So we went to Tokyo this last Tuesday (I have some fantastic pics of Laura I'll have to post later). It was a blast for the first part, the second more frustrating than anything else, as we were looking for a music district and wandered (with our guide) for hours. After finding it, my credit card was denied as Visa took that moment to flag it for possible fraudulent activity. Needless to say we were pretty much ready to go home at that point. We did have one last stop though (which is the subject of this post) and that was to buy an R4 card.
An R4 (for those not in the know) is a card that will bypass the Nintendo DS's operating system and allow users to access homebrew (user created) applications, as well as allow less scrupulous people to play actual games. My reason for getting the card (believe it or not, it's true) was for the homebrew aspect.
As one can imagine, getting around without speaking a foreign language is difficult, but for day to day situations you can get by on little to no speaking skills using gestures and situational cues. So far we haven't had any problems, and while this is true, we are trying to learn Japanese. Learning to speak it is easy. Sounds are sounds. Learning to READ it is an entirely different situation.
Written Japanese consists of three, count 'em, THREE alphabets/languages. The main one is Chinese Kanji. This is the most complex. One character is usually an entire word, not just a sound.
Second is Hiragana (pic below). This is a much simpler set of characters, as Kanji both looks complicated and consists of THOUSANDS of characters. Hiragana by comparison has 46. The way it works is each character is a sound (kinda like English) and are put together to make words.
Next, and for our purposes probably the most useful right now, is Katakana (pic below). Katakana is used in most commercial situations: store signs, restaurant menus, etc. The wonderful thing about Katakana is that it's English equivalent is Romanji. English letters that are put together to sound like the word it's making (this is the same for Hiragana, but there's a distinct difference in usage).
In Hiragana, the character sounds are put together to make words that are distinctly Japanese, such as 'sayonara'. With Katakana, the sounds that are put together would be best described as Japanglish. They sound like English words but don't quite hit the mark. For example, many gas stations are self serve. If a station is self serve their sign will simply say, in Katakana, 'SELF'; however, because this is Katakana and not English, the actual sounds are (phonetically) say-ru-fu. Say it quickly, and it sounds like 'self' but with a heavy Japanese accent. Katakana has the same number of core characters as nd if you know them, you can sound out the characters and figure out what English word it is supposed to be. Another example MA-U-N-TE-N-DU-YU (phonetically: MAW-OO-N-TAY-N-DOO-YOO) is, of course, Mountain Dew.
While Kanji would be the hardest to learn, and Hiragana the easiest to memorize, Katakana is by far the most useful to learn right now. Walking into a restaurant that has a text only menu is quite daunting. Many have pictures, but they're never as specific as you'd like, and the better restaurants simply aren't going to be foreigner friendly.
Now to the title of the post. One would think that I'd been playing with video games and experiencing the joy that comes hand in hand. No. I've been learning to read. I found a fantastic homebrew app for the DS that someone built to help memorize characters for Katakana and Hiragana. In the space of 1.5hrs last night I managed to memorize 30+, with another 10 or so during my 1.5hr break today (minus the time taken out for this post).
It's amazing the sense of self-satisfaction you experience when you look at a sign and, though not able to make out all the characters, can piece together enough to figure it out. You then smile, say 'I CAN READ!' and file the unknown characters away for later study. I can honestly say I haven't felt that feeling in a loooong time. Long enough to have forgotten it all together. I've known the joy of reading for most of my life, and regularly exercise it for pleasure, but it's another thing to have it demonstrated again from such a PURE BASE LEVEL. It's not like French, Spanish, or German where you immediately recognize the letters, sound it out, and make a rough guess. The Asian alphabets are wholly alien and unlike anything in your current repertoire. It truly is like learning to read from the ground up.
It's like being a child again.
Click on pic for larger image.
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