Adventures in Kanjiland

Learning Japanese is hard (muzukashii desu: 難しいです).

Well, really, learning any language is difficult.  For Westerners, it seems it is more difficult than learning other Indoeuropean languages because they barely share any common origin.  If you are French and learning English, you are already a substantial way to your goal before you even start.  Words are shared, grammar and sentence structure are similar, and alphabet is common (with a few minor and easily memorized exceptions).  But a Westerner learning Japanese must learn not one but two new alphabets, and -- if one wishes to become fluent and literate -- thousands of kanji characters.

With my responsibilities to the mission and my project, I do not have an abundance of time to spend learning Japanese.  I grab what time I can; usually a few hours on the weekend at a coffeeshop while I enjoy a long, leisurely lunch.  But, my progress was slow.  So I thought I'd try something different.  I've been told my method is a very unusual way to learn Japanese; and it may be.  But, I think it fits my way of thinking, and in the long run may prove more fruitful.

I've decided to put the brakes on my textbook learning and instead devote most of my time to learning Kanji.  Here's my thinking.  I can only devote a couple of hours a week to studying Japanese.  A housemate has been attending 15 hours of class instruction per week for the last five months.  He has long since surpassed my meagre capabilities; but even he says he feels he still knows almost no Japanese, and most of the time has no clue what people are saying or writing.  In two or three hours per week, I'll never make a dent in this, based on that experience.  But, if I learn the Kanji, then even as I commute to and from work, I can be studying: watching for learned kanji, guessing at previously unknown kanji if I see a group and know two of the three, and I can see what it is describing (e.g, I know that 屋 is 'flower', so 花屋 tells me that 屋 is 'shop'; I can then look up how to pronounce 屋).  It is still slow, but I can feel a little more progress than I did before.  Maybe it is just that I am doing something a little different; but isn't that how all muscles are strengthened?