I have been very quiet about my use and speaking of Japanese. When I came to Japan I learned that there were classes offered in addition to the work I was getting paid to do. At times I still get a little mixed up and confused with speaking Japanese and trying to create new sentences, even though I have a pre-conceptual knowledge of how conversation and grammar works.

I have been talking with friends and family about their experiences of learning to speak, read, and write Japanese. Up to this point I have been rather silent and slow in my leaps and bounds of speaking and fully communicating and immersing myself in the language, but that is not to say the drive is not their, or that I am not trying to culturally assimilate. Many of my friends and family have said that it took them between 3 to 6 months to cognitively adjust to reading and writing in a Japanese environment. They have also said that to initially learn the language was so alien with the use of particles and implied subjects once an idea is set that speaking Japanese through an English filter and translating is just not possible. It has been reassuring to learn that I am on course to read, write, and speak Japanese.

I will talk a little about learning to read and write in this blog post, and speak about spoken language in the next post. I have been fortunate and blessed to have studied Chinese in university. If you are thinking why the hell is Chinese related to Japanese? Well in the spoken language it is completely irrelevant. On the other hand, learning to write Chinese hanzi, has been useful in learning Japanese Kanji. One road block, has been the barrier of using simplified hanzi in reading Japanese kanji. Simplified hanzi is not applicable to kanji, if I had studied Cantonese opposed to Mandarin dialect of Chinese I would have been in an area of China where traditional hanzi is used.

There are many more character elements between traditional hanzi and kanji than simplified hanzi and kanji. This is because kanji was adopted as a Japanese writing system when traditional hanzi was the standard over half a millennia ago, older than that actually, but this is used as a point of reference. Written hanzi and kanji are older than the Gutenberg printing press.

Simplified hanzi is a relatively new writing system that was standardized from the 1950’s during the Mao communist era of Chinese rule. It is hard to say whether or not simplified hanzi will be good for Chinese historical documents and culture in the future, but there is a very important precedent that was set with the new writing system. Instead of a statistic calculated at around less than 30% of the Chinese being able to read and write before WW2, at present day over 90% of people are fluent at reading, writing, and speaking Chinese with the simplified standard. Literature is definitely an important aspect of cultural solidarity and nations, as seen in present day. For me though something more important is a sense of knowing and social justice that is brought to the literate. Instead of a writing system preserved for the social elite in the wealthiest or scholarly forms simplified hanzi has been made accessible to nearly everyone.

There is some ambiguity around the simplification of hanzi and its effect of making the Chinese as a whole more literate. Of all the Chinese characters only 20% of the most used characters have been simplified. That means that the other 80% are still traditional characters. This means that advanced Chinese citizens who read and write have to revert back to learning traditional forms of the characters. An academic questions I pose to nation-states and reform is, “what is the genuine improvement of simplifying ideographic written languages?” I think that the Chinese would have had to become 90% fluent as a population to achieve their country status and success anyways. But in that thought Mao truly did change and revolutionize China, and has been the case of leaders since then to the present day.

I question the simplifying of ideographic languages, because Japan has not, Hong Kong and Macau have not, and other larger city centers have not because of a sense of cultural preservation and identity. Not to mention in most of the larger international cities it is common to have 4 or 5 business languages. Literacy is a matter of cultural value and normative interaction with an environment. I will have to find studies to support this, but logic and rationale give this reason.

The Japanese writing systems that would be considered similar to alphabets like Enlgish, better expressed as a syllabary. These are quite easy to learn. A syllabary is a series of symbols where each character stands for a syllable. There is a writing system in Japan called Kana this consists of two syllabaries. One syllabary is hiragana, the other is katakana. Hiragana is the first writing system that primary school children learn to read and write, it allows children to learn how to phonetically read and write. Next students learn to use katakana, because they are characters that make the Japanese aware of culturally and linguistically borrowed words and ideas. Think about it in terms of English, we italicize all foreign words to make readers aware that they are, well, foreign.

Hiragana and Katakana are two syllabaries that share the same phonetic pronunciations, simply emphasizing the difference of domestic, and international words. There are 46 basic kana to learn in each syllabary, and around 106 total written and pronounced rules. So about 212 pronunciation rules. That does not sound to hard right? I promise it is not, I have learned to read and write all of that in about a week. Once mastery of the basic syllabaries exist then children begin to learn kanji. This is one of the oldest writing systems with daily use that is intact. From the beginning of middle school to the end of high school students learn roughly 2160 standardized characters set by the Japanese government.

I have been able to learn the writing patterns and better memorize kanji after the beginning of my three years of seeing, thinking about, and writing the Chinese characters. Moving into the future I have been developing a set of goals and curriculum that I want to build as a daily regiment to learn and accelerate in Japanese. I will talk about these in future posts.

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