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日本語

The Limits of Language

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” – Wittgenstein This is a topic that I have been thinking a lot about for the past couple of weeks – in fact, I’ve even wrote a couple of posts touching on this idea.  In general, language shapes our thinking and our perception of the world – if there is something that is unexpressible in language, we then try our hardest to find a way to express it in language, and more often than not, we will usually take… Read More »The Limits of Language

In the Beginning

While I am a little (okay, a LOT) burned out on it, I am a bit of a theology nerd.  This is not a theology blog and it will not become one.  But as in the post Kami, there are some interesting theological insights to be gained from seeing how western theology interacts with Japanese culture. The Bible has been translated into Japanese.  The very first sentence is this: まだ何もなかった時、神は天と地を造りました Note the character 神, which means Kami, or God. Here in the west, we have a very specific idea of who… Read More »In the Beginning

Discovery

One thing I love about learning a new language, is that once you get past the basics, there is always something to discover.  I’m still a beginner by all means, but I consider having learned hiragana and katakana, and getting to the point where I understand the language enough to actually discover things, to be “getting past the basics”. Even though arguably I have not. Yesterday, I encountered the word “大日本”, which means “greater Japan”.  I found that it was pronounced “dai-nihon”.  I knew the characters for “nihon” (日本), and I know… Read More »Discovery

A Post About Actually Learning Japanese

After all of the posts about Japanese culture I’ve been spewing forth, I thought I’d write one about actually learning Japanese. I finally found a tool that I actually like, and I finally feel like I’m actually learning things. Putting the effort into learning hiragana and katakana has been completely invaluable.  I say this because it underpins absolutely everything else, and I think that this is probably the first thing that needs to be done – before kanji, before pronunciation, before everything.  Because it makes everything past that so much… Read More »A Post About Actually Learning Japanese

Kami

Spiritual content ahead.  I won’t make it a habit, but I want to take this blog where my linguistic and cultural explorations take me, and I found this fascinating. A few days ago, while I was reading up on Shinto, I learned something very interesting. See, Japanese nouns have no concept of singular or plural.  It’s something that’s simply not encoded into the language.  I mean, you can use the “tachi” suffix to specify plurality, but in general, when a noun is specified, you don’t know whether it’s singular or… Read More »Kami

Should Japanese Change?

When learning a new language, one of the first things that almost everyone does is one of two things: Compare it to your native language Suggest improvements Now is Japanese a very efficient language?  Not really.  The kanji are elegant, but obviously it is a steep barrier to entry.  And I think it’s obvious that if one were starting over with a new language, Japanese is probably one of the last languages that one would come up with intentionally. But it’s what we have.  And while there’s nothing wrong with suggesting… Read More »Should Japanese Change?

Parallels Between Language and Computer Science

Ogawa Makoto is a former Morning Musume idol, who took a couple of years off of performing to go to New Zealand to learn English.  She recounted her experience in words similar to this (and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember them entirely): I went to New Zealand to learn English, but in doing so, I found that I didn’t understand Japanese.  So I had to learn Japanese first. As I’ve been thinking about how best for me to learn Japanese, I’ve been thinking deeply about the underpinnings of language,… Read More »Parallels Between Language and Computer Science

Bootstrapping a language

In computer science, there is a concept called bootstrapping.  It applies primarily at two points:  The first is when you start a computer up, and the second is when you write a new language.  It refers to “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps”. When you begin writing another language, you have to write it in another language.  The earliest were written in machine code, meaning hexadecimal values that the processor interprets into instructions.  But as the craft advanced, the languages became even more abstract, until you have today’s monstrosities… Read More »Bootstrapping a language

Alphabet

Perhaps one of the most challenging things about learning Japanese is that it does not have an alphabet – but it appears to have an alphabet.  So we, as English speakers, try to overlay what we know about alphabets onto Japanese, and then it simply doesn’t work. Japanese, instead, has syllabaries – which are very different animals.  They are more like a grid than anything else.  There is no set order – in fact, any order that we put them into when we learn Japanese is based upon the romaji order – a… Read More »Alphabet

Learning Japanese

I’ve tried several different approaches to learning Japanese.  Some work better than others. The first thing I looked at was duolingo.  I then trashed that very quickly, as I didn’t think it would do well at teaching me what I wanted to know. I looked at Rosetta Stone and tried it out.  As I mentioned, I have very mixed feelings about it.  It teaches a lot of vocabulary very quickly, which is a plus.  What it does not do is give any kind of background to the vocabulary – so you… Read More »Learning Japanese