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Summer reading
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Herzog
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After 11 months of studying Japanese, I tried to make simple small talk with my neighbor a few days ago. He was taking advantage of the break in the rainy season to work on a motorcycle that had been parked outside our apartment building for months. I said “Anata ga sore wa baiku shiranakatta.” He returned my gesture of friendship with a blank stare, so I kept walking. Only when I was around the block did I realize that instead of saying, “I didn’t know that that was your motorcycle,” I had said “I didn’t know you are a motorcycle.” It is easy for Americans to giggle at the way English is mangled by the Japanese. But it doesn’t take much self-reflection to see that I am guilty of destroying the Japanese language every time I open my mouth. I don’t have to go very far from the security of my tiny apartment before I am linguistically floundering around in a world I don’t understand, mutilating a very sophisticated language with my American accent and careless grammar.
My neighbor is clearly unaccustomed to deciphering my broken Japanese. My closest Japanese friends are used to translating my bad sentences into something that can pass as their language. They have figured out that when I say “I bought a vegetable DVD,” I really mean “I bought a cheap DVD” (yasai and yasui, respectively). And when I say “Tokyo is a big traditional rice cake,” I actually want to say “Tokyo is a big city” (mochi and machi). And when they ask me how my weekend was, and I exclaim, “Summer bathrobe!” I am trying to say, “It was great!” (yukatta and yokatta).
Some mistakes are not so easy to figure out. Once, trying to give a compliment, I inadvertently offended a group of students by telling them their “Hello Kitty” pencil cases were terrifying, when I meant to say they were cute (kowaii and kawaii).
These confusing vowels make speaking Japanese difficult. Reading it, however, is another beast entirely. Written Japanese is made of three different alphabets. I was proud of myself when I learned the 71 characters of each of the first two alphabets, but that was before I sat down to study kanji. Kanji characters are derived from Chinese, and there are more than 50,000 of them. I was repeatedly told not to be overwhelmed though, because most adults only know 2,000. Right. After studying for five months, I still know less than a first-grade student. And according to a news report from Kyoto University, I even know less than a kanji reading chimpanzee!
Learning these characters is a bit like playing the game Pictionary. They represent ideas and sounds, and they allegedly look like the images that they represent. “Tree” sort of resembles a tree; “forest” looks like three trees. I can handle that. But what does “power” or “distress” look like?
They look like a bunch of squiggly lines to me. But I’ll keep studying so that I can accurately describe the distress I feel when I study Japanese.
(Editor’s Note: Betsy Herzog of Cullowhee, a 2005 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is spending a year teaching English in a Japanese high school. The Herald will feature monthly columns by Herzog through July, when she returns to the United States for graduate school.)
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