All about Nihongo Class

My sincerest apologies to everyone who has waited more than a week to see an update on here. After a busy and eventful weekend in Nagasaki, we returned Sunday afternoon to a mound of homework and a week with 4 tests looming before us. Needless to say, the tests and homework mounds too precedence over blog updating. Sorry!

But we're back now, and should definitely have more pictures and adventures soon. Becky's got her heart set on writing about the Nagasaki trip, so I will leave that to her. She is sleeping right now, and may update later tonight about Nagasaki with a bit of persuasion.

Anyway, first I'll talk about class life, which, after this week, is the most pertinent topic. As some of you know, we are using a textbook series called Genki. It's issued by the Japan Times, and comes in two main volumes, spanning 23 chapters. Last year in class with Grand Valley's newest 日本人 on staff, Sayaka Abe sensei, I covered the first book in it's entirety, which brought me through all of chapters 1 through 12. Thanks to Abe sensei's thorough, comprehensive, and highly enjoyable class (yes she might read this eventually ^_^ ), I had a pretty solid footing on the basics as I went into the placement test 3 weeks ago. Becky, however, had a bit of a rough beginning to her Japanese learning career, with a new sensei every semester and a very slow pacing before Jeremy Robinson sensei, the GVSU Japanese program's current "buchou", took the reigns of the program two years ago. Becky's first year in Japanese only covered the first 8 chapters of Genki, and Robinson sensei had no choice to to pick up the pace to catch the class up to where they should have been. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a teacher to make a lesson plan for a foreign language class, muchless for a language as complicated as Japanese. To avoid digression, we'll end it here: Abe sensei, Robinson sensei, I am very grateful for the curriculum you've put together at GVSU. Thank you for everything!

Anyway. There are plenty of readers (hi, family!) that haven't the slightest clue about Japanese anything. The alphabet, the food, the culture, the cartoons, it's almost like a foreign country on the other side of the world! Since the topic of the moment is class, I thought it might be of interest to explain in a highly abridged form how the intimidating character system works. Senseis and classmates, feel free to skip this next part.

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Let's begin with Hiragana.

Hiragana is the "main" alphabet, which allows for the creation of all the "sounds" that can be made in Japanese. They all have their own pronunciations (based on syllables, unlike the western languages who are based on phonics), and are derived from Chinese characters a long, long time ago. They look like this:
まいにちにほんごのじゅぎょうにたくさんかんじとぶんぽうをならいますから、まいばんしゅくだいがよじいじょうあります。
(Because we learn a lot of kanji and grammar every day in Japanese class, we have at least 4 hours of homework every night).

They're loopy, rounded, and for the most part, pretty simple. At least, no more complicated than western characters. This is the first alphabet that is learned. There are 39 hiragana characters, and some of them, like english (hello, X, Q and Z) are rarely used. It would be easy if we left it at that, right? Well, there's been talk around here that Kanji is slowly being phased out, and the eventual evolutionary step of the language will be for kanji to disappear. But that won't happen any time soon, especially not in my lifetime.

"Adam, what is this "Kanji" crap you keep talking about! I don't understand it at all!"

So glad you asked! Well you see, kanji is the reason why everybody gripes about Japanese. It's the reason why, after 16 chapters of basics, I still can't even read street signs all the way, and it's the reason why the novels I picked up are going to take several years to read. Kanji are borrowed chinese characters, all with a conceptual meaning, and sometimes as many as 5 different pronunciations depending on context. What!? Yeah, it's not easy. Oh, and there are also over 5000 kanji.

The same sentence again, but with kanji incorporated:
毎日日本語の授業にたくさん漢字と文法を習いますから、毎晩宿題が四時以上あります。

Well, at least it takes up less space, right? This is pronounced the exact same way as the all-hiragana sentence, and it means exactly the same thing. It may look more complicated at first glance, but imagine if you knew every character at the blink of an eye after growing up in a country where you have been exposed to it for several decades. If that were the case, you'd say this way of writing it actually faster to read and comprehend, right? I'm getting to the point where sentences with no Kanji at all are more difficult to read (there are no spaces between words in japanese, if you have noticed), and all-hiragana sentences look like a melisma of curly lines.

So in a nut shell, each kanji has its own concept. Let's take the first few in the sentence:
毎＝まい＝mai = every
日＝にち＝nichi = day (or more specifically, sun, or sun cycle)
hence, 毎日＝まいにち＝every day. Kanji is the concept, and hiragana is the pronunciation system. But not everything has kanji versions. Many grammatical structures, including but not limited to verb conjugations, and particles, and many nouns, are always written in hiragana.
For instance, a verb, "to go" (iku):
行く＝to go
行った＝went
行かない＝didn't go
行こう＝let's go
行ったことがない＝have never gone
Some are long, and some are short, but the kanji （行）is always the same in whatever contextual conjugation you care to give it. But I'm beginning to digress.

