Surprising Kanji

(手=hand + 洗=wash) = toilet

Every now and again I come across a word that is usually written in hiragana or katakana displayed in Kanji. Sometimes the kanji used are quite surprising. Here are some examples:

美味しい /  おいしい / oishii / tastes good

A word so common on Japanese TV, you only have to flick through a couple of channels and you are bound to here it. Often translated as 'tasty' or 'delicious' leading to odd sounding conversations with Japanese people in English about food. おいしい is most commonly written using hiragana, but occasionally is displayed in Kanji. These two Kanji are 実 beauty, and 味 taste— makes sense if you think about it I guess.

Another example is　上手い / うまい / umai / skillful, good at

Now I learnt 上手　じょうず　jyouzu a long time ago, and I knew the kanji for じょうず was up (上) and hand (手). Up-hand "good at something" seems to make sense. Later on I ran into the more casual うまい  which also means good, or skillful, but it wasn't until recently that I found out that うまい was transcribed as 上手い using kanji, because it's not so common to see it written like this— I guess the reason being that it's easy to get it confused with じょうず　上手.

お洒落  /  おしゃれ  /  Oshare  /  smart, flashy, fashionable, stylish.

Again, I often saw this in hiragana on TV, but only recently found out the Kanji: 洒: wash or sprinkle, 落: fall, drop, come down お洒落 sprinkle, come down = fashionable, stylish, I can make that connection.

面白い /  おもしろい  /   omoshiroi  /  interesting; funny

I was pretty embarrassed when I couldn't read this kanji after having studied Japanese for about two years, seeing as it's one of the most common words in the language! But I guess I'd just never come across it in kanji form before. 面: face, features, surface 白: white. White surface = interesting. Hmm, I guess if you're being sarcastic perhaps.

This is what I really like about kanji. The way you can connect the meaning of characters to make various connotations. Great fun, beats the Roman alphabet hands down. — (下手　へた　下: down 手: hand, down hand = rubbish, not skillful)

Another step in the right direction

Today I have another "first" I want to share. I’ve used this blog before to chart firsts, and I think it’s important to do this to keep track of my progress.

Recently, I’ve come to realise that in my 5 years in Japan my language progress has been disappointingly slow. This is due to a number of reasons I guess, and I don’t really want to go into them here, but I think I realise the mistakes I’ve been making now which is the main thing, and correcting those mistakes, although difficult, is important, otherwise I will never reach my goal.

Hopefully the "first" I have to report today will illustrate my attempts to do that.

Today's "first" is my first business related conversation at work in Japanese. My department is English speaking, I speak English with most of my close colleagues on a day-to-day business and in meetings etc. which is fine, but most of the Japanese staff on other departments expect to communicate with me in English too. This is comfortable for me, and is something that has probably gone on too long—ideally I would have been speaking Japanese, or at least attempting to, the entire time I have been there.

I have been doing this job for 3 years now, and to now begin speaking Japanese to people seems like rather a large step. It’s kind of feels like the first time is always going to be the hardest, I'm going to do it and everybody's going to be like "What the hell are you doing Neil?" A barrier between myself and using Japanese at work has formed over the past three years.

Over the past couple of months or so I’ve been trying to overcome this barrier. For example I’ve been speaking about my Japanese studies more with people. And I’ve been using idioms. How have I been using idioms? you might wonder seeing as I don’t speak any Japanese at work. Well, I‘ve been talking about Japanese idioms and using them to try and raise a laugh.

I’m not sure how this first came about, but recently it’s kind of become a bit of a joke on the department that I want to use random Japanese idioms in meetings etc. And I have. Just for a laugh. This is helping me to break down that barrier that I believe has been constructed, one that clearly I must have constructed myself, but nevertheless one that I feel is there.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, this week my boss introduced me to a Japanese associate of the company. He’s not so hot at English, so she asked me, kind of jokingly, to speak Japanese. And, lo and behold, I had a chat with him in Japanese about the work we needed him to do for us. I think my boss was a little surprised, but she laughed. And it all seemed to go pretty well.

