Richard's blog

Since I am going to Japan, (March 30 or April 6) I have decided it is about time I started to learn the Japanese language. True, I could probably surf through my Japanese experience without knowing a word, but what would be the point of that? So I have made up a series of palm cards with my extremely badly drawn versions of the characters on them, and am attempting to learn eight new hiragana characters per day. But they are such pesky creatures! The character for “wa” looks dreadfully like one of the two characters for “o”,
and the character for “ha” is very similar to the character for “ho”.
Of course, learning the hiragana doesn’t mean you can read Japanese. There is another syllabary (hiragana is a syllabary) called katakana, and then there are the kanji. Kanji are characters which have meanings (rather than designating a sound as in hiragana and katakana). Alarmingly, most kanji can be pronounced in several different ways. The kanji are based on the Chinese characters, which means they are not too hard to write, because I’m used to writing Chinese characters from high school. Hiragana, on the other hand, are full of foreign curves that you don’t get in Chinese. I’m sure the Japanese would get a good giggle out of my attempts to write characters like “nu”, which has one too many loops for its own good.

Katakana doesn’t have loops, which is good. I am going to learn it second, partially because it is easier. This syllabary is used for translating foreign words into Japanese. This is more frequent than you might think, and nearly always comical. Consider the forrowingu:

purasuchikku: plastic
serori: celery
metoroporisu: metropolis

My name comes out as Richa-do Jakuson, which has to be better than Heramuttu Rangu, if your name was Helmut Lang.

In other preparations, I have started buying things that I think I won’t be able to find in Japan: toothpaste without sugar, the all-important Vegemite, powdered stock, underarm deodorant, etc etc. It will be clearer how much of this sort of thing I need to buy when they finally tell me my exact location. If, as I hope, I’m in the Tokyo area, it won’t be necessary to take as many exotic items as if I’m placed in some unknown industrial city north of Sapporo.

Book: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Music: Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle and Sebastian

R