The day has finally come! I sat my butt down and studied hard and I finally know how to read some Japanese! You have no idea how much I as an adult took being able to read for granted. It was something I didn't even think about when I first moved here. I've been so frustrated that I could not do the simplest things like read a menu to figure out what I was eating or not knowing what kind of sauce I just bought at the grocery store. But, I finally conquered one of the Japanese reading/writing systems. I can now read katakana and I mean READ it. I didn't just memorize the symbols, I officially read a whole menu with no help from anyone :D It was an exciting moment for me. I'm clearly moving up in the world.
Here's a little bit of information about the Japanese writing systems. There are three different systems: katakana, hiragana, and kanji. I chose to learn katakana because it is used for "borrowed words" from other languages (namely English). This means that although I am struggling to learn Japanese, I can still understand the words I am reading because they are words like kohi (coffee) or hamubaga (hamburger) or rate (latte). Hiragana is kind of like the basic alphabet. It covers all of the basic sounds in Japanese and uses it to form words. This is taught to children before they can read kanji. I hope to conquer this next...The last and most complicated of the symbols is kanji. These are symbols derived from Chinese that represent many words and sounds. I actually have learned about 50 or so kanji from my day to day interactions. Things like "water", "day", "month", "book", or even the names of some local cities from the trains have all been burned into my brain as I see them at least one a week. I hope I can absorb more and would like to know at least 200 or so kanji before I leave.
No comments:
Post a Comment