The Japanese Writing System

The general consensus among Japanese language students here is that Japanese is pretty simple in terms of grammar, but it has a complex writing system. Despite that, I can read/write Japanese way better than I can speak it. Maybe it’s because I study kanji. A lot. Regardless, I’m going to break down the writing system and explain it a little bit in case someone is interested.

There are four symbol sets in Japanese: romaji, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. If you are capable of reading this, then you know romaji. Because Japan does business internationally, and not exactly everyone in the world knows Japanese, but many people can read Roman characters, businesses often write their names (and slogans) using romaji. Foreign businesses that setup shop in Japan also tend to retain their original spellings. Businesses in Japan also often use English for advertising, despite the fact that many people don’t know English. And in reality, the English used in advertising tends to not actually have any real meaning, which is where Engrish comes into play. Similar to the way that kanji are used in America as fashion statements, such as tattoos or whatnot, English has a “cool” factor in Japan. Seemingly random or nonsensical phrases are commonly adorned on shirts and stuff. One of the American students that studied here had a shirt with the kanji for “wind” on it, but the specific connotation of the kanji was “fart.” I’ll just say he didn’t wear that shirt again.

The most basic and essential symbol set of Japanese is hiragana. I guess you could compare it to the alphabet, but it (mostly) represents syllables instead of individual letters.
There are 46 basic symbols, but there are actually more given that the basic symbols’ pronunciations are changed by slight alterations (i.e. ひ=hi, び=bi, ぴ=pi, ひゃ=hya, etc.) Since hiragana composes the basic syllabic sounds of Japanese, all kanji can be written in hiragana. This poses an interesting dilemma for students of Japanese, or at least me. To kill time and simultaneously study, I tend to translate stuff. I find it extremely frustrating that sometimes words are written in kanji, and sometimes they aren’t—even in the same source. Some words don’t have kanji, but hiragana typically marks the grammatical portions of a sentence (verb/adjective endings, particles, etc.). If a word has a kanji, I wish it would just be used all the time. If you aren’t familiar with a word, and you just see a big jumble of hiragana, it can be difficult to separate everything. Kanji may be more difficult to commit to memory, but it really is easier to read.

Katakana is essentially the equivalent of hiragana, but for foreign words. Japanese borrows a lot of foreign words, Japanamizes the pronunciation, and then firmly integrates them into the language. Borrowed words have to be modified to fit into Japan’s syllable system. For example, Christmas becomes Kurisumasu. These words are then represented with katakana instead of hiragana. Because some foreign sounds don’t easily fit into Japanese syllables, there are some extra katakana modifications that make this symbol set larger than hiragana, such as for the letter ‘v.’ I think katakana is the mortal enemy of Japanese students. A lot of students really like it because the words are basically just cognates (assuming they are derived from English, some katakana words come from Portuguese or Dutch, due to Japan’s long trading history, or German, French, etc.). However, a lot of katakana words already have Japanese equivalents, so I feel that studying katakana is kind of the bane of making real progress with the language. This is strongly noticeable on product labels. For example: milk is often miruku, not gyunyu; apple is often apuru, not ringo; and fruit is often furutsu, not kudamono. It’s a rule in Japanese that Japanese words are written in hiragana only, and foreign words in katakana only (except in kanji dictionaries, where one indicates the Chinese reading, and the other indicates the Japanese reading). But to further emphasize how inconsistent the language really is, I see Japanese words in katakana and vice versa on signs and stuff all the time.

Kanji is probably the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Japanese. Kanji are the complicated ideograms borrowed from China. There are a lot of exceptions when talking about kanji, but generally, there are at least two pronunciations for each—a Chinese one and a Japanese one. Some kanji can be pronounced many different ways. Kanji may have different readings if: they are alone, they are in a word, they are used as a suffix, they are a prefix, they are a different part of speech, etc. Maybe because I’m a visual learner, I don’t find kanji to be all that difficult. Kanji are composed of different radicals (there are 214 of them). Once you learn the radicals, you stop seeing kanji as a group of complex strokes, and you start to see them as a pairing of different radicals. If the meaning of the kanji isn’t totally abstract, the radicals may indicate somewhat the meaning of the kanji. One interesting issue I have come across with studying kanji is that sometimes I can read a sentence and comprehend it, but not be able to read it aloud. I’ll know the proper meanings, but I’ll forget the reading.

