天気

It's been a while since I've talked about kanji compounds but today I came across a sweet one.

天気

This reads "tenki" and it means weather. I've known the word for weather for a long time, and I've known the first kanji, 天, for heaven or sky for a while too. What is new for me is 気, which I have just learned in the past couple of days. This kanji means spirit or temperament. Thus the compounds for weather is literally, "The spirit of the sky." HA! Genius!

Springtime in Charlotte and My Future Plans

With March now squarely in the rear-view mirror, it seems like we've left the cool weather behind and can look forward to... well summer, which is actually worse. In the meantime though we have Spring, as fleeting as it may be. I picked up my final Christmas present today, a new camera and I took it out for a test drive today. Fun stuff.




That's all minor stuff. Much bigger news is that I have accepted a position teaching English in Japan. Nothing is guaranteed yet, the Japanese Immigration Bureau still have to approve me for a work visa, but if that happens I'll be off to the land of the rising sun. It's pretty exciting stuff. This has been in the works for well over a year now and I'm really excited that things are coming together.

Of course, now I have a nice new camera to take with me, and hopefully I'll be updating this blog somewhat regularly with my exploits in Japan.

Don't think that just because I haven't updated my blog since January that I haven't been working on my Japanese either, I have. I took a break from Rosetta Stone to read through an introductory grammar book on Japanese; it was an excellent decision. I think if you are learning another indo-European language Rosetta Stone's system of not directly addressing grammar is fine, but it doesn't work so well in Japanese. The idea behind Rosetta Stone is that you learn the language in the most natural way possible, by being exposed to it with contextual information, just how we learn our first language. The problem I found is that, as adults, we come with baggage, expectations based on knowledge of our own languages. In my case, my problem came from English's emphasis on word order. English grammar is all about word order, and the order we put our words in decides the meaning of the sentence. This is not the case in Japanese. Other than the need for the verb to come last, word order is VERY flexible. Instead, Japanese grammar is based on particles that are tagged onto the end of words that indicate what that word's function is.

は is a topic marker.
に indicates direction of an action or location of existance.
で indicated location of actions or by which means an action is done.

明日、私は海岸に車で行きます
Rather than translating, if you were to swap out words it'd look like this.
Tomorrow, I (topic marker) beach (direction marker) car (by means of marker) go.
Of course, translated this says, "Tomorrow, I will go to the beach by car."

There's a lot more to it than that, but that will give you an idea.

Needless to say, Rosetta Stone just dives in throwing the particles around, but it never became clear to me how exactly each particle was functioning. Now that I understand the particles though, I'm back into Rosetta Stone learning more than ever.

Breaking Through

I'm closing in on the end of the first level of the Japanese Rosetta stone, I only have the final fourth unit to go, and I've come to a realization; I'm really enjoying learning Japanese. This is a big deal, mainly because through seven years in grade school and two terms at Furman I never once enjoyed learning Spanish. It always seemed like a chore to me, something I had to do to graduate but didn't really want to do. When I set out to learn Japanese I knew that I was already at an advantage in that I wanted to learn, but I was never really sure if I would enjoy learning the language. I am happy to discover that I am enjoying learning Japanese, and I think this, more than anything, will help me along.

Learning a language takes discipline, there's no doubt about that, and you need to be regularly working with the language if you want to make any real progress. But the more something feels like a chore, the less you want to do it. The fact that I am enjoying learning Japanese turns that chore into something I want to do, and makes it easier for me to devote my free time to it. I remember making the comment once that I would prefer for everyone to just learn English because learning a foreign language was too much of a hassle. My Spanish professor thought that was a short sighted view and was a poor outlook on language learning. I'm happy to discover seven years later that he was right, it is a poor outlook, I just didn't like his language. So for those people who never felt like they could master a language other than their own, I'd encourage you to give it another go. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would be unable to learn another language, I am happy to be proving myself wrong.

