minna no nihongo

coming back to japan after being home for a few weeks, i came to the realization that i know an embarrasingly small amount of japanese for living in japan for 10 months already. when you cant have a conversation a 5 year old japanese kid could have, maybe you havent quite been hitting the books hard enough.

i couldve learned more if i had the motivation, but i havent had the motivation to seriously study it until now. perhaps it was the scope of the project...japanese is a language with zero similarites to anything other language (with the exception of english words that theyve "katakanaized", ie: shirt becomes shirutsu, tv becomes terebi, radio becomes rajio, ect...). it even puzzles linguists how the heck they ever came up with the language in the first place. add to the fact that reading and writing is extremely difficult...they use 4 different alphabets, the most common one being kanji, of which there are about 20000 to learn, with 2000 being considered essential by the japanese board of education. they say it takes 4-5 years of hard studying and living in japan to begin approaching full fluency. i guess i figured i had no chance, so why bother.

but then i thought that it would be an absolute waste to lose a chance to learn a second language, even if i only achieve an elementary or intermediate level for it. i squandered the chance to learn french, but i blame that on the age i was when i was studying it and the uninspiring nature of my french teachers through school. i wasnt in the czech republic long enough to learn czech, but even if i was i dont think id do very well because the pronunciation of it is so difficult.

plus, learning japanese is pretty fun, especially when you can use what you learned every day. i bought alot of new texts last month and the lessons are actually fun to go through. amanda has become my sensei and is good about correcting me or giving me grammar points or conversation practice. and learning kanji, despite how impenetrable it may seem, is pretty fun. you start to learn that theres a method behind the madness that is japanese.

so hopefully ill start seeing some rapid improvement in the coming months...im not holding my breath, as im notoriously slow in learning certain new things like languages, but some improvement would be really rewarding.