works of wanderlust

Tag: japanese

  • hiragana three

    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.

  • the japan files

    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 excited you most in 2025?

    It turns out there are two subtly different terms for non-Asian people who find themselves with an interest in Japan: one can be a japanophile …or one can be a weeaboo (or weeb).

    Both are similar terms, but like anything we do in this crazy culture of ours one is a reference to a tastefully pursued hobby and the other is a a pejorative insult meant to look down one’s nose at someone who is oddly obsessed with a narrow aspect of the same thing. One term leans positive while the other is a gut punch.

    Like, think about it this way: if you were really into wine I could compliment you and call you an aspiring sommelier or an enthusiast, collector or someone with a refined palate. Alternatively, if you were really into wine, wink wink, we could call you a lush or an drunk.  

    It read it with that vibe. 

    Essentially people who get nerdy about Japan and try to learn about the culture, the language, the food and more lean towards the label of Japanophile. But the latter term, weeaboo, gets slapped on folks who maybe turned their karate class and Crunchyroll subscription into weird personality quirk. Get it?

    I have met many of both this year. I jumped head first into the Japanese language going so far as to take a class offered by the local Japan Society, and I had a great time honing some of the lessons I had picked up on my own through tools like books and duolingo, all of that in the months before actually hopping on an airplane and jetting off to Tokyo and beyond.

    I don’t want to imply that my Japanophilia has popped out of nowhere in 2025, tho. I have been flirting with the film and food and literature of Japan for decades. I think my first “this is different and I love it” moment was in a theatre in the early 2000s watching “Spirited Away” on the big screen. I have long since added Murikami’s translated works to my top five authors list. And you’ll  almost always find a small stack of Usagi Yojimbo comics on my nightstand (which I fully understand is an American comic written by a man with Japanese heritage about Japanese history, but… it fits the theme here, no?) I’ve been tangentially interested for years and years. 

    But then in early 2025 we booked a trip and I thought to myself that it presented an interesting opportunity to go a little deeper: and so I did. I started learning hiragana and katakana characters on my phone. I picked away at some of the language. I bought books. I watched videos about the place. I dug deep into making lists of interesting Japanese foods. I prepared for our trip to make it more than a tourist jaunt, but to open my mind to observe the culture and the world when we arrived and immersed ourselves in Japan.

    And as I write this we’ve been home for about a week, and I keep practicing my Japanese and I keep poking at my literature and I still have a lot of Japan videos recommended to me on YouTube (though now I can watch them with a kind of “we saw that” familiarity or comparison mindset.) 

    I pushed into a Japanophile vibe in 2025. And I’m glad I went so deep before we went so far. 

  • japanese, part three

    I am approaching fifty, but attending an introductory language class kinda makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten again. We count in unison, ask each other our names and ages, play games identifying colours, and get stickers for good work. 

    I also have the least interesting origin story of the bunch, I’ve concluded. Everyone else seems to have a much better reason to be learning a challenging new language than my “I just decided to learn something new” one day reply. 

    One guy has family in Japan and he’s trying to learn how to talk to his grandmother. He already seems to know quite a lot and jumps to answer almost every question before my brain can even start to do the back and forth translation and get words to my mouth.

    Another guy is trying to immigrate there and wants some basic proficiency under his belt before he leaves. He spent the break yesterday getting help from the teaching assistant proofreading an email he needed to send about his immigration process or something—I only half listened from across the room.

    I was chatting with another dude after class and he had apparently grown up in Japan because his parents were working there when he was very young, and was fluent in Japanese at one point. There were recordings of himself speaking as a kid and he decided he wanted to be able to understand what his younger self was saying so… language classes.

    And me. Just interested. Lifelong learner, I reply. I dabble—I am just in a phase. Will I still be poking at this in a year? It would seem a bit of a waste, otherwise, right?

    In a month or so we’ll be in Japan. Immersed. 

    I’ve got a few basic phrases locked into my brain, but the daily drilling of new ones goes in fits and starts and I’m not as consistent as I need to be with the effort. Also, my brain is not as young and spongelike as it used to be. In one ear and out the other, is how the phrase goes.  I can say it twenty times in class and seem to have it just right, but then—out of context, perhaps—I can’t seem to latch back onto it again.

