For the past 6 months, I’ve been taking studying Japanese more seriously. From the time I quit studying Japanese in elementary school until now, I had very little formal schooling in Japanese, and whatever was formal, wasn’t very effective.
*Run down for people who don’t know: I grew up speaking Japanese outside of Japan so my knowledge of it is like..half there half not.
After learning Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese to a relatively high level many years ago, coming back to Japanese now, I realized that I forgot what it felt like to learn another language.
For the past few months, I’ve been trying to study the kanji for words I already knew — that way, I would only have one thing to learn on top of old knowledge, as opposed to learning a new word + new kanji for that new word. For example, I grew up hearing the word とおい (tōi, kanji: 遠い) so I would practice writing and visualizing the kanji.
More recently, I flipped from studying kanji to studying more (new) vocabulary words. Obviously studying a language like Spanish or Portuguese from English won’t be as difficult as going to Japanese from English, especially in terms of vocabulary (and orthography).
What made me think about this was something as “simple” as school subjects. For example:
English-Portuguese-Japanese
Psychology — Psicologia — Shinrigaku (心理学)
Literature — Literatura — Bungaku (文学)
Geography — Geografia — Chirigaku (地理学)
Engineering — Engenharia — Kōgaku (工学)
Having English as a native language, to learning Spanish and Portuguese, once I “learned” about the rules that certain words took from one language to the other, I could pretty much guess that psychology and literature would be something like psicologia and literatura, respectively; and if I was wrong, I would be corrected, simple. But from something like English to Japanese, you can’t just “guess” for languages that don’t really share any kind of history together.
I never learned (or at least retained) something like the names of school subjects in Japanese for multiple reasons, the first being that the acquisition of that vocabulary was never really enforced, even if we went over the words. Second, because I guess I personally never felt the need to know it as a kid, since I wasn’t formally schooled in Japanese in those subjects, and third, because it didn’t have a high enough frequency in my household for me to have known how to say chemistry, biology, math, literature, etc.
What scared and prevented me from learning Japanese for so long, I think, was the fear of kanji. I knew that on- and kun-yomi gave kanji so many different readings in different contexts, and how could I memorize and effectively recall more than a thousand characters, if I could even get that far?
My perspective on that changed when I recently tried to learn new vocabulary. In my notebook, I wrote the school subjects in English, then in hiragana for the Japanese version, since originally I intended to learn the words by how they sound first. I would learn the kanji after I could successfully recall the words.
But what I realized that the kanji actually helps me remember how to say the words.
For psychology, shinrigaku written in hirgana is just a cluster of sounds to me. But when written out in kanji, shinrigaku (心理学) is heart (心), logic (理) and study (学), all of which semantically, I could see being related to the idea of the field of psychology.
The same goes for geography (chirigaku, 地理学). In kanji, it’s ground/earth (地), logic (理), study (学). What helped me even more with this one, was that I recognized the first kanji 地 as the same kanji (and luckily, sound) that appears in map, 地図 (chizu).
While I believed for the longest time that kanji would be the most difficult aspect of learning Japanese, I ran into a roadblock that briefly made me think vocabulary would be even harder than kanji. But taken together, with just a bit of knowledge about certain kanji, thanks to my childhood experience of growing up with it, my kanji has been able to help me expand on my vocabulary.
This experience has been a rather cyclical one. When I was a kid in Japanese school, I believed my strongest area was vocabulary. I always struggled with kanji. Studying Japanese as an adult, I dove head-first into studying the kanji for words I was already familiar with, but when trying to expand my vocabulary, kanji has stepped in and stepped up to help me with my vocabulary by helping me visualize and associate certain sound-meaning pairs with new vocabulary.
I realize that for beginners, kanji is a daunting thing and takes a lot of time to learn and retain. I realize that not everyone has the same background as I do with Japanese. But once you’re familiar with kanji, you can see it popping up in new places, whether it’s embedded within another character or in a compound (words with more than one kanji character) and it has the ability to help you. Not hinder you.
It’s not easy learning a new language, and in my case, it’s not easy trying to add on to a language that comes semi-easily and semi-not. Some languages are hard on multiple fronts, like how I thought Japanese was, especially the kanji and vocabulary. But interestingly, I think it’s all starting to come together like the coherent language it’s supposed to be. And it’s beautiful when it does.
It just may take a while to get there.
