Japan - On Writing

こんにちは！
Hello!


And good morning! You know, writing is tough. Yet for as tough as it is, writing first relies on the fundamental understandings of basic language. And learning a language can be extremely difficult if your brain is not wired in that way. No shame, some brains are simply more adequate to learning languages than others who, for example, might be more adept at intuitive artistry.

This is going to be a text heavy post, so get ready.

OK. Through a string of blog posts and the refinement of teaching lessons, difficulties I once overlooked in the English diction are slowly become less opaque, and new sets of questions I never needed to explain before have come into light. What was once an passive understanding of a system of language is now a comprehensible combination of rules and exceptions surrounding a deep history of word appropriation, structural reconfiguration, and conceptual adaptation.

No joke, English can be difficult language. Supporters site irregular verbs conjugations and various exceptions to many rules as reasons for difficulty, as opponents scoff at repeatable grammar types and lack of gender presence. What I say is English is generally easy to learn while incredibly difficult to perfect. That being said, Japanese is nothing to scratch your nose at - the Japanese essentially intermixes three, sometimes four (!) different sets of characters simultaneously. You better know all of them in full if you are to stand a chance at reading. And thats just the first step. Lets say you can identity all seventy-one basic Hiragana characters and can form a word, you still have to know what word you are reading. Oh, and did I mention that the Japanese don't use spaces?

Thatmeansyoureallyhavetoknowwhenandwherewordsbeginandendoryouwillfindthetaskofreadingimpossible.

So, in appreciating the struggle (and taking a break from) learning Japanese, I am submitting a new blog post to give insight to why people, correctly, say that learning Japanese is one of the harder languages to accomplish.

If I haven't come out at said it directly before, Japan's dollar store chains are remarkable. Each one is different and the one in Tosa city sells this really helpful graph paper used to practice writing. You may remember something similar in grade school when learning cursive, that top and bottom solid line, with a broken middle line to guide the upper stroke marks of your cursive writings. Same concept here, expect that character is focused in its own square, and each square is further partitioned by horizontal and vertical dotted lines to guide each stroke placed in relation to the center of the character's position. 

Practice, practice and more practice. I've now amassed two and a half notebooks, the latest pages denoting something resembling complete sentences. 

Lets start this one by first jumping into our time machine.

We want to travel back and observe the development of human "writing" on the grand time scale. What we would see are systems around the world tending to originate in picto-graphic forms (pictures standing for events, objects, or thoughts) and transforming gradually into sono-graphic modes of expression. That is, from images that represent certain ideas (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs) to the representation of characters coding for audible sounds (modern day English alphabet). Now one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to say that this transformation is lineal, or at worst, that its progressive. No where, despite our specie-centric point of view, is it law that our way is the best way. In fact, if we continue to notice change through the modern era, we actually see the reversal of this effect! This transition into sono-graphic systems is beginning to loose momentum and like a giant pendulum is getting ready to swing back into the realm of imagery with the advents and popularity of modern short-hand texting, picture messages, and especially emoji. At least what we can say from all of this is that adding a smiley face in your message is nothing new at all conceptually, but a fresh form.

All of this points us to the understanding that this switch from images to sounds is again found in the the story of how the Japanese language developed. So, to begin, lets go to China.

The Chinese are known for having a huge, vast library of characters at their disposal. The official numbers are around 3,500 characters, yet, because our time machines are set back to the 5th century CE, we can expect a larger range in the 40 or even 50 thousands. And so imagine you are a Japanese aristocrat familiar with most of the Chinese writing, and are charged with adapting the system for Japan's people. What do you do?

Well, you develop Man'yogana. It was the in between language that used Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. Man'yogana is no longer in use, although we can say that its modern representation is the Kanji. This is the most difficult modern set of Japanese characters, and is actually the basis for two of the following writing systems. From Man'yogana, the Japanese created the Katakana and the Hiragana systems. Yet, its a mistake to think of either Hiragana or Katakana as reductions.

As with most, if not all writing systems, the practice of reading and writing was reserved first for the elite, high-ranking, and the noble men of society. As an effect of this, it was the esoteric and esteemed ambiance surrounding the privilege of reading and writing that gave the form of communication both its simultaneous mystic and intrigue. Flaunted hauteur and its desire often go hand in hand.

And so, from the people who first could not, or simply were not allowed to, learn the Man'yogana of the day, began developing their own short-handed way for capturing and propagating this trend called writing. You might have guessed that if it were the noble men who were given the opportunity to learn Man'yogana, then it was the noble women of Japan who invented Hiragana, the short-hand Kanji.