Excellent Kanji Compounds: 警察官

Most kanji are made up of smaller elements which are often times kanji themselves. When these elements are combined together into a single kanji they often lose the meaning they had as a kanji. For instance, 田means rice field. This kanji is also an element in 猫 (cat), which we discussed earlier. What do rice fields have to do with cats? I don't know, probably not much.

This however is NOT the case for kanji combinations. A kanji combination is when several kanji are strung together to make a word and there's almost always a logical pattern to why certain kanji are grouped together to make word. Kushner points out that this can give us some insight into ancient Japan when many of these patterns were established, but more importantly, they can be downright amusing.

And so, I present to you 警察官 (keisatsukan) the Japanese word for “police officer”.

What is a police officer you ask? Why it's simple, a police officer is a person who:

警 - “admonish”es you

察 - “judge”es you and is a

官 - “bureaucrat”

It's the admonishing bit that really gets me.

There you have it, the Japanese have nicely summed up the function police officers.

(Our own etymology is somewhat similar. Police comes from Middle French “police”, essentially meaning government. No admonishment though... sad).

New Book, New Vigor?

So I picked up another book to help me with my study of Japanese, specifically, Kanji. This one is called “Crazy for Kanji” written by Eve Kushner (who contributes to this great blog here: japanesepod101.com). Where Heisig works to teach you Kanji, Kusher works rather to teach you how to study kanji.

I've already discussed how Heisig's method is very effective, but I had trouble focusing on it. Even though it is based on some whimsical, often amusing tales, I still had trouble keeping to the task. Kushner aims to alleviate this by trying to show the many ways kanji can be fascination. In the end, Heisig is essentially a means to an end, a method of getting the kaji into your head and that's it. Kusher offers a much deeper knowledge of the kaji, discussing their history, patterns, evolution and so much more.

I said I wanted to continue to use Heisig and I am, but I'm going to try to do it at a higher speed, not necessarily going over each kanji to the degree Heisig envisioned. What I hoping is to see them, and then as they pop up in Rosetta Stone, I can deepen my knowledge and make the connections I need. This could backfire horribly though, we shall see.

I think Kusher's book is interesting but I won't truly know how I feel about it for a long while. I feel it is the type of book you need to read at least twice. Once, when you are starting your study of the kanji to give you a sense of what to look for. Then a second time after you've become more proficient with kanji, to truly discover everything she's talked about. At any rate, I plan to deal much more directly with the kanji while I'm doing the Rosetta Stone, making sure I at least get a good look at them, and break down kanji combinations when I come across them. Well, here's to hoping it all works out.

Back in the Saddle Again

Well, it's been a while. I'm not surprised that I let this blog sit here unattended for three months, perhaps more surprising is that I came back to it this soon at all. It's unfortunate, because part of the goal was to use this blog to help me stay focused on learning Japanese and just as I had let this go, my focus on Japanese slid as well. But I'm back, and back to the Japanese as well.

I've decided to change my approach, originally I was going to focus on Kanji via Heisig, but I've decided I need to be grappling with the language itself, so back to the Rosetta Stone. I still want to use Heisig's book, but I'm going to adjust the way I've been using it. As I've come back to Rosetta Stone one thing has been made abundantly clear, Heisig works. When I first started Rosetta Stone, back in June, I had it set to romanji, and shortly thereafter switched over to kana, but I avoided kanji like the plague. That's past now, I have Rosetta Stone set to kanji and it's staying there.

The thing with kanji is, you have to do it at some point if you actually want to be able to read the language and like so many things in life, it's that first step that's the hardest. Kanji are intimidating. They're complex, numerous, and used very differently from how we use our phonetic alphabet. When you first approach the language and you see all these crazy symbols it's very easy to switch over to romanji and stick with something familiar. But after doing the first few hundred kanji in Heisig you can more easily tell the kanji apart and memorizing kanji you've never seen before becomes easier, even when not using his method.

Whether using Heisig's method or not, the most important thing is to continue to work with the language and the kanji. Even the Japanese start to forget kanji if they don't use them regularly, so you can imagine as a student of the language there can be no let up.