So that’s another first. Not a great leap, but a step in the right direction I guess. In the future, whenever I enter a situation where it is possible to use a foreign language, I am going to make it clear that I want to early on, no matter how bad my skills are, just to stop this barrier appearing.

If I stick to the impudent child method I spoke about then nobody is going to mind. Using humour is a great way to overcome these boundaries, whether it’s talking about funny idioms, or making example sentences about something ridiculous like Pandas again and again—something I do in my Chinese lessons—if people are laughing it’s difficult to feel uncomfortable.

Grammar focus

Recently, I've been beginning to notice the importance of focus in study. I think it's important to keep yourself focused on a certain point or structure for a period at a time in order to learn efficiently.

In the past, I've been in a hurry to learn, and when I think to myself, "I must study some Japanese tonight" or something like that my inclination is to take on the whole language, as if I'm going to be able to devour the whole thing in one sitting.

This may sound unrealistic, and of course it is, but I think this is my subconscious telling me I've started learning too late, or I'm not going to be living here forever, and I need to get a move on if I'm going to succeed.

Anyway, in recent months I've begun to notice the benefit of remaining focused on a certain point for a period of time—mainly thanks to the fact that I now have a good teacher who isn't allowing me to talk and talk making wildly inaccurate sentences as some of my past teachers have been willing to do (but perhaps this is a topic for another post).

So recently, we have been focussing on the てくださる、ていただく、てくれる、てもらう、constructions. I have been learning Japanese for nearly five years now, and of course I have come across this construction before. But I have never given it enough time or thought to truly master its usage. Now I realise what a big mistake that was. I've been spending a lot of time on this recently and now feel pretty confident using these combinations and it's like massive new areas of Japanese have been opened up to me, and I find it hard to believe I went for so long without really getting to know it well enough.

My approach in the past has always been to hope that this kind of structure would sink in eventually, I guess through a combination of time and exposure. Of course, this takes a) time, and b) you need a lot of exposure, two things that I have complained about lacking in the past. My reasons for thinking like this can probably be put down to laziness on my part, and having teachers who were not strict enough with me.

Anyway, I think it's important to really spend some time trying to get to know a structure or language point like this to get the benefits sooner rather than later.

I think one of the benefits of  focusing on one point over a period of time like this is that it becomes something that you begin to go over in your head when you don't have your books in front of you. This is great "free extra study" that you don't even have to put any energy into. It just starts to go round your head as you're doing the dishes or something like that.

So recently, I've been trying to put this into practice with my Chinese. With my teacher we are currently going over directional complements,  like 进去 - go in, 下来 - come down; and completion complements like 修好 - fix (good), and 买到 - bought. Already I can tell that this part of the language is going to be coming up a lot in Chinese, and I think my past approach would be to hope that it sinks in at some point. I think this is possible, but now my thinking is that to become proficient and familiar with these structures as soon as possible is the better way to go.

Pronunciation reminder

Had a reminder this week about my pronunciation problems. I wrote about this ages ago, and how inportant it was, and then promptly completely forgot about it for a year or so.

It seems that when it comes to Japanese I can kid myself that the pronunciation is so simple (at least compared to Chinese) that I don't need to think about it. Not so!

I've also mentioned before that when you really try to speak as if you are a native speaker, almost mimicking the native speakers I guess, success seems to become easier to come by.  Tonight I was concentrating on doing this in my Chinese language exchange, and I could see my Chinese partner's positive reactions to what I was saying.

10 minutes later however my concentration had slipped, and I was back pronuncing words with a British drawl. My language partner's face had dropped, I could see the pain in her eyes.

Goddamnit! It's bloody hard work learning these foreign tongues. There's so much more to it than learning new words and grammar. You really have to live and breathe the language. You have to mold your mouth around the thing again and again to achieve a modicum of success.

This may sound a little defeatist, but the challenge is not motivation for me. Just technique and opportunity. I need to work on both.