The School and the Course

The School

The school is called the ARC Academy and I am very happy there. It is a short walk from Yokohama station and in and bright, modern building. The class are very motivated and full of fun and the 3 1/2 hours each day passes very quickly. We have a Kanji test every Monday morning and a general language and grammar test every Friday. After two weeks I've made quite a bit of progress but am nowhere near speaking and writing fluently.

Above is a bit of last week's white board.

 Below is part of a page from the text book.

2)
この 料理は 少し お酒を （ 入れる ）と、おいしく なります。
りょう り すこ さけ い
3)
聖徳太子
しょう とく たい し
8.
聖徳太子は 574年に 奈良で 生まれました。子どもの とき、
しょう とく たい し ねん な ら う こ
勉強が 好きで、馬の 乗り方も 上手で、友達が たくさん いました。
べん きょう す うま の かたじょう ず とも だち
一度に 10人の 人の 話を 聞く ことが できました。
いち ど にん ひとはなし き
20歳に なった とき、国の 政治の 仕事を 始めました。そして
さい くに せい じ し ごと はじ
お寺を 造ったり、日本人を 中国に 送ったり しました。
てら つく に ほん じんちゅう ごく おく

The Language.

 The spoken language is quite pleasing to the Western ear. Being polysyllabic and containing a lot of vowels and few hard consonants. It looks when written in Roman script a bit like Italian, with all the a's , i's and e's.


The good things about the grammar etc are:

-There are only three irregular verbs.
-There are two past and two present tenses but no future.
-No plural nouns, adjectives or adverbs and no male/female ones, unlike French.
-There are very few exceptions to the rules and the rules are pretty easy to understand.

The bad things are:

-Many words have exactly the same sound, think of two- to -too in English and multiply by about 5 for each sound. 
-The word order is almost exactly backwards to English.
-There are many levels of politeness that affects the choice of vocab and the verb endings.

The Writing

This is the really tough bit. The Japanese writing system is widely acknowledged as being the most complex in the world. In any one sentence you can have five distinct things going on:


-There is a phonetic alphabet, HIRAGANA (ひらがな), that corresponds to various syllables and is used for Japanese words.

-There is another alphabet,  KATAKANA  (カタカ),   that is different to the above and is used for words derived from foreign languages and sometimes in advertising.

-They occasionally use the Roman alphabet as well.

-Hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, (Kanji), characters are  used for the their meaning, each character generally having two distinct pronunciations depending on whether it is in a compound word or not.  Compound Kanji  tend to be pronounced more as a Chinese person would say them. 

-The Kanji characters can also be used phonetically, i.e. for their sound not their meaning. Thus symbol for rice:

is also the symbol for the USA because to early Japanese ears it sounded a bit like the "Ameri" in America.

So you can get all five systems in the one sentence.  It can be quite taxing at times, sort of like trying to do a kryptic crossword written in different languages all mixed up.

There are some great derivations and hilarious origins of the Kanji. Also trying to decipher what the English word is that Japanese are trying to write phonetically can provide hours of entertainment. I'll show you some of my favourite Kanji treasures in another post.