Because Southridge didn't offer a class for Japanese, I opted to take the self-study option for Japanese using Mr. O'Malley as my supervisor. I had no previous experience in the language or any other Asian-based languages, making Japanese a difficult challenge.
Language Log Tracking Progress: Live Language Log
Step 1: Pre-Assessment -
With no prior experience to Japanese in any form, I knew this would be a difficult task. On each category of language self-assessment, I (unsurprisingly) scored a zero. From previously language development experience I knew that I was strong in memorizing how other languages pronounce their certain sounds. To carry this over to Japanese, starting with characters and writing stroke seemed like the obvious first step.
Step 3: Language and Culture Goals -
I think because of the difficulty of the language, achieving even just Phase 1 in all the targets would be considered a success, and so I set my goals to be just at. If I could achieve basic oral communication, base-level visual interpretation, along with read and writing skills, I would feel confident enough to travel across Japan, without worrying about language being a huge issue. However, if I would want to teach English in Japan, I would need much more advanced capabilities.
Goal #1: Oral Communication -
To achieve basic oral communication I will do two main things:
Train listening through Duolingo
Train speaking through repetition practice and Duolingo's speaking assessment
Goal #2: Visual Interpretation -
To achieve basic levels of visual interpretation, I will follow these steps:
Watch a short clip, or view a picture
Describe the contents of the picture or video using whatever vocabulary I have learned
Look up vocabulary where applicable and try to use often
Goal #3: Reading and Writing -
To achieve success is this criteria I will...
Regularly use Duolingo to practice reading comprehension
Write my descriptions from goal #2 in hiragana to practice the strokes
Language Acquisition Final Essay:
Learning Japanese was, and will be, a big challenge. Moving from to a language with not only completely different characters, but also sentence structure was a huge switch that I'm still adapting to. As of the time of writing, I do only have around 43 hours of total language acquisition time across the past year. However, according to my average time per week, I will reach the required total time in approximately 6 weeks at my current rate of around 94 minutes per week. That being said, I have certainly come a long way in learning this language, and so I would like to highlight some of the major challenges, what made them so rough, and how I got past them (if I did).
The first major hurdle in learning Japanese was without a doubt the sentence structure. Since they use an SOV(Subject Object Verb) based structure, opposed to English's SVO (Subject Verb Object), creating coherent sentences not only requires vocabulary, but proper structure as well. This becomes especially confusing when asking questions, since a question simply looks like a statement up until the very end where the hiragana character "Ka" produces a question. For example, the phrase "Ken is here" translates to "Ken san wa koko desu", but to change it to "Is Ken Here", something is added to the end, "Ken san wa koko desu ka". This difficult trait of Japanese is something that can only be fixed through enough exposure to the language, and total autonomous recognition may never occur for non-native speakers. The structure makes it extremely hard for people to learn coming from English. As is the character system.
Japanese is made up of 3 separate character systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, where each have their own unique purpose. Hiragana is for the most commonly used words and phrases in the Japanese language, most of which created ages ago. Kanji bridges the gaps into modern language by offering more complex, but also more concise characters that each mean a specific word. Learning the language means learning Kanji, and hence memorizing hundreds of Kanji. Luckily, that level of memorization is mostly reserved for the advanced learners, of which I am far from so far. Finally, Katakana is the collection of characters used for "loaner" word from other languages. Many words sound the same in the "loaned" form, but special characters were created for the sounds. Because of the extensive and complex system of characters, learning Japanese was extremely daunting at first, but the best way to overcome the fear of the characters was to dive right in and start learning. Eventually I found ways to remember what character made what sound, and how they fit together to make other words.
Grammar and conjugation was something I only briefly explored as I quickly realized I was biting off more than I could chew. The conjugation charts reminded me much of similar ones used to teach conjugation in Spanish. However, I quickly realized that like Spanish, irregularities were rampant. I'll likely revisit this topic when my vocabulary and conversational skills come to require it, but since they currently don't I can happily avoid.
Despite the struggles and challenges of learning this complicated foreign language, the process has been rough and testing in the best way possible. Long sessions of Duolingo, watching interviews, and practicing strokes were tough in the moment, but have only increased my appreciation for the language. It's unlikely I'll stop working toward fluency as now that I've started, it would be an awful waste to stop. Going into the future, I'm excited to see what adventures and experiences will be brought on by my desire to learn Japanese, especially when exploring the beautiful origin country of Japan.