Monday, Week 1  -  Go!

Today was the beginning of my half year long journey through the Japanese language. In the morning I had grammar class in which we were given a brief introduction to Japanese grammar. The teacher talked about sentence structure. It is completely different from western and even some eastern languages. I think this will be one of the hardest part the coming weeks, to adapt to a different senctence structure.

The second lecture was about sentence structure and different constructions. This was our first encounter with Japanese in action when the teacher talked in Japanese during half of the 3 hour long lecture. It was quite overwhelming in the beginning since the syllables in the words are very similar. But after a while it was ok actually, it just takes a while until your ears adopt to the new sounds.

Challenge no. 1
Other than the different sentence structure the biggest challenge the coming days will be to learn reading hiragana and katakana. These are two of the three writings systems in use. As a beginner all characters look very similar, so for now I survive by read the romaji under every words in the text book!

Highlights of differences between Japanese and English emphasized today

•	Word order is different, SOV (subject-object-verb) rather than the English SVO.
•	In Japanese it is often sufficient with only the verb in a sentence.
•	Japanese doesn't have nouns in plural, so "dog" and "dogs" is the same. Instead different quantifiers are used.

Tuesday, Week 1  -  Tips for learning hiragana

The first thing is to find a chart that covers all hiragana. Then I copy the chart by writing each character several times in the order they appear in the chart. By doing this I get the feeling of how it is written. The next step is to write each group without looking at the chart.

A very useful tool to use while studying hiragana is a flash card program that asks you about different characters in random order which is very good when you've learnt them in order. The one I use is DreamKana.

Wednesday, Week 1  -  a, i, u, e, o...

Today we got a formal introduction of hiragana and the Japanese syllable system. All Japanese words consist of consonants coupled with vowels. This is what makes transcription of western names into Japanese so funny. When Japanese try to pronounce a foreign word with several consonants grouped together they have to add vowels between each consonant.

Example from our teacher:

I must say that reading hiragana is still confusing, let alone write it. We learnt some small words and drilled hiragana at the same time, a very good exercise since it combines learning words at the same time as learning hiragana:

Pronounciation observations
Even though it can seem pretty straightforward to pronounce the words there are some subtle unwritten rules.

•	つ (tsu) is pronounced very short with focus on the "ts" sound. Example: tsukue pronounced as ts(u)kue.
•	The "u" in す (su) is often skipped when at the end of the sentence. Example: desu (is) is pronounced more like des(u).

Thursday, Week 1  -  Calligraphy

Today we only had calligraphy introduction just to give us a feel of writing Japanese characters with a brush. The first kanji we learnt to write was 一 (いち = one). It can look easy to write just a brush stroke but there are a lot of things to think about when doing it for real. For example it's important how much force you put down the brush with, that determines how thick the character will be. It's also a rule not to retouch the character after the first attempt, that's cheating. Here's the instruction sheet for the first character:

The second kanji, 人 (human, man), was a bit more complicated with one more stroke. To accomplish the thinner stroke endings you have to lift the brush slightly while writing:

The last 2 characters we practiced were 山 and 小 (mountain and small). These characters contains three strokes and are even more tricky to write. With the increment of number of strokes comes also increment of difficulty. The hard part is to put together the strokes so they become proportional with each other. It is especially hard to know where to put the two dots in 小 in the beginning since they "hang" in the air:

In the end I tried to write some hiragana and it turned out to be harder than I expected it to be. Hiragana is more soft than the more square shaped kanji which means that it's even more difficult to find a good balance between strokes. It's commonly known that drawing circles is more difficult than drawing squares, same principle here.

Friday, Week 1  -  Introduce yourself

We have been given some sentences to translate into Japanese this week just to get some practice. The last thing was to write a very basic introduction of yourself and here's mine:

This sentence contains the essence of what I've learnt this week: "A is B" structure, "の" particle, counting (year at university, age), basic greetings.

Sentence 1

はじめまして。

How do you do?

Sentence 2

Peter	です。
Peter	is
I am Peter

Comments: As mentioned before the verb "is" is placed in the end of the sentence, and the subject is skipped if it's obvious what it is.

Sentence 3

Lundだいがく	の	がくせい	です。
Lund University	<particle>	student	is
I am a student at Lund University.

Comments: Here the の particle connects the two nouns Lund university and student, it adds information about where the student studies.

Sentence 4

いま	さんねんせい	です。
Now	third year student	is
Now I am a third year student.

Sentence 5

せんもん	は	きかいこうがく	です。
Major	<particle>	mechanical engineering	is
My major is mechanical engineering.

Sentence 6

にじゅいっさい	です。
Twenty one years old	is
I am twenty-one years old.

Sentence 7

どうぞよろしく。

Nice to meet you.

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