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• Want to learn japanese

  Saturday, Jun 28, 2008 6:48PM / Standard Entry / Members only
  13 comments

  

   shogunate

   

  sumo match, i learnt to appreciate when i was filming in nan jing, weird

  

  tokyo, panormic view

  I have always wanted to learn japanese since teenage. It is frustrating enough not able to understand nintendo games and popular anime, let alone travelling all the way to tokyo, osaka, hakone or okinawa, having seen all these amazing cultures and not knowing a thing about its background, or having eaten some anonymous amazing sushi before and find it impossible to make the same order again. Argh, i can still remember the pain. I have tried to pick up the language a couple times, the first time is a couple years ago, the tutor is japanese, in some local multilingual culture center; turns out the fee is beyond extravagant i just had to terminate after two sessions. The second time, believe it or not, is self-learning, only a few months ago; i was travelling to japan so often i decided to learn it myself, out of this little phrasebook from lonely planet. I know its kinda unconvincing, but it worked like a charm for me. I tried to learn katakana so i memorised them one by one during the flight, and started practising on japanese magazines, trying to make out the english equivalent. As we all know, katakana is like the representation of foreign recent borrowings ie. credit card, coffee, however it is often uneasy to tell. Take credit card for instance, in katakana its pronounced: ku-re-jit-to ka-do. Only with patience and lots of practise, i could make out half the katakana i came across during the trip, it helped a lot when i was buying stuff and ordering dinner. But there is another problem.

  Gramma- always bring infinite pain to discouraged learners, in japanese there is no exception. Here is something we often say: 'There are many good restaurants in tokyo', in japanese its 'to-kyo ni wa i res-to-ran ga ta-ku-san a ri-mas', translate it back to english, it roughly means 'tokyo in wa good restaurant ga many there-are-inanimate (wa and ga are both particles that follow the pronoun; a-ri-mas is used for inanimated objects or things). Notice how the order of things are completely reversed, so precisely that it almost resemble yoda in star wars. Wait a minute- yoda is japanese! So o-bi-wan and qui-gon-jin are koreans, and jajabings is- just retarded. Anyways, back to japanese. My other problem is that i hate meaningless learning, i would much prefer to learn like listening to a story. Luckily i happened to like studying on japanese history, so i would like to approach the language historically. If anyone of you out there who happens to be or know anyone who is fluent in both japanese and japanese history, please let me know, you have my greatest thanks and praise.

  A-ri-ga-do, ja-ne. 

   

   

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