Last up is Katakana, an alphabet of hiragana doppelgangers used for "imported" words. As with any language in this highly global world, words from other languages are adopted as society needs them. Sometimes it's because there isn't a similar word in the original language, and another language already has a perfectly accessible one (in English, see words such as "coup d'etat", "perfume", "crescendo", and "hamburger"). Let's see if you can spot the Katakana by its rigid, linear style:
コンピューターを使ってインタネットを見て、ブローグにしゃしんをアップしました。
"I used my computer to view the internet, and uploaded photos to my blog."

As you could maybe guess, "computer", "internet", "blog", and "upload" are english words with japanese pronunciation. This is rather difficult to read at first, since katakana has the same amount of characters (with a few extra variations) as the hiragana alphabet, and it's sometimes inconvenient to remember two characters for the same sound, on top of kanji. But then, I remembered learning upper and lower case english letters, and later cursive, and wondering how in God's name "G" and "g" were the same letter. "R" and "r"? Get out of town. "O" and "o"? Okay, I can live with that. But as you're reading now, it probably doesn't even phase you anymore that those two letters are different looking, since they trigger the same response in your brain. In other words, it's not all that different as any other language. It's just got a different shaped learning curve.

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I hope this has been relatively interesting for those of you who don't know much about the writing system that I've been slaving over learning for the past 3 weeks. I find it absolutely fascinating, and have fallen in love with the process of learning a foreign language. I've always been a big fan of how words work together, and my lengthy resume (another french-borrowed word) of english courses taken and langage books read can be a testament to that. On a related note, the process of learning a foreign language is paralleled verbatim with the process of learning and mastering a musical instrument, and simultaneously studying all the ideosynchrasies and applications of music, and eventually developing your own style withing the macrochosm. Notation is the written language, Ear Training is the pronunciation factor, music theory is the grammar, performing is applied speaking via conversation, and developing a writing style is just like developing a compositional style. They are literally the same process. Pretty cool.

I'll also go on record as saying that extensive listening of music of all forms and weirdness, the music school ear training curriculum, and hours upon hours of passing a single note down the line with the intention of perfect matching in trumpet ensemble has boosted my dialect/pronunciation perception to strong proportions. While I'm not the best at vocab retention, pretty slow at grammatical construction, and can't draw parallel lines in kanji to save my life, my pronunciation of Japanese words is, if I may say so, probably the best in the class.

So as for the class, we have covered 4 full chapters of Genki so far (13-16). Each chapter contains about 60 new words, 16-20 Kanji (which allow for the construction of more words, sometimes words we already know, but usually not), 3 to 7 new grammar points, which can range from new verb conjugations, to types of sentence clauses, to ideosynchrasies between the different words for "to give". Also, there is a supplementary section in each chapter that covers a bit of culture, and about 30 extra words. Every night, we get homework from the designated Genki tear-out workbook, Kanji practice sheets, that drill handwriting and contextualize new kanji, word association maps, essays (and i mean 5th grade-size essays for the most part) and whatever else the 5 different senseis decide to bestow upon us. Usually, it amounts to about 10 pages a night. The effect of this of course, is that I catch up on sleep during the afternoon instead of updating the blog.

So after a total of 8 tests, one kanji/vocab and one grammar per chapter, I'm holding my own. Becky and I have a similar grade at the moment; I think she may have a few more cumulative points than me, but we're both doing just what we need to be doing. But upper-mid-90's on tests is not even in the same realm as speaking conversationally to Japanese friends. And the people in class that speak as if they're an authority on a subject after learning it once, and sporting a high-browed attitude while barking out in-class answers with excessive volume fail to see through their own conceited delusion that regardless of who shouts out the kanji's meaning first, everyone in class still SUCKS at Japanese compared to native speakers. It's just a fact that MUST be accepted if you expect to keep all your learning doors open. Now I'll get off my soapbox.

I was also going to write about the Tea Ceremony today, but I've exhausted my will to type any more. Expect to see soon:
Becky's update on Nagasaki
Adam's update on the customs of rehearsing Japanese classical music
Someone's update on Tea Ceremony
Watashitachi no update on "Top 10 cool things in Japan". (I look forward to writing this one)

Until next time~