Post 2: Studying Japanese

わたしのともだちとおばあちゃんとわたし at high school graduation

I decided to study Japanese because my grandmother is Japanese and moved to America when she married my grandfather. Growing up, she spoke Japanese to me, but the only words I remembered were おなかすいた、おばあちゃん、とこんいちは. I decided to take Japanese so that I could learn to speak to her properly in the language in which she is more comfortable.

The part of Japanese that has been most exciting to me so far is learning to read Hiragana. As an English and Creative Writing major, reading comes very naturally to me, at least in English. I don't really remember learning to read but sounding out the letters of Hiragana, and then realizing the words are words that I know, is very satisfying. I didn't have any trouble memorizing the characters and learning to read has been a lot of fun. In high school I never took a non-Romanic language and as a result had a lot of trouble learning to read French--the letters are so familiar and I feel like they should be making words I know but they don't! Japanese is so different from the languages that I have studied before--as well as English--that I feel like I'm starting from scratch, and that's as very interesting experience for me.

The part of Japanese, on the other hand, that has been most difficult for me has been learning how to speak. I have had a lot of trouble with the inflections of Japanese, the subtleties of how every syllable's specific pronunciation changes the word. It has been very difficult for me to remember where the double vowels and glides are when I am speaking, although for some reason I don't have any trouble when I'm reading or writing. Language Lab has been helping me with this a lot, but I find it much more difficult to recall grammar when I'm trying to speak than when I'm trying to write.