works of wanderlust

It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

What was the best anything that you read in 2025?

Japanese signage. 

I’ve never been a great student of language. 

In grade school, having started elementary in a town that was apparently not following the provincial French language requirements for the curriculum, we moved and my new school dropped me into learning our second national language about three years behind everyone else. I never really caught up. I lagged in junior high. I fought to catch up in high school, literally spending a summer trying to get into a groove that would allow me to join the full IB class rather than being one of those partial nerds. I have dabbled in Duolingo. I even tried my hand speaking in both Quebec and France. No dice. I’ve spent the last ten summers helping out the France pavilion at our local heritage festival (because my neighbours, from France, run it) and the best I can do is kind of keep up understanding a third of what is said.  I don’t speak French.

When I lived in Vancouver for three years I enrolled in night school because I got it in my head that I should learn German. I bought books to study, I bought fiction to pretend like I could read it, I travelled to Germany and tried to have simple conversations. It was a lot less effort than I put into French (and a lot fewer opportunities to practice) and to this date I kind of understand the very basics, but I couldn’t talk my way out of a biergarten during Oktoberfest if my life depended on it.

This past year I embarked on my third serious language adventure: Japanese. I’ve documented a bit of it in this blog, of course, and there are numerous references herein to my efforts and my adventures into the world of the Japanese language in 2025.

Japanese tho has been different. The biggest reason is that it does not use the western alphabet.

In fact, most of my efforts this past year have been devoted to just trying to memorize the hiragana and katakana (and a few kanji this past couple months) of the primary character sets that compose the basics of written Japanese. There are a lot. Nearly fifty basic hiragana symbols plus marks and variations and rules and applications that adjust how it all works. There is a similar number of katakana, and a similar twist on how they are used. There are literally fifty thousand or so kanji symbols and not even fluent speakers are expected to know more a couple thousand of the core symbols. 

I have used apps and flashcards and books and worksheets and classes and even a poster hanging in my office.  It has been a huge slog, but a rewarding one. And particularly rewarding was being able to stroll through the streets of Tokyo, ride the train to Kyoto and explore Japan’s hot spots in November while having a thousand daily opportunities to notice that some of that effort to learn those characters (and a bit of basic vocabulary) had stuck. I couldn’t really claim that I could read it, but it wasn’t all incomprehensible. I could look at things and recognize shapes and words, especially important ones about numbers and food and such.

I’m far from fluent, I fully admit that, but reading a bit of hiragana on the beautiful streets of Japan was probably the best thing I read all year.