Rockin' the kanj

At some point, it happens to everyone who decides to study Japanese: learning how to read.

Daunting.  Monolithic.  Impossible.  All words used to describe my penis which also can be applied to the kanji problem.  2,000 characters separating the men from the boys and the women who also often look like boys.  Studying written Japanese is a lot like dating a someone you met at a Brewers game: you know it's going to be ugly, but you have to do it to win that $20 bet with your roommate.  And so you crack open "Baby's First Kanji" and a sick chill washes over you as you suddenly realize what your tattoo actually means.  But, like working with my daunting, monolithic, impossible penis, it gets less painful the more you do it.

The first thing to remember is that pictographic language is actually really efficient.  Japan actually boasts a 99% literacy rate.  Clearly, it can--and has--been done millions and millions of times.  And once you get on top of it and start working in a rhythm, it's actually kind of fun (like my penis).

The best part is, you don't really have to know everything.  Even if you can't read the word or know how to say it, it's often won't undermine your comprehension.  Let's use a simple example.

入学金

入 is used for "enter."
学 means school.
金 means money

Even without having any idea of how to say this word in Japanese, you can probably figure out that it means "enrollment fee."

It sometimes feels like cheating. 

Let's take another example that I ran across yesterday:

Do they make back deodorant because that guy could seriously use some

The first character, 左, means "left."  The third character, 通, means street.  The final character, 行, means "go."  Add those kanji clues together along with the fact that the people angrily bumping and shoving me while I was lining up this picture all walking on the left side of the walkway, and one can quickly extrapolate three things: the quick-and-dirty translation is "keep to the left," it is not necessary to know everything to be able to understand enough written Japanese to survive, and Japanese people do not fuck around in the train station.

Just like in English when you see prefixes and suffixes like "mal" or "dict" or "auto" and use them to derive a definition from an unfamiliar word, so too can the beast of reading Japanese at a basic level be tamed by a broad understanding of character meanings.

Now, if you're trying to translate legal documents or instructions on how to assemble a transmission on a 2011 Honda Civic, please, please do not follow this advice--for that, there's no substitute for rote.  But if you're wondering how far you can get on a grade-school understanding of kanji--well, you can do okay.

Reading Japanese characters, like explaining why you're naked and dangling by your neck from a doorknob in the closet of a Motel 6, relies heavily on context.  One of the most frustrating parts of learning to read Japanese is that the pronunciation, like the face of a horrified Puerto Rican cleaning lady, can shift dramatically very quickly.

大, for example, sounds like "dai," "tai," "o," or "ookii," depending on usage and the characters that precede and follow it.  Jesus Christ, who were the assholes who made this language?  Except wait, hold on:

Let's take P.  One of 26 (52, counting capitalization) simple, easy-to-read letters that make up English--God's language.  After all, it's the language He wrote the Bible in.  But let's take another look at our p in action:

prophylactic

pheromones

penis

pneumonia

What do these words have in common?  Aside from the fact that they can all appeared in the police report following my bachelor party (along with pdead pstripper), not a lot.  The P acts differently in each instance.  You can't read each constituent letter--it acts as part of a whole.  Why does that sound so familiar?


Wait a minute... O Lord, why hast thou forsaken us?

When I first started studying Japanese, I thought to myself "what a load of horseshit.  A little internal consistency would be nice."  But for the last three years, I've been teaching English to children.  They have the exact same problem I mentioned above.  Kids always come up to me after doing the homework I assigned them and they all have the same question: "what's a prophylactic?"

I witness these struggles on a daily basis--of trying to find some concrete answer that will suddenly make the problem of pronouncing a Romanized alphabet go away.  But you know what?  In spite of the difficulty and probably threats of physical abuse from their parents, they get closer to the answer every day.  A bunch of kids make me look like a world-class asshole for complaining about something as basic as reading.

It's a hard thing eating humble pie with chopsticks.  

There are no absolutes in language, and it is the epitome of folly to believe that one's own language is inherently better.  Chances are, you just forgot how tough it was when you had to learn it the first time.  That's just something you've got to understand before rockin' the kanj.  In the end, taming a language is just a matter of endurance, grit, determination, and flexibility (like my... students).