When I finished my cross-stitch project at the end of April, I posted that I was in need of a new project. I decided to cross another item off my bucket list: learn to read a language that does not use the Roman alphabet. My top three choices were Russian, Arabic, and Japanese. I decided on Japanese because it’s a much easier language to learn than the other two. Moreover, I have some experience with Asian languages, having studied Mandarin in college. Japanese is much easier since it has two phonetic alphabets and no tones. I set myself a goal: to be able to read a sushi menu.

As it turns out, there are three sets of characters in Japanese, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The last one is what people think of when they think of Japanese writing; those are the pictograms that represent words. Hiragana and katakana are symbols that represent sounds and have no inherent meaning. They are just like our letters.

Common pedagogy suggests learning the forty-six hiragana characters first, so I got my hands on the most highly recommended Hiragana workbook, Let’s Learn Hiragana: First Book of Basic Japanese Writing (Kodansha’s Children’s Classics) and started studying.

Oy. Learning languages past mid-adolescence is quite difficult. Nothing was sticking. The first lesson has you learning ten hiragana characters and it was so overwhelming. I would write them over and over and over again, but all I saw was squiggles.

Until the other night. I couldn’t sleep and was browsing through the sushi app on my iPod Touch when I realised that the squiggles next to the English were hiragana. And I could recognize three of them, those for the sounds a, ka, and i. Breakthrough. The squiggles were no longer meaningless, they were sounds!

I’ve been able to add three more symbols, one of which isn’t in that first lesson: e, o, and ga. Ga was the forth symbol in that first word, which is akagai, a type of clam.

With those six, I have been able to truly READ some words. The first one was aoi. Blue.

I can now read a couple of words on a sushi menu, including ika, squid.

I’m going to start making myself vocabulary flashcards. It’s all well and good to be able to read, but understanding would be good, too. 🙂 The next sound I’m working on is U so that I can read all the vowels.

My favourite Japanese word that I can read is oka. That’s hill. And also French-Canadian for stinky delicious cheese. 😀