As far as Rosetta Stone is concerned the verdict is still out, but I'm thinking it is going to work. My anti-virus owned my Rosetta Stone unfortunately and I had to reinstall and start over from scratch, but I am kind of glad that that happened. It is a forced review and I am finding out how effective what I've been doing up to now has been. I definitely feel like this time through I have a much stronger grasp of what's going on, so hopefully that's a sign that I can actually pull this off.

水 - Water, and some patterns

水

Today's kanji is 水 which is the kanji for “water”. It's has both an on reading and a kun reading:

On: sui

Kun: mizu, mizu-

Not surprisingly the Japanese word for “water” is “mizu”.

This is a great chance to teach you a couple things, how to type in Japanese (it's pretty easy) and, why patterns are great.

First let's do the typing. You want to go to your control panel and find the languages and regions option. It's pretty easy to find in vista, it might be a little hidden in XP but it's there I promise you. Once on that screen you want to selected the “keyboards and languages” tab and choose “change keyboard”. Choose add and then find “Japanese” and check both the “Japanese box” and the “Microsoft IME” box and hit apply. Either at the top of your screen or on you task bar you should now see a little box that says “EN”. You can use your mouse to select what input you'd like to use, but there are also keyboard short cuts.

Alt + shift will switch between English and Japanese input. It defaults to hiragana and kanji.

Once in Japanese Alt + Caps Lock will change it to katakana. To get back to hiragana you have to hold Alt and double tap shift, no idea why MS set it up this way.

Then to type in Japanese you just type as if you were typing in romanji. So for the above example you would just type “mizu” his space and out pops 水. Sometimes you don't always get the kanji you want though. For instance if you want to type “tsuki” for “moon” what you get at first is つき, which is “tsuki” in kana. However there is a kanji for moon, 月. In these cases once you type in “tsuki” and hit space if you don't get the kanji you want, hit space again and it will pull up a drop down menu.

Now onto the kanji itself. According to Heisig a lot of the kanji have compressed forms when they make up elements of more complicated kanji. For instance, 水 becomes three little drops on the left side of kanji like in 湖 (they are drops, even if you don't think they look like drops), the kanji for lake. Conveniently this is a pattern and many water related kanji have these drops. For instance, marsh 沼, swim 泳ぐ, open sea, 沖, or 灘 (apparently there are two kanji that can mean open sea), and even juice or soup 汁. Of course, not every water related kanji has those three drops (stream 川), and those three drops are not always indicative of water (to stay overnight 泊まる) but those patterns where certain elements show up repeatedly in common ways certainly help speed the process of learning the kanji along.

苦 - Suffering, sort of.

苦

This is a tricky kanji, because as far as I can tell this kanji is only used in compounds and never alone. In Japanese suffering is actually written 苦悩 and is actually part of a kanji compound. Well maybe, things are complicated. There are a few different English words that could be used for that compound (“anguish” for example), and there are several compounds that could be translated as “suffering” (苦しみ for example). Well those are subtleties that can only be figured out by wrestling with the language. I've chosen this kanji today however to highlight an occasional problem I've discovered with the Heisig method.

This particular kanji is made up of the element identified yesterday as flower, and the kanji for old (古). At any rate, my problem with this kanji isn't remembering it, quite the contrary, I am very good at remembering it because I have a very clear visual image associated with it. The problem is the story of that image isn't the same as the one Heisig gives, and could be a bit confusing. The story Heisig gives is one of a withering flower but I've found the image of Theodin in Lord of the Rings suffering as the site of his son's flower covered grave to be much more compelling. After all the kanji for old looks like a grave, and once a person gets old enough they end up in a grave. Only problem, grave has a kanji of it's own, 墓. I don't want to risk getting the kanji for grave mixed up with the one for old. Unfortunately I think the story of Theodin is firmly lodged in my head so I think for this instance I am just going to have to make sure I keep things straight.

I've found that the stories and images that Heisig uses stick much better though when they are pop-culture reference or stories well ingrained in western civilization. So the Lord of the Rings story I've adopted is really good for keeping the kanji in mind but comes with risks.

