No Longer (completely) Illiterate!

~Having nothing better to do yesterday, I finally sat down and learned hiragana, one of the three main systems of writing used in Japan. Hiragana is much like the Roman alphabet that is used in English, in that each symbol represents a sound rather than an entire word:

^ One has to be careful when learning hiragana, because the sounds are sometimes pronounced differently than their corresponding English letters. For example, the first five symbols, for a-i-u-e-o, are pronounced ah-ee-ooh-eh-oh, NOT ay-aye-yu-ee-oh like we do in English. This is why I didn't major in linguistics...

Learning Japanese writing has proven to be very difficult for me. My original intention when starting my job was to practice a bit each day, but when I get home around 9:45 pm after work, I'm completely burned out and just want to eat dinner and go to sleep. During my two days off each week, I've so far been carousing around Nagaoka and the rest of Japan. Still, I did my best, making flashcards for each symbol. However, it just wasn't working: I'd forget the symbols by the next day. Luckily, I turned to the internet for help and discovered a number of extremely useful websites.

I used two different websites to learn hiragana. The first site presents each symbol along with a mnemonic: an associated English word or phrase to aid in memory. For example, the symbol for the sound 'ki' is associated with the word 'key', because the symbol looks like a key:
Some of the mnemonics are extremely silly, but that's a good thing because it makes them easier to remember (my favorite is the mnemonic for the sound 'ne', which is 'nemesis!').

The second website has a memory game where symbols appear on the screen and you have to click on the correct sound that the symbol represents. You can enable and disable one or more symbol sets (for example, only activating the symbols you've learned so far). This is a great way to test the symbols that I've learned; I was able to memorize the set of 46 symbols in a few hours.

This morning, I quickly reviewed the hiragana that I'd learned last night, then looked around my apartment, trying to decipher...I mean, to translate any writing I could find. I looked at food packages and appliances and was able to read a little, but not too much; most of the writing is in kanji. Dejected, I sat down to eat lunch, and was able to translate a word! On the side of a box of cookies, I saw the symbols お い し い which literally spell out o-e-shi-e in hiragana, and sound like oh-ee-she-ee:

^This Romanizes into your Word of the Post: 'oyshī', which means delicious! As you can see, translating Japanese writing is quite a process.

Today I rode around Nagaoka on some errands, and I was very pleased that I could actually identify some of the symbols on signs and stores. I spotted お い し い again on a sign in front of a restaurant area (perhaps it said, "Delicious restaurant plaza?"). I was able to sound out many words, but the problem is that I don't know what most of the words mean. Being able to sound out the words is only half of the process; actually translating the resulting word into English is the other half!

Next on my list of things to learn is katakana, a second set of phonetic symbols much like hiragana, but used for words taken from other languages. Katakana is also used to spell out company names, which is why I see so little hiragana and so much katakana when riding around Nagaoka. Hopefully my progress will swift (the symbols are derived from hiragana and are actually easier to write).

Unfortunately, memorizing the symbols and their sounds in hiragana and katakana is only half the battle; I still need to learn how to correctly write them (which is a lot harder than you might think). I found a handy website that has animations of how to draw each symbol.

Once I'm through with hiragana and katakana, it's on to the thousands of kanji! Joy. Well, at least I'm in the right place to practice, since I see this stuff every single day...

Oh, here's some Japanglish to lighten your day:

^ Pocky bitter chocolate, as the box clearly states, is for men only. Presumably, women caught consuming this 'oyshi' confection are breaking the law. I suppose that women are only supposed to eat the 'sweet' version. ~Oyasumi!