Japanese Language Ability

Living in the country is the best way to learn a language, right?

Then why is it so difficult!

I have noticed improvement, I'm picking up new vocabulary I tried to learn before but it didn't stick like きたない (kitanai - dirty), which came from a conversation with a housemate about the state of other floors in our guesthouse. I think ours is the cleanest!

But mostly I just feel frustrated. I spent 5 whole years studying this language! Of course, it was in my spare time, slotted around GCSEs, A-levels, and writing a novel, but 5 years is a long time!

I can create complicated sentences in my head, but they don't come out right. My vocabulary is still very limited, although it's slowly getting better. I think the biggest problem is listening and understanding.

I listen to my housemates having conversations around me and I can understand random words and sentences structures. Sometimes I get hung up on a certain word that I can't quite remember, and by the time it's come back to me, I've lost track of the conversation!

My housemates are all very understanding and speak to me slowly in Japanese, or in English. But I know I must really annoy them, you can't relax if you're constantly translating for someone or wondering if they have any idea what you're talking about, or trying to speak to them in their own language for their benefit.

And then there's reading and writing!!

Hiragana and katakana are no problem, they've stuck with me over the last 5 years and my reading speed is improving, although there's so much English around it's actually quite hard to practice 'in the field'.

But those kanji! They are so difficult! Even if they have furigana (the small hiragana telling you how to pronounce them) you still need to know the word to get any sense of meaning! In a lesson over the weekend, I got to talking about kanji with a student and I mimed writing 愛 (love - ai) and she said it was perfect and I should take up calligraphy, which I thought was nice.

The most annoying thing is that I've forgotten words and phrases that I knew a few months ago. I got an A* (the top grade if you're not familiar) in GCSE Edexcel Japanese in June, but, ironically, as the trip got closer and closer, I had less and less time to practice and study so things slowly slipped away from me.

Definitely a down-side to the method I used to teach myself Japanese is having no one to talk to! Teaching yourself using a CD course works to an extent, but it does mean that the practical experience of conversations is minimal. If you take this approach, take every opportunity possible to speak with native-speakers or anyone with Japanese language ability. It's priceless, albeit a bit nerve-racking.

One thing I've noticed is that hardly anyone uses the textbook Japanese that courses teach you, with desu and masu endings. They use either the plain forms of verbs e.g. taberu instead of Tabemasu for 'I eat', or miss out particles like ni when talking about times and places, which makes speech much quicker, but also harder to follow. For example, a polite sentence for 'I went there' might be 'Soko ni ikimashita' but the plain version would be 'Soko itta'.

I've seen some improvements, like being able to understand announcements on the subway, but that might be because of the Berlitz method - drilling parrot fashion! One example I've seen of improvement is slowly starting to understand the way words change in certain positions, like when you say 'first block' (in terms of the city's layout) you don't say 'ichi choume', you say 'itchoume', because it's quicker and easier, to say - not to learn! And why the pronunciation of words changes when a word is put in front of it. A good example is the district, Nihonbashi.

Literally, it means 'Japan Bridge' and Japan = Nihon, and bridge = hashi. But when something is put on the front of hashi, the diacritical marks (") are added to the hiragana character (は becomes ば) and it becomes -bashi. Because an 'n' (ん) before an 'm', 'b' or 'p' is pronounced as 'm', Nihonbashi becomes Nihombashi.

I used to wonder why they made it so confusing, changing all these words and pronunciations, but now I'm here I can see that it's actually easier to say and it makes speech flow much better.

I suppose the longer I'm here, the better I'll become and more things will make sense. Maybe I'm just being me, expecting 100% as soon as possible.

Well, I have 6 months left to get better, and then a year of studying Japanese at Uni, and then I'm back here for a whole year at a Japanese Uni, so there are plenty of opportunities to improve!