Culturally suppressed simply because of their sex (remember to always qualify sex apart from gender) reasoned that Japanese women were forbidden to write in Man'yogana, so they adapted it to form their own unique, popular, and still in use today, Hiragana. Literally meaning "flat" "false" "name," or loosely translated to mean "squashed fake characters," Hiragana is a quick and fluid way of writing the 46 (now 71) characters in one stroke. Because of this, you can still see the curves and rounded corners of Hiragana characters. For example,　ひらがな.  And as a testament to the great use and popularity of this new script in ancient Japan, one of the oldest and most well known Japanese novels is written by a woman. It is The Tale of Genji, which, of course, was written all in Hiragana by Murasaki Shikibu.

Now, one of the reasons that you might have heard that Japanese is one of the hardest languages to become familiar with is because aside from Man'yogana which is now Kanji and Hiragana, Katakana was introduced around the 8th century and thrown into the mix. Furthermore, Katakana represents the exact same 71 possible syllable sounds as Hiragana, but with a completely new set of characters to memorize. This may at first sound redundant. Why create two separate syllabaries to represent the exact same set of phonetics? Good question.

The answer is function. And actually, once you start to notice which words are spelled out in Hiragana and which ones use Katakana and Kanji, the Japanese language starts to show its premeditated structural form. Hiragana is the first language students are taught at school. It is used to represent adjectives and verbs for the larger part, sometimes as particles.

Katakana, meaning "fragment" "false" "name"  or loosely translated to "broken apart fake characters" is the made up directly of Kanji characters which have been broken apart. To keep track, Hiragana emulated the Kanji in its own fluid form, whereas Katakana actually breaks apart the Kaji into simpler forms and retains its sharp strokes. Thus, Katakana embodies an overall rigid, angular presence on the page. And yet both Hiragana and Katakana code for the same 71 possible syllables. To help demonstrate this effect, here is my name  in Hiragana　あんどれす　and again in Katakana　アンドレス. Today, Katakana is set aside to be used for foreign words, titles, names, and others.

Please note that Hiragana and Katakana are NOT alphabets. They are syllabaries. Each symbol codes for a syllable, not a letter. Each is comprised of a consonant and vowel with the single exception of "n" which stands alone. This is very much unlike the American alphabet that combines consonant and vowel letters to form syllables in varying ranges. Therefore, when you write out the name Andres in Japanese, you must add vowels because the consonants "d" and "r" in my name do not exist on their own. What you get is my name written as Andoresu.

Although seeing you name in another script can spark cool fascination, many foreigners jump too quickly into force writing their name in modern Kanji. But its not that simple. Set anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 different characters, modern Japanese Kanji is, in a word, intimidating. Perhaps that is why 85% of Japanese people who challenge themselves to the highest level of the Kanji Kentei...fail.

The Kanji Kentei is the standard ruler index for measuring Kanji comprehension. The test counts not only the recognition of Kanji, it tests its application as well because many Kanji are homonyms. And for good measure, the exam also tests the correct stroke order to the character. To say that some of these characters are inherently intricate is no long stretch of implication. The Kentei test is made up of ten levels, level ten being the lowest and easiest, comprising of just 80 characters. This is the test passed by first graders. At the other end of the scale, level 1, there are 6,355 characters that tests the classical Japanese proverbs and idiomatic expressions, knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, and special or radical Kanji readings.

Is the concept of why Japanese is so difficult coming into focus now? If you want to be humbled by a short Kanji map of characters, follow this link: Kanji.

Realistically however, you wont need all, or even most, of those. According to Japanese Ministry of education, there are 2,136 "official"characters used in government documents with about half being taught in elementary and the other have in secondary school. And since its inception, new Kanji has been invented, and many old Kanji have been modified.


Phew! Ok, almost done here. If you are keeping count, you may have noticed that so far I've only covered three of the four Japanese scripts. Fortunately, I've saved the easiest for last. The final script is Romanji. Like the name implies, this set follows the Roman alphabet system that you are reading currently. So, when you read Japanese names such as Tokyo, Sushi, Teriaki, you are already reading Romanji. Congratulations!!

Finally, I say that learning Japanese is a smother transition in fact because I know Spanish. Similar to Japanese by coincidence, Spanish also works by a 1:1 consonant/vowel pattern. Spanish doesn't have any ugly words like "through" that contains five consonants, two vowels but only one syllable. I love to watch the Japanese expression of surprise and amazement when I explain this to my students and in effect, this little bit of insight has sparked for me what I describe as my new and completely superfluous hobby of writing Spanish in Japanese.

はすた るえご！

あほる,

-A