One way Japanese literacy is determined is through knowledge of the Joyo kanji. The list is updated periodically, but there are currently 1945 kanji in it. The Joyo kanji are basically the “official” kanji that are used in media sources, etc. Other kanji (or different readings) may be used as well, but they are accompanied by furigana (small hiragana above the kanji to show its pronunciation). On top of learning the symbols, the Joyo kanji list consists of the various readings that need to be learned as well. 生, for example, has twelve different readings. Most Japanese words are constructed from combinations of kanji, so memorizing all the symbols and their readings isn’t going to result in the ability to understand a newspaper article.

A list of the Joyo kanji can be found here.

Obama

President Obama seems to be quite the celebrity in Japan. There are numerous towns in Japan which are called Obama, and they seem to be doing their best to capitalize off this similarity. Obama-cho, which is nearby, and I think is the location of Unzen, has been doing President Obama themed omiage (souvenirs) and special champon (a noodle dish) that adds potatoes to the formula. It is not uncommon at all to find shirts, cups, etc. with Obama's face on it in mall shops. Obama impersonaters are also very popular on Japanese variety TV shows. Finally, there was a ceremony today for the students that are leaving for home in February. Our school's president gave a speech and talked about Obama for a little bit. It was complete with an English "Yes we can!"

Snow and fish

It's snowed a few times in Nagasaki this winter, but never enough to stick except for this one time last week:
This is completely unrelated, but here's a Japanese snack mix that includes dried fish:

New Year's

Well last week was an interesting week. It was New Years, obviously, which is one of the major holidays in Japan. My host brother got the whole week off from work, which meant limited internet access for me since the only connection is in his room. The week began with extensive cleaning of the house. Then on Tuesday, Chris' Pizza, the only place in Nagasaki to get some real American food, was having it's last ever day open (RIP). I opted to go to my French buddy's birthday party instead, though. Got to try goose liver sausage. We then went to a nearby bar and sat on the tatami floor and hung out for awhile. Some of the people there were glued to the TV, watching the annual New Year's singing competition. I had a nice big bowl of kimchi rice, which is a Korean dish. Shortly after midnight, the bar owner/chef treated us to a free bowl of soba noodles, which is traditionally eaten on New Year's. We then went to another bar for awhile, and then went karaoke for three hours. I topped that off with an early breakfast from a 24 hour McDonald's, and I made it home and in bed by 8am. It was a blast.

The day after New Year's, my host mother's daughter came by and helped her make a very elaborate dinner. The rest of her kids, their spouses, and their kids came by for dinner. My host mother's daughter's husband plays drums in a band composed of people from his workplace. They like to play Deep Purple and Red Hot Chili Peppers :) My host family went to the shrine in the afternoon, and the onsen late in the evening. Many Japanese go to the shrine shortly after midnight on New Year's morning to offer their prayers for the new year and receive a fortune, followed by a period of heavily enebriated karaoke. The fact that my friends and I got into karaoke at that time is notable.

The week ended with me virtually rewriting my entire 20 page independent study paper on Japanese metal because I wasn't satisfied with how it turned out. I finally finished it yesterday, so now I can start on my 10 page society research paper which is due in a couple weeks. My soc. paper will be on ijime, which is "bullying."

