While I was doing research for another project I was doing, I went down a bit of a rabbithole. I was trying to explain (and make sure I understood) the uses of voiced vs. unvoiced consonants. I found a bunch of interesting things. One was that there are some kana
My thoughts on kanji and what they are for have evolved over the past year or two. When first starting Japanese, they seem almost redundant and needlessly difficult. Why use kanji, you think, when there are around 110 perfectly good syllables to use in their place? But that’s an English
At my Japanese lesson today, the question was posed: ひらがなは漢字どちら方が一番やさしいですか (which is the easiest, kanji or hiragana) I responded 漢字は方が一番やさしいです (kanji is the easiest). I didn’t make this statement lightly or without thinking. And while it would have been fun to troll sensei, I wasn’t doing that either. I really
There are two pillars to success when learning any language: vocabulary and grammar. The thing about them is, they are actually rather orthogonal to each other. Even in Japanese, as long as you learn the dictionary form (or to some degree even the polite form of the word) you don’t
As I have been learning Japanese, one observation keeps coming to mind, one I can’t shake: Japanese is incredible, amazingly, spectacularly biased against beginners. What I mean is this: when you start learning Japanese, there is a hump. The hump seems almost insurmountable. You have to learn an entirely new
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
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 –
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