Language and the Lack There-of

 Since I was around 10 years old I've had a fascination with languages, especially those that did not use Latin script as part of their written expression. I learned the entire Cyrillic alphabet, dozens of Chinese characters, and even Phoenician script. None of this of course got me anywhere near actual written or spoken fluency but it was a start. Fast forward 10 years to when I entered college and began learning German; 1 hour a day, 5 days per week, and hours of study for 2 years. It was only when I began to learn another language that all the English grammar, verb tenses and conjugations that I could not comprehend when I was in middle school became crystal clear. I also discovered I had a natural aptitude for learning and speaking another language. I was on my way!

Now, some 50 years since my interest in language began, I find myself living in a country where my native English tongue is not widely spoken and my Japanese language skills are put to the test like they never have been. Before moving to Japan, I had visited here many times with Ikuko and had taken Japanese classes. All of this gave me a decent grounding in Japanese but proved inadequate when it came to speaking everyday, natural Japanese.

I have been aware of how complex Japanese can be since I began studying it some 22 years ago. To give you an idea of just how complex, below is an image illustrating word order comparison between Vietnamese, French, and English. As you can see, all 3 follow the same subject, verb object convention.

Now here is the same sentence comparison between English and Japanese:

Not only is the word order and grammar profoundly different from English, or any other language for that matter, there are 3 different scripts employed. Hiragana, (e.g., みたいです ) katakana (e.g.,ホテル) and kanji (e.g., 店). Herein lies but one challenge in learning Japanese.

Another challenge is many Japanese don't expect gaijins like me to speak Japanese to them. The initial reaction is often one of surprise, as in, did this person just speak to me in Japanese? Once recovering from the unexpected utterance, the response is sometimes something like "日本語は上手です" (Your Japanese is good,  (based just one phrase!))  If I should botch the pronunciation, e.g., using a short vowel sound instead of a long one, using つ (su) instead ofす(su) then the response is akin to puzzlement. There are many other challanges but they are part of learning the language. So, I'm diving into the deepend of the pool and immersing myself in learning the language. Towards that end I began an intensive Japanese language class which meets every morning Monday through Friday from 9:00AM to 12:00PM. So far so good. 頑張れ！