It's February already? When did that happen?

I’ve got just over four months left here. That came as quite a surprise to me today. What month is it? February? Already? But I’m making the best of the time I have left, which is still quite a lot. This week proved to be very interesting and fulfilling. My language skills have given a lot more confidence in school. I can converse way more easily with my classmates than even a month ago. It’s quite amazing. But what I’m excited about this week is learning how to read. Japanese is an incredibly difficult language to read. Speaking isn’t all that hard, aside from learning vocabulary. The grammar is completely unlike English but it makes way more sense. Once you get used to the speed of the language it’s not that bad. Reading and writing however, are completely different animals.

Japanese uses kanji, which are Chinese characters, as well as hiragana and katakana, which are derivates from kanji. The hiragana and katakana are phonetic alphabets (technically syllabaries) and you can write the entire language in either of those. But the Japanese prefer to use the ridiculously complicated kanji. There are literally thousands of kanji, each one with different readings and uses. This is because the kanji were adapted after Japan had formed a culture. So they already had the word for “water” and applied a kanji to it. That kanji developed the reading “water”. But then there are situations where you don't pronounce that kanji “water”. In compound words the kanji takes on a whole new reading. Looking up words you don’t know is incredibly difficult because you have to count the stokes on the kanji or look it up by radical (pieces within the kanji). Altogether a very time consuming process. The natural solution is just to memorize all of them. Grrrrr. Japanese kids start in elementary school and finish in high school. I’m starting out pretty disadvantaged.

If you’re thinking, “learning to read sounds like a mighty big task. I wouldn’t even know where to begin” then I would agree with you. But I have a goal: to be able to read a Japanese newspaper. This is even more complicated than learning all the regular kanji. Newspapers maximize on space by using different words than you’d hear in conversation. It’s the Japanese version of abbreviating. Instead of taking letters from each word to form an abbreviation, they use kanji. A five kanji word gets reduced to two in a newspaper. America, four letters in katakana, is written as two kanji pronounced beigoku. But no one ever says beigoku in regular conversation. There are tons of words used in the paper that just aren’t used in daily life. It’s all about conserving space. You can cram and incredible amount of information into a tiny amount of space with Japanese. It’s elegant and unique but it also is incredibly complicated. And because it’s so hard to look up new words you have to memorize pretty much everything.

I started working on this task this week. For months I’ve been using the JLPT 2 & 3 kanji lists and transferring them to flashcards. Now I’ve started working from the paper. My host mom subscribed to the weekly Middle schooler’s newspaper, 中学生新聞 (see, it takes less space in Japanese) for me. Every night we go through a new article, or really more like a fourth of an article. I write down all the words I don’t know, between 15 and 25 per night, and then translate them with my family’s help. I memorized the words at school using flashcards and then review that evening. It takes me a good part of the day to transfer the words to flashcards and memorize them. I take a break on the weekend by just reading the old articles and not bothering with any new ones. I’m very happy with the method of studying because I can see the results right away and I’m working towards one of my major goals.

I’ve also been racing through my Japanese history book this week. Now I know why it’s important to study history; and understanding of a people’s history gives great insight to the present. I was always faintly aware of this but it didn’t really hit home till now. Did they teach us that in school? Maybe I wasn't paying attention that day. Anyway, I finished WWII and occupied Japan last week and I’m up to about the ‘80s this week. It’s interesting to see what is new in Japanese culture and what is old. The whole “lifetime employee” tradition is very recent, post WWII. Before that workers would commonly travel from job to job and profession to profession to learn as many skills as possible and become more valuable. Education is something that has been rooted Japanese culture for a long time. Japan had national compulsory education in the late 19th century, during the Meiji era. That's far before the U.S. had it in every state (1918 - wikipedia). The history of a people helps to explain why their culture does things. I think something that I undervalued was their capacity for change. A mere 160 years ago Japan was in Medieval Times. Then they became a world power. Then they sneakily attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Actually, they issued a vague warning to the U.S. government an hour before the attack but it took so long to decode and translate it that it was delivered late. After we crushed them in war, they rebuilt to be the second largest economy in the world (soon to be overtaken by China). Amazing country.

As interesting as I find Japan, reading about Japan, learning Japanese, I find it equally interesting to look at the U.S. from the outside. I get to see what some of the rest of the world sees. One thing is that all the articles that talk about the economic crisis start with “the economic crisis that began in the U.S. last September” or “the economic crisis that snowballed out of the U.S. last year” or “the U.S. really screwed us over this time”. I made that last one up but that’s what I feel they’re saying to me. Also, unrelated to the economy, I watched the History of the NBA in class last Wednesday. My homeroom teacher is also the basketball coach. It was really old, “and Michael Jordon boldly leading basketball into the future” but interesting. They had lots of interviews from old players like Wilt Chamberlain and Dr. J. Every guy talked about wanting to be a showoff, play to the fans, do fancy moves. And every time one of them said, “you know, we’re all exhibitionists at heart” the kids in my class went, “huh?” They didn’t get it, I started getting embarrassed. No wonder they think Americans are jerks. Our role models are selfish people who love showing off. The most important thing to them is winning, not honoring their team, being loyal to the fans, just winning and getting attention. I’ve never seen it that way before. But America is a place that will respect and reward that talent, that drive to be seen and stand out. Japan is a place where society will try to hammer the nail back in.