こんにちは。(Konnichiwa.) I am learning to read Japanese and it makes my brain ache in a good way. I had no plan to learn Japanese – I don’t need it for any reason, but I work for a language learning app, and someone in my team is completely redeveloping our Japanese course. She needs a Guinea pig to follow along behind her and test whether what she is doing works, and that lucky mammal is me (relatedly, I really hope we get to a point where no one remembers why we call testers “Guinea pigs”).
Japanese has a complex writing system, and as an English speaker, I need to progress through it in four stages – romaji (the Romanised version of Japanese, which allows me to write “konnichiwa”), hiragana, which I’m learning at the moment, which gives me the phonetic version of Japanese words (こんにちは), katakana, which allows me to write foreign loan words, and kanji (the scary bit) which are the complex characters which each represent a word.
There is something quite nice about learning a language because you have to, rather than because you want to. It kind of removes the need for generating and sustaining intrinsic motivation, which can be quite tiring. I’m quite curious to see whether I can keep this up, and progress to a good reading ability for my level, simply by doing a bit of study each week as my colleague gradually redevelops the course. That has been the most surprising thing so far – that certain types of extrinsic motivators can actually be quite effective so long as you have a fairly positive or benign attitude towards the task in hand.
The other thing which has really struck me is that even relatively small chunks of time spent trying to decipher characters can quickly become exceedingly tiring. There is a reason we don’t learn to read in just a few weeks – the brain freaks out and gums up when we try to decipher too many unfamiliar hieroglyphs at once. A big part of my job is helping my colleague scaffold the learning process, so she sees when I get tired or frustrated, or when a particular exercise is just too much for me. Understanding how many characters to introduce in one setting (5 seems to be optimal), how many times to test and retest them in the same session (up to 30 exercises, depending on complexity) and how long the session should take (around 10-15 minutes, more if you like to write everything down in detail) seems absolutely crucial for enabling learners to master reading and writing Japanese. As is so often the case, slow and steady seems much the best approach, rather than binge learning and wearing yourself out in the process.
I wish I could recall learning to read as a child, but I have no real memories of it beyond collecting new words in an old tobacco tin (which I used to sniff surreptitiously in class). There are moments when I’m trying to read Japanese and I feel suddenly very much a child again, almost on the verge of tears or a tantrum at the frustration of trying to understand but failing. “I’m too tired!” “It’s too hard!” I wail at my poor colleague. But there’s also the powerful surge of joy when a recognisable word emerges from the tangled mess of shapes on the screen in front of you. It’s like finding Wally/Waldo but a hundred times better. Learning to read is pure power, and when you get it, you feel truly invincible.
bookbusbird 