Why I started learning Japanese — and why I continued

Serena Bhandari
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

It’s a question I am frequently asked — most recently today — and one I’ve struggled to answer in the past. Indeed, when my Japanese teacher queried as to the origins of my language study, I gave him the most basic, and definitely the most honest, of explanations.

“When I went to the languages office to sign up for a language, they said the German tutor was on lunch break, and I had a class to go to”, I mumbled, embarrassed at my evident lack of forethought. My answer may have brought a smile to his face, but I’m certain he was thinking about how such an obvious fool had managed to stick with the language for two years.

The truth is, that may be why I started studying Japanese, but it’s not why I stayed. As a young teenager, I found Japanese culture fascinating, perhaps to an unhealthy (and looking back, incredibly embarrassing) extent. Born from obsessive binging of the Yu-Gi-Oh television show in primary school, my interest in Japanese media grew, spanning everything from anime, to manga, to JRPGS such as the Persona series; the latter being my current interest.

I even cosplayed as video game character Kay Faraday once

However, I rarely thought about studying the language — sure, it might be interesting, and definitely useful, but it looked so hard. I looked at the multiple writing systems (there are three) and saw dots and squiggles. I definitely tried to familiarise myself with hiragana several times during my teenage years, but on no occasion did I successfully motivate myself to memorise the 46 basic characters that make up the most simple of Japanese alphabets. I didn’t even attempt to learn katakana, the alphabet used to write foreign loan words, or kanji, the Chinese-derived writing system of which there are an estimated 85,000+ characters.

So then, when it came to my first week as a student on UCL’s Human Sciences degree programme, and I faced the choice between a language, or several dull looking geography style modules, I wasn’t exactly pleased. Nonetheless, I made the decision to study Japanese over German (for the reason stated above) and I’ve never looked back.

The language module was only compulsory for my first year, but I’ve found myself sticking to it for my second year and even doing quite well, if I may say so myself. Where I struggled with French and German at school, Japanese has thus far avoided these pitfalls. No more gendered nouns? Count me in. Why is the German word for table masculine and the word for camera feminine? The illogical nature of gendered nouns frustrated me to no end; I really cannot recall the last time I noticed a table packing noticeable male genitalia.

Maybe it’s just not particularly well endowed?

Also, no plurals. This makes my life so much easier. When I say the word 子ども (kodomo; children), it simultaneously refers to one child, or multiple children depending on the context. And if you’re not comfortable with leaving the meaning to listener discretion (“What do you mean you’re babysitting my child — I have 3 children!”), you can add the simple suffix -tachi to almost any noun to denote plurality.

Verb conjugation, something that I always struggled with for other languages, is surprisingly simple for Japanese. No matter the person doing the action, the word is the same. So whether I’m eating, my mother is eating, my dog is eating or my friends are eating, in the present/future polite form, the word is 食べます (tabemasu).

There are, of course, a couple of things I’m still really struggling to get my head around; the main one being the Japanese tendency to use different counters for types of items. If you’re counting things it’s hitotsu, futatsu, mikka… whilst if you’re counting shoes or socks, you would say issoku, nisoku, sanzoku… There’s even a separate set of counters for houses.

My textbook’s reference page for counters — and this isn’t even all of them!

Kanji is as challenging as you might expect, but not as dull. A pictorial writing system has definitely taken some getting used to, but for the most part it’s incredibly fulfilling and once you get used to it quite a lot of fun. Also, whilst the basic Japanese hiragana alphabet has more than double the letters in the Roman alphabet, there are far fewer ways of pronouncing each character, meaning slightly less embarrassment when conversing with a native speaker.

At the end of the day, I cannot emphasise how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to learn this language. I’ve made friends who also learn Japanese, gained useful skills, and seen myself make real progress; something that secondary school teaching-for-exam style language lessons very rarely led to for me. If you’ve ever considered it as a language but thought “no, it’s too hard” consider this a friendly nudge in the right direction.

…Now to start learning Hindi!*

*Or not.