And So It Begins
I arrived in Japan in early November. Here I am almost four months later, writing this in one of my watering holes on a Saturday night. This is the night and the place where I plan my language lessons for the week.
To be clear, when I say my language lessons I mean not only learning Japanese phrases. I am learning kanji, the Chinese character script brought to Japan a long, long time ago. I am learning hiragana and katakana and romanji, the three other scripts used here.
Here is what I know so far:
Many English words migrated to Japanese. When they did they were modified to meet Japanese linguistic standards. Consonants do not bump into each other in a word or end a word (with the exception of n/ン/ん). Vowels, for the most part, also do not bump into each other.
An aside: I just figured out while writing this post how to make my Windows 10 Surface Pro 4 with a Japanese keyboard switch between English and the various Japanese inputs without the mouse. In the Language Preferences install the Japanese Microsoft IME and select it as your keyboard. The key below Escape|⎋ and to the left of 1 toggles between English and Japanese, and the modifier keys on either side of the space bar toggle the Japanese input methods. “It just works” on MacOS, but now that I know how on Windows, it makes sense to me.
Back to the lesson.
Take the name Paul. In Japan, it is po ru / ポール . The dash elongates the vowel. Anyway, see how Paul is broken apart: in English we pronounce it pol (pɔːl) not pa-ul. L is usually replaced with R as it is in this case. But consonants not the letter N do not reside alone. They need a vowel sound. So ru / ル often replaces the English L when it is found in a word.
Take the word hot. In Japan, one of the words is hotto / ホット but is not the only word for hot. When I order ramen / ラーメん that is what I dish out.
It is a fantastic cheat.
p.s. — My translations into hiragana or katakana or kanji or romanji are, I hope, accurate. Students following this blog should not quote me as a reference. Corrections are welcome.
