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Learning Japanese

How strange. It seems that something I’ve picked up on a whim to make my anime watching more fruitful is now the main thing in my life. Out of school, out of work and serving a tedious National Service. With nary a bright future in sight, it seems that working on my languages might be a ticket out of this doldrums. 

Japanese is not an easy language to learn. This is slightly alleviated by my knowledge of Chinese characters to some extent. A lot of the grief encountered in learning the language is the memorization of the imported Chinese characters called Kanji. Most of the simple ones I’ve already known since I was a child while the others just require a bit more work than usual. Of course, that still leaves a lot of things to cover, in particular, learning to use it practically.

When it comes to language, two things are very important in society. Understanding and functionality. To understand means you can explain it clearly to those who do not. Functionality means you can communicate and transit between your native language and the language in question smoothly. Once you have mastered these two concepts you can effectively peddle your “skill” in language instead of your “knowledge”. 

What’s the difference between “skill” and “knowledge”? Skill is something tangible, that can result in the production of meaningful work for an employer or be shown to an educational institute. There is also a certain uniqueness to this quality, especially in a holistic view of the person. Knowledge is not as tangible and can be accumulated to roughly the same degree by two or more people.

For example, two people completely strange to the Japanese language may come to learn that 猫 is a pictograph for cat and is pronounced “neko”. That is knowledge. But they will lack the skills to translate a sentence that contains 猫. Let’s bring in another two people who do have the skills to do so. They may be both of the same educational level when it comes to the language. However, they might translate the sentence differently, picking up or missing certain nuances of the sentence. Even if they have attained the exact same level of knowledge in Japanese, the work produced is different. This is the concept of a “skill”.

I wish for my Japanese proficiency to rise above being knowledge haphazardly piled together to a discernible set of skills for use in work and play. Of course, I now have all the time in the world to so. I would need to brush up on my English too, since I will first have to transit through a period where my English will be a crutch. If my English is poorly developed, then it will be of little use in helping me learning Japanese.

With regards to the activity of this blog, I do apologize. New social media takes up so much of our time nowadays, being easily accessible and highly addictive. I will try to steer myself to better endeavors such as this, but do not I was never a prolific blogger, most of the posts here could have been encapsulated in a tweet, had Twitter been widely used back then.