Half-term Report: Must Try Harder

How time flies - we've been in Japan for six months already!

I've been taking Japanese lessons now twice a week since October and while I feel I'm beginning to understand the basic structure of the language, I have reached that tricky phase where the act of proffering a tentative sentence elicits a return volley of Japanese that I still can't quite comprehend. It was much easier when we could just gesture pathetically, with a look of compete gaijin incompetence. People would then feel honour-bound to speak perfect English for our sole benefit.

Learning Japanese is hard. Harder even than finding out that you can only buy trousers at Gap, not just because they can accommodate your gargantuan waist size, but because they offer 'easy fit', which is marketing-speak for 'fat arse'.

Japanese is actually relatively paired down, as you might expect from a culture renowned for an aesthetic of simplicity. There are far fewer tenses than English. There are no possessive forms of nouns or pronouns. There are no plural forms. But their absurdly complicated numbering systems more than make up for this. On the face of it, Japanese numerics are commendably straightforward - eleven is '10 1', twenty is '2 10s' etc. But the numbering system is different when it applies to objects, as opposed to people. And age. And small things. And long things. And flat things. There are zillions of them, and there are no rules, you just have to learn them.

My particular favourite is the fact that the counting system for rabbits is the same as for birds (itiwa, niwa, sanba...). Allegedly this is because Buddhists are forbidden to eat anything with four legs. Evidently partial to a bit of rabbit stew, the enterprising monks of ancient Japan classified rabbits as birds.

The Japanese will counter with "well, you have collective nouns'. Which we do indeed, but these terms are just for pub quizzes, they are not in common usage. You might see a bloat of hippopotami or a coalition of cheetahs at the zoo, but it's a bit different from ordering two bottles of beer (ni-hon, onegai-shimasu, in case you're wondering). Thankfully, there are still some things we can stick two fingers up to, and for...

As if learning the lingo wasn't difficult enough, learning to read is another thing altogether. There are three character sets - kanji, hiragana and katakana. There are around 4,000 kanji characters, of which I know about 10, like river, mountain etc, which isn't too much use frankly. Hiragana is an attempt to simplify kanji using around 40 or so syllables, and katakana uses a phonetically identical syllabary, but describes what the Japanese call 'loan words', which are typically English words that have become commonplace in daily language.

Of the three, katakana is the most instantly gratifying for a gaijin, as it is essentially like an 'I-Spy' code. Ha-n-ba-ga, for example, is your Macdonalds staple food, although a little more convoluted is the burger chain name itself: Ma-ka-do-na-ru-do. But Katakana doesn't teach you any Japanese, it just makes you realise how much English has been exported overseas.


Jessica has hit the ground running, and has already memorised the hiragana syllabary, so she'll be handling most of our domestic administration before too long. We've given up all hope of ever understanding enough to read kanji though. People ask us what is the most different thing about living in Japan, and I usually reply that it is having to take our mail to work to have someone explain to me what it is about. Very disorientating...

Anyway, I'll sign off this entry with a summary of my most impressive linguistic gaffes to date, something which I'm sure that I will have to regularly update:

1. Introducing Sarah as 'my crab' to the immigration department official (kanai = wife; kani = crab)


2. Thinking I was telling someone they were a bit drunk, when I actually said that they had done something very rude to a lady (yo chatta = drunk; ya chatta = very rude act with lady)


3. Constantly mispronouncing 'teacher' - a little bit embarrassing as my Japanese teacher is a woman (sensei = teacher; sensai = former wife)

As you can see, the margin for error is pretty small...