatic increase in the amount of handwriting I do on a daily basis. I’m sure I could save the trees and do it all on the computer, but what’s the fun in that? I enjoyed writing my notes and homework out by hand in college and I can’t imagine doing it any other way. The fine art of margin doodles would be lost. Besides, I spend enough time as it is staring at a computer screen.

After reading a recent article by my pen-aficionado friend Chris, I decided I needed a fancy writing pen for my homework. I certainly have no shortage of drawing pens (20 Microns and counting), but I don’t really have any nice writing pens. It hardly seemed justifiable to buy such a pen when I was only writing grocery lists, but now that I’m doing all this very important learning? Yeah, I can spend $30 on a pen. I’m no longer a broke college student and I can afford pens I didn’t get for free at a job fair.

From top to bottom: Pilot Petit3 Mini Fude Brush Pen (blue-black), Pilot Petit1 Mini Fountain Pen (apricot & clear blue), Lamy Safari Fountain Pen (extra fine)

So I went and splurged on some pens at JetPens.com (which is a dangerous place full of all manner of attractive writing and drawing implements). Somehow I managed to get away with only buying four pens. I ended up getting a reasonable “beginner” fountain pen (a Lamy Safari), a couple of a cute mini fountain pens, and a brush pen. Ostensibly I only needed one pen, but the Lamy bumped me over the $25 free shipping mark so I had to make sure and negate those savings by buying three more pens. I feel I exercised amazing self-restraint by not purchasing the whole rainbow of the little Pilot Petit1’s.

I’m going to pretend I bought this mini fude pen because I need it for kanji practice.

The internet has irreparably damaged my use of the English language.

Still, I feel it was money well spent. All of them are nice pens, and I am definitely happy with the Lamy. It writes so pleasantly. It’s easy to forget about these little things in life that are so inexplicably satisfying. As much as I love drawing, it is sometimes frustrating and difficult. Writing however has that same tactile appeal in a much more relaxing way. I suppose it’s a little odd, but I look forward to doing my homework because of this. It’s a bit disappointing I don’t have cause to write for anything else. Maybe I should take up snail-mail.

ne is for neko

I am going to apologize in advance. As I have mentioned, the Mister and I will be moving off to Japan for a year. I’m not going to lie, I think this is super freaking exciting. I’ve always wanted to live abroad for a while. There is probably going to be an abundance of OMG I’M MOVING TO JAPAN!!!! posts transitioning somewhere into OMG I’M IN JAPAN!!! (with a brief interlude when I’m too crazy and stressed because I’m actually moving.) So this is probably the first, but not last, Japanese themed posts. You’ve been warned.

In the four months or so left until the move, I’ve decided to start learning a bit of Japanese.

Having made this decision, I immediately floundered at where to start this quest. While I have no illusions about becoming anything close to fluent, I thought it would be nice to be armed with at least some basic speaking and reading skills. Herein lies the difficulty. The Japanese writing system is complex to say the least. It primarily uses a combination of two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, both containing 48 characters, and thousands of adapted Chinese characters called kanji. Katakana would probably be the most useful as a gaijin because it is primarily used for foreign words such as chi-zuba-ga- and piza, but most sources suggest starting with hiragana. I’m not even going to think about touching kanji. Bleh….

Fortunately my dilemma was conveniently solved by a birthday gift from one of my friends. She got me a nice beginner Japanese book called Japanese From Zero. It teaches you hiragana and introduces the very basics of Japanese grammar. I just finished up the book so I am now able to write in hiragana and construct some rudimentary sentences. This is pretty exciting. My first time learning a non-latin script wasn’t nearly as difficult as I imagined. I loved penmanship in school so learning to write entirely new characters was pretty fun. I also pretended I was learning to decipher and use a secret code. It’s dorky, but I always feel that way when learning new languages.

So my thoughts on the book…overall it was pretty good. I felt like this book rather gently and non-threateningly introduces you to Japanese, which is nice because Japanese sentence structure diverges significantly from English. I really liked the progressive approach that phased out the rōmaji (romanized Japanese) for the hiragana as you learned them. The lessons are reasonably sized and include plenty of examples and exercises. It was pretty quick too. I spread it out over three to four weeks, but if you did a lesson a day it would only take two weeks. You come out of it knowing how to read and write hiragana, some basic vocabulary, a bit of grammar, and a few cultural tidbits.

Before my friend got me the book, I’d dug around on the internet to see what sort of options were out there and if any of them were free. I would have loved to have found something like Duolingo (which I think is awesome for casual language learning), but there aren’t really any great free options. You can find plenty of good free resources, but in general there isn’t much structure and they require much more effort and dedication on the part of the would-be learner. While it is certainly possible to learn Japanese on your own this way, I think it is nice (and quicker) to have somewhere structured to start like a book or program and Japanese From Zero is a fairly inexpensive option.

That being said I had a few issues with the book. One of the drawbacks of studying language from any printed book is the lack of audio. While most of the sounds in Japanese are pretty straight-forward, I had to go and look up some of the trickier pronunciations. Fortunately, YouTube is a pretty good supplementary resource for this. I discovered later that Japanese From Zero’s accompanying website (YesJapan.com), has the same lessons with audio. There is a subscription cost for more advanced material, but it is my understanding that all the material covered in the first book is available for free. And there are some cute little practice games.

My next problem with the book was one of quality control. Despite the fact that I’m not the most skillful writer, poor editing is one of my pet-peeves and I felt this book could have used a thorough going over. There were a handful of typos, a couple of missing explanations, and not all of the words used in the lessons appeared in the glossary. While these flaws weren’t serious enough to deter the learning process, I found them irritating all the same.

Lastly, if you are looking for a very technical approach, this book probably isn’t really for you. If you are looking for an inexpensive, friendly introduction to Japanese, I think it’s suitable. Now that I’ve finished it up I am still debating whether to purchase the next book (continuing on into katakana) or to learn katakana on my own and perhaps purchase a more advanced text book. Decisions, decisions. It will probably come down to a battle of ambition versus convenience.

As I ready myself to continue on in my quest, here are a couple of my personal suggestions for anyone tackling hiragana on their own:

• Hand-writing the characters is a simple way to facilitate memorization. For me it helped really stick them in my brain better than only using flashcards or reading them. There are lots of free, printable worksheets out there and Youtube has plenty of videos demonstrating how to write them. Try searching for things like “learn hiragana” or “writing hiragana”.
• Practice makes perfect! There are lots of free ways to practice hiragana available on the internet so find one that suits you. I opted for the digital method and used the super basic RealKana to practice, but you can also go old school and make flashcards. I’ve also heard good things about Anki which is a sort of spaced repetition flashcard program that tailors practice sessions based on your feedback.
• Set aside time every day (or as often as possible) to work on it. Even if it’s  just something silly like practicing writing characters while in the shower. (I totally did this)

And although cuddly, kitties are perhaps best left out of the learning process.