Let's talk about Kanji

As many of you know, I am hoping to go teach English in Japan next year. While not required, in preparation I have begun to study Japanese. So to help me out I'm going to blog a little bit about what I am learning, mainly Kanji, which is probably the first big hurdle to learning to read Japanese.

The Japanese use four character sets. First there is Romanji, which we are all familiar with. Romanji literally means, “Roman Characters,” and it is the Latin alphabet we have all come to know and love.

Secondly and thirdly there is the Kana: Hiragana and Katakana.

Hiragana is a Japanese phonetic alphabet comprised of about 110 sounds that is used for Japanese words. For instance, みどり, which is “midori” in Romaji, and means “green” in English.

Katakana is a Japanese phonetic alphabet for foreign loanwords and onomatopoeia, and some names. An example would be バレット, which in Romaji is “Baretto” and “Barrett” in English. For every hiragana there is a katakana.

Finally there are the Kanji (漢字), literally meaning “Chinese characters”. There are thousands of Kanji. However to pass the hardest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test you need to know just under 2000. Each individual kanji has a meaning. For instance in the above compound 漢 means “Sino-” or “China” and “字” means “character. Also each kanji comes with readings, sometimes several of them.

The readings come in two varieties:
On'yomi, which is basically the Japanese estimation of the Chinese pronunciation when the character was brought to Japan. The “on” readings are typically used in kanji compounds. For instance the on reading for 字 is “ji”.
Kun'yomi, is the native Japanese reading and is basically the Japanese word that meant whatever the kanji stood for when it was introduced. Generally when a kanji is representing a single word then you use the “kun” reading. There are exceptions to this though as the Japanese word for “book” is “hon” which is the on reading of 本 (this kanji has more meanings than just book).

As you can see, learning the read Kanji is a bit of a juggling act for an English speaker. We have to identify the character and learn how to tell it apart from others (for instance 日(day) and 目(eye). We have to learn what that character means. Then we have to learn the different readings for that character and how it fits into various kanji compounds. For instance 日本語 which is read “nihongo” and means Japanese language.

The method I've decided to employ to help me with Kanji is the Heisig method which is in the book “Remembering the Kanji” by James W. Heisig, and covers a little over 2000 kanji. In his book Mr. Heisig attaches a meaning and story to each kanji and slowly builds more and more kanji from more basic primitives. The idea is that adults learn better using their imaginations rather than rote memorization. There are really strong points to his method, as generally I can get the kanji provided I can recall the story. Therefore, the trickiest part for me is matching the story to the meaning (he wants to you to go from meaning to kanji, as he says that going form kanji to meaning will naturally flow). I might add it is harder to go from meaning to kaji than from kanji to meaning. If I see a kanji I've review I normally nail its meaning right away, but remembering how to write the kanji when I see the meaning is trickier. I think that is mostly because when you see the kanji you can visualize the associated story, but it is more difficult to recall the story if you are working from the meaning.

Since I am working on getting the Kanji down right now I am going to try to blog about one kanji per day as an additional method of helping me to remember, hopefully without undermining the method that I have decided to employ to help me get the kanji down. Generally I'll be sticking to kanji I am having a harder time remembering, and will do so, hopefully, while avoiding any copyright issues. Today though I am going to start with something more fun.

猫

This is the kanj for cat and its kun reading is “neko”. The kanji itself is made up of three primitives. To the left is a primitive Heisig identifies as “dog” and it is a squished version of犬 (at least according to him it is), which is the kanji for dog. On the top right is a primitive that Heisig identifies as flower, and it is not a stand alone kanji. On the bottom right is the kanji for “rice field”, 田. Heisig has a story involving all three elements to help people remember the kanji's meaning, but that's for him to tell, not me (because I don't want to run afoul of IP law).

But I like cats, the internet likes cats, and maybe you do too, so I've shared this with you.
It is used in compounds like:
猫舌 (nekojita) which is the dislike of very hot food or drink.
猫背 (nekoze) which means bent back.
At perhaps a few others.

That's it for today, thanks for reading.