クリスマス

So…do the Japanese celebrate Christmas? I suppose so. To say “the Japanese celebrate Christmas” is a bit of an overgeneralization. Plus, the Japanese conception of Christmas is a bit different than the American one. First, only 2% or something of the Japanese population is Christian, so it isn’t exactly a religious holiday here. Christmas is, pure and simple, a commercial holiday. I was surprised when I first walked into a store and heard Christmas music being played, but it ended up being an inescapable constant just as at home. George Michael's "Last Christmas" seems to be *the* Christmas song to play over and over and over again. Stores had Christmas sections and Christmas sales just as at home. There were a few houses nearby that put up Christmas lights and stuff. The girl’s dormitory for my university had lights up as well. Nagasaki station, which is a large shopping center, had a big Christmas tree with pink lights setup outside.

Japan differs in that Christmas isn’t celebrated on Christmas day, but on Christmas Eve. Presents, if to be given at all, are given the night before. All the Christmas décor and ornaments and stuff in stores are cleared out by Christmas morning (in preparation for New Year’s). One particular Christmas tradition that is uniquely Japanese is eating KFC for the Christmas meal. Apparently KFC was pretty unpopular until some person decided to dress up the Colonel Sanders statue that is in front of most KFC restaurants in a Santa costume. It brought in customers...and now you have to reserve your Christmas day chicken well in advance.

My Christmas was pretty uneventful, although Christmas Eve was a total blast.

Nintendo DS

I bought a Nintendo DS awhile ago. This is, hands down, one of the most versatile tools for a student of Japanese. I was initially going to buy an electronic dictionary, but the DS was a superior alternative. The DS is like most game systems, where only a tiny fraction of the available software gets released in the States. However, in Japan, there is an extensive library of kanji-centered learning/study software. There is software for everything from simple quiz programs, to software for practicing brush strokes/order, to dictionaries, to software specifically setup for practicing for the dreaded Kanken exam. Electronic kanji dictionaries in Japan start at about $80, and ones with a touchpad/stylus like the DS start at about 3x that cost. The DS itself is a little more expensive here, but a used DS Lite plus kanji software would run about $100. Compared to the actual dictionary, this is way cheaper, plus it can do stuff dictionaries can’t—like play games. The only downside to the DS as a dictionary is that it doesn’t have an actual keyboard, but that’s quite minor since after about 40 minutes of practice, the stylus can be used just as quickly. There is similar software for Chinese and Korean, although not as much.

Peace University

This past weekend I attended the 6th annual Nagasaki Peace University. This was a tour, lecture, and discussion put on by (I think) the Nagasaki Peace Foundation. It was open to the public, but most people there were students, jets, or professors. It began with a tour of the Atomic Bomb Museum, that was sadly cut short due to our bus leaving late. I'll have to go back sometime because I didn't get to see everything. They had a replica of the bomb, which is larger than I expected. They also had many artifacts recovered from the destruction, such as: a tower with its metal beams completely contorted, walls with shadows burnt into them, roofing tiles that formed blisters, and different objects with human bone melted into it.

We then shuffled into a big hall where we were divided into sections of English and Japanese speakers. A survivor of the bombing, Nagano-san, told us her story, which was translated into English by an interpreter. She lost her two siblings; her brother died the day after the blast from burns, and her sister died shortly thereafter from radiation sickness. They were very young. Her mother suffered from radiation sickness as well, but recovered and lived a long life. She expressed deep regret at requesting her siblings to come back and live with the family a few months before the bombing. What I think was most personal for me about her lecture is that I am familiar with, and frequent, the places she was vividly describing as only 60 or so years ago being covered with rubble and corpses.

After her lecture, there was a panel/discussion for a number of different topics. Most of the NICS students from my school attended the program. They are mostly from China, and a couple of them, during the discussion, made comparisons between the atomic bombing and the Rape of Nanjing. I'm not sure how the Chinese students phrased it in Japanese, but the interpreters translated it as the "Nanjing Event."

After the discussion, there was a guided tour of the Peace Park and the Hypocenter Park. Our guide pointed out the stark difference in atmosphere between the two parks. The Peace Park is more positive, and is often used for promotional, PR, and political stuff. By contrast, the Hypocenter is very solemn and quiet. Other than the obelisk and statue of Mary, it is quite empty. It is also, I hear, a place for high school couples to go at night.