Friday, June 16, 2006

Japanese Language

For the past month, I've been hitting the language books at least a few times per week. Mostly because I found out that someone I know and talk to frequently is also attempting to learn the language. I'm sure we'll make all sorts of mistakes and our language won't be the most polite, but it's fun to trade words because it forces me to start picking them up.

Back in the early spring, I estimated that I knew around 1/4 of the kana symbols (hiragana/katakana) and maybe 100-200 words. Which isn't a terribly good start, but might have also been underscoring myself a bit. There are a lot of words that I can identify in spoken speech which helps in breaking down the spoken language (so that I can recognize sentence structure).

Now, I suspect that I might know closer to 300-400 words. I've been mostly concentrating on nouns because they rarely change based on usage. Verbs are much more difficult because there are all sorts of rules about how to change them to match the sentence. Adjectives aren't too bad, but they also change in certain situations. Stock phrases are easy enough to learn, but I'm still a ways away from forming my own sentences or understanding spoken / written speech.

At some point this summer, I need to knuckle down and write out all of the kana symbols a few hundred times. That way I'll know the stroke order and be able to recognize all of the kanas.

Then I get to start on the Kanji symbols... eep!

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 1:25 AM (0 comments)