I had a couple of language breakthroughs this week. \u00a0First of all, I’ve been learning, very slowly, one of the three Japanese character sets, Hiragana. \u00a0Hiragana has about 71 characters, and each character is a sound: \u3057 (shi),\u00a0\u3053 (ko),\u00a0\u304d (ki), etc. \u00a0Pretty much every word in Japanese can be constructed from these basic sounds. \u00a0Japanese has 110 sounds in total. \u00a0English has… 7890 sounds! \u00a0So native English speakers have it easy. \u00a0The second character set is Katakana. \u00a0It has the same number of characters as Hiragana with the same sounds, but they are written differently and are used exclusively for foreign originating words, such as the word computer, \u30b3\u30f3\u30d4\u30e5\u30fc\u30bf. \u00a0The third character set is Kanji, which are Chinese characters, where each character represents something, like \u5ddd (river), or \u5b66\u6821, (school). \u00a0There are tens of\u00a0thousands\u00a0of those, so I’m putting off learning those for a while. \u00a0 Anyway, the breakthroughs.<\/p>\n
One night this week I went to a sushi place that has a little computer screen at each table to order from and a conveyor belt that brings your order to your table (it’s awesome). \u00a0The computer screen is entirely in Japanese. \u00a0You select the sushi you want and another screen pops up with two options, one with a green check and one without. \u00a0What does this mean?? \u00a0By\u00a0recognizing\u00a0the Hiragana characters, I was able to read the word wasabi. \u00a0Green check with the word wasabi under it? \u00a0Wasabi please? \u00a0I think so! \u00a0I selected the green check and my sushi came with wasabi. \u00a0Craig 1, Japanese 10000000. \u00a0At least I’m on the board. \u00a0The second breakthrough came from my learning Japanese mp3s. \u00a0I’ve learned “Good Morning”, which I’ve been using for a while, and recently I learned “How are you?” (slowly, but surely). \u00a0This morning when I went to breakfast at the hotel, I said the usual “Good morning”, the server guy said “Good morning” back. \u00a0Then I followed up with, “How are you?”. \u00a0The server was shocked. \u00a0And then he smiled. \u00a0A tall foreigner with crazy hair, just asked him how he was. \u00a0He was\u00a0literally\u00a0speechless. \u00a0Then he mustered up, “I am good”, in English. \u00a0(I’d prefer it if he respond in Japanese, but baby steps, baby steps). \u00a0The funny thing is, I only said, “How are you?”, but he thought it was a cultural breakthrough. \u00a0I moved on and got my breakfast, read my\u00a0English\u00a0newspaper, and went about my day. \u00a0But it felt good to communicate, if just a little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a couple of language breakthroughs this week. \u00a0First of all, I’ve been learning, very slowly, one of the three Japanese character sets, Hiragana. \u00a0Hiragana has about 71 characters, and each character is a sound: \u3057 (shi),\u00a0\u3053 (ko),\u00a0\u304d (ki), … Continue reading