Japanese My Is Bad

My Japanese notebook is from China, a gift from a friend that’s living there this year. He gave me the notebook when he was passing through Japan, choosing it because of the comedic English that’s scrawled on the cover. It states:

“TREE

Primary fence next to the dandelion More than

ten miles a taste of the scenery
Fog grass came the voice of her How many years
have begun to sound good Sent a letter to wish a
paper airplane Because we can not wait for the meteor”

I laughed at this when I first read it, a laugh that insinuated something like, “Stupid Chinese people, can’t even write a poem in English.” I’ve used the same laugh when reading Kleenex boxes that say things like:

“Bird is wet, and me too. Rain…Rain. It’s rain every.”

Or t-shirts on mild mannered, polite Japanese climbers, with the phrase “We are fuckin’ one” written across the back.

When I open the notebook my friend gave to me, however, there is language much more incomprehensible and enigmatic than anything else I’ve come across—my study notes in an attempt to learn Japanese.

The first ten pages or so are dedicated to vocabulary, broken down into verbs, adjectives, and then everything else. Whereas the verb and adjective sections are relatively organized, the “everything else” is a hodgepodge of nouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, common expressions, pronouns, exclamations, onomatopoeia and cool sayings that I find interesting. I use that section to quickly jot down things that I hear or read and want to make sure that I commit to memory later. At my low level of Japanese just about everything I hear or read goes into that section, flooding the pages to the point that I can’t study fast enough to be able to memorize all of it. When I do get a chance to make flash cards and quiz myself I am faced with another problem: all the words sound the same.

Okay, clearly this is a hyperbole. Of course all the words don’t sound the same. But there are similarities between sounds of words that make them very hard to keep organized. It’s a problem to the point that I have dedicated a whole page of my notebook to “tricky words”. There you can find examples like:

okita- woke up

okutta- sent
okotta- got angry
okureta- was late

Such similar words make me hesitant to speak in the past tense lest I say something like, “I woke up with George” instead of “I got angry at George.”  If I mistake the word hantai for hentai, for example, rather than saying “I disagree”, I would be calling the person a pervert.

Some words are, in fact, exactly the same. Katta can mean both ‘bought’, and ‘won’. Itta can mean ‘said’, and ‘went’. And the word kaeru means ‘go home’, ‘to change’, and ‘frog’. There are no spelling or pronunciation variations to create different meanings, you use the same exact word. If I said, “Kaeru wa kaeru toki nanka o kaeru” it would mean “When the frog goes home he changes something.”

No, it isn’t a phrase that I use often, but it illustrates the fact that when memorizing words I have to make sure I remember that that one word is the exact same way to say three other things. And this is just individual words.

When it comes to putting together sentences, the crux of Japanese becomes much more challenging. The difficulty is derived from both a very different syntax to English and the number of exceptions and special rules that arise in different contexts. In my notebook I have tried to organize these exceptions. But, like with the “everything else” section, the result is a jumbled mess. Some of the categories include:

- Three different ways to say ‘to give’

- Two ways to say ‘more’
- Two ways to say ‘to be’
- Three ways of saying ‘because’
- Three ways of saying ‘and’
- Two ways of saying ‘want’
- Using colors as adjectives
- Saying something looks like something else versus saying something is similar to something else
- Three ways of forming ‘if’ sentences
- Conjugating for potential, volitional, and conditional tenses
- Saying something is about something
- Saying something is intended for someone, versus for their benefit
- Using one word to say both ‘I already decided’, ‘I decided right now’, and ‘I’m thinking’
- Three different verbs for playing instruments
- Three ways of saying ‘only’
- Multiple ways of saying ‘it’s scheduled for’ versus ‘it’s planned for’
- Hoping for an outcome for someone else
- Hoping for an outcome for yourself
 
It goes on.

When I say two or three ways to say something I’m not referring to synonyms. In English we have lots of ways to say things, like sad, morose, melancholy, depressed, etc.  Synonyms I can understand. With synonyms, at least I can opt to just learn one word, usually the easiest one. No, the similarities that I am highlighting are the basic ways to say simple words. The easiest way to say something that I would expect to be simple, like 'and', changes according to context. The word ‘and’ can be soshite, -kute, or –de, depending on what you are saying. The different words are not interchