I realized something today that has been kind of simmering in my consciousness lately, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

Many words in Japanese are actually compound words.  For example, 美味しい means “delicious”, but the words separately mean something like “beautiful taste”.  電車 means “train” (or that’s how it’s taught in Japanese Level Up), but the kanji separately mean “electric train”.  But 大丈夫 is not really a compound word, it means something entirely different than the three kanji separately would indicate.

So is it reasonable to teach “oishii” as “delicious”?  Is it reasonable to teach “densha” as “train”?  Or are we losing something in translation because we’re trying to force compound words with separate meanings into one English word, and losing something in context?

“Beautiful taste”, for example, is rather poetic, and is something I would expect from a society that has a very well refined and historic sense of beauty.  It says a lot about how they see food, and even so, the human experience.  But “delicious”, to us, just means something tastes good.  Or even very good.  There’s no poetry in it.  So it feels as if we’re forcing their poetry into our language, and losing a major sense of the Japanese culture while we’re at it.

This is becoming a major frustration in learning Japanese, and I’m starting to think that learning it by translating into English (even using words like “delicious” or “train” just doesn’t work.  I’m not advocating an approach like Rosetta Stone, don’t get me wrong, as their approach is frustrating and insufficient in its own way, but I am saying that I feel like I’m losing something from Japanese by trying to force kanji (and compound words) into an English mold.

Why do we have to learn it as “delicious”?  Why can’t we just use it as “beautiful taste”?  Does that somehow make Japanese easier for us to learn, while blunting the impact of the cultural difference?  Or are we trying to find areas of cultural similiarity to lessen the culture shock (such as “genki desu ka?”) and instead screwing the pooch in the process?  Or am I just overthinking it are these translations perfectly fair?

This would go the other way too, but I’m not sure quite as easily.  To a Japanese, they might have the concept of “delicious”, but the translation to English is one word.  Perhaps they are missing the nuance in our language, that we don’t have a sense of beauty in the sensual aspects of food that they do?  Or again, perhaps I’m overthinking that too.

I don’t know the answer.  This is an exploratory post  But the more I’m learning about Japanese, the more I see some very difficult cultural differences brewing just beneath the surface, and I feel as if those differences may be being deliberately glossed over in the name of learning quickly.  I’m not sure I like that, honestly.

I feel as if, if I even come close to mastering Japanese, I’ll be able to learn any other language I want.  Japanese is hard.

Crazy hard.

But I keep encountering ways to look at it that make it easier, and sometimes it feels like you just kind of have to luck your way into learning these things, as there seems to be nowhere that has everything you need in one place.  Every site or book seems to have parts of it, but you have to spend months just piecing it all together until it just clicks.  I know I’ve said something similar to this before, but it’s still true.

Take learning kanji, for example.  When you first start Japanese, you have this big ol’ pile of thousands of characters in front of you, and you think the best way is to just pick them up one by one, stomp them into your memory, and then eventually you’ll master it.  But that’s really not how it works.

Here’s what kanji really are (for the purposes of memorizing):  They are a multivariate grid of a little over 200 different axes.  Each of those axes is a “radical”.  Kanji Damage (and “Remembering the Kanji”) gives each of those radicals a name, and that’s a really wise thing to do.  What I’ve been doing is just giving them my *own* name.  It’s probably not the wisest thing to do, but it works.

For example, 外, meaning “outside”, I call a “ta” and a “to”, because that’s what the two katakana characters look like.  時, or “time”, I call “sun temple”, because that’s the two characters.  And 寺, or “temple”, I call “ground on measurement”.  I make other mnemonics too…  “long ta” for one component of 各 (“long ta over mouth”, “half a give” for one component of 号, etc.  It works for me, but it may not work for most.

The point, though, is not so much what you call it – though most of those radicals do have names that it would be helpful to learn at some point, but that it works for you to help you remember where on that 200 and some dimensional space a particular kanji falls.  Obviously it works a bit for me because I called those up – even though I did have to look up the pronunciation.  That comes a bit later.

What I’m trying to say is, that it’s not insurmountable, but you can’t approach it as just a pile of kanji you sweep up into the middle of the room, pick one out, and hope that it’s useful to you.  You gotta organize them in a way that makes sense to you and use that to your advantage.

I’ll tell you, there’s a sense of accomplishment when you look at a name like “Takahashi”  (高橋), and think “hey!  I know that first kanji!  It means “expensive”!  Or “敦子” (Atsuko) and realize “hey!  I know that last kanji!  And I know how to pronounce it! Or a word like “気楽” and have a pretty good idea of how to pronounce it because you’ve seen both of the kanji before and recognized them!

The tools you use are important – some are better than others.  The books you use are also important – some are better than others.  But the most important thing is to figure out how to make it make sense to you, and build on that.  Because you’re not learning Japanese for someone else – you’re learning it for yourself.  And, other than whether people can understand you or not, You are the only one who gets to judge whether you are happy with your progress.

Hope this helps.