    Learning languages is not for everyone. It seems like some people just get it—or at least they are faking it way better than I am. I persevere, but am humbled by the effort.

  • japanese, part two

    How’s it going?

    Hajimemashita  はじめまして。 

    Yesterday was oddly milestone-ish for my language learning. Not only did I hit the two hundred consecutive days in Duolingo, but my second night at my in person language classes went a lot better than the first. Bank on that also in the last couple weeks we have secured tickets to both Ghibli Park and Tokyo Disneyland for our upcoming trip, my immersion into the culture of Japan recently has taken up a good chunk of my brain space.

    Last night in class we spent the first hour working through some common greetings and expressions, and of course the culturally appropriate ways in which to use each of them. I now have a long list of two or three word phrases that I should probably spend the week working to memorize.

    After the break we focused on some of the hiragana and numbers. It’s basically like kindergarten, singing the count to ten song and learning how to draw basic characters.

    Though, I suppose, every technique I’ve tried to date has had a wildly different approach. Duolingo treats you like a cross between a rushed tourist and a language scholar and works through the foundations of the language basics to build grammar and understanding. That audiobook I bought started by throwing complex thoughts at me, like “I’m going to eat sushi at the restaurant tonight with Hana,” and then shifting the words and ideas around in the hopes that understanding is uncovered. My flashcards, of course, are all about rote memorization. And this language course, as it turns out, seems to be a kind of building-blocks of conversation approach where we learn simple phrases and then add to it as we go along.

    My brain is less of a sponge for any of this than I was anticipating. 

    I have been learning words and phrases one day and then feeling them there on the tip of my tongue the next but unable to spit them out. It’s been a grind. Japanese is not for the feint of heart. 

    Many of the people in my class are relative pros, of course. I’m having trouble parsing the participation matrix in this particular set of people which seems to range from absolute beginners (like me, guys who have been dabbling with apps for six months or so) to folks who have obviously studied the language in the variously distant pasts so much so that some seem to have a firm grasp on what we are doing: as if a grade two student showed up in kindergarten and flummoxed the other kids with their proficiency at tying their shoes. You know? 

    I don’t expect proficiency, but having a few dozen things comfortably (and permanently) lodged in the ridges of my grey matter would sure be a quality result here. 

  • japanese, part one-ish

    I have written here previously about a couple of my self-study efforts to start learning Japanese, in part for our upcoming trip to Tokyo, but also just as—well—something interesting to pursue. Skills, languages, all that stuff—it broadens the mind, right?

    I figured I would make my updates a bit more formal because as of last week I signed up for actual in-person lessons. Right-o. Things are getting a bit more serious all of a sudden. The local Japanese Society, a cultural organization made up of and supporting Japanese immigrants happens to have a series of courses to teach the language to anyone interested in learning.

    The first class of my introduction to Japanese is tomorrow evening.

    We have a homework, tests, and cultural things to do in between classes.

    I just passed something like day 175 in Duolingo, and my hiragana and katakana skills are starting to settle into a comfortable familiarity—by which I mean I have about fifty percent recognition of the characters and their sounds. This is probably more-so with the hiragana, for now, but I’m starting to be able to look at characters when I see them out in the wild and sound things out. I mean, I usually don’t have the vocabulary to know what the word means, but I can sound it out—which is a great start, I think.

    I also bought myself a dictionary. That’s it. Nothing special to add about it, other than like any time I bought a translation dictionary it is a fun time looking up words and just flipping around through the pages looking for curiosities. 

    And, less useful but maybe interesting as the project progresses, our next door neighbours are hosting an exchange student from Japan for the year and she has already poked her nose over the fence to say hi (mostly to meet the dog, of course) and maybe there will be some opportunities to speak to her in Japanese when I get some lessons (and verbal confidence) under my belt.

    But the core of it, really, I think is the lessons. Eight weeks of three hour focused instruction before we go, and then I can try the test for the second level course and keep going in the new year and when we’re back from our vacation. By next summer I suppose I could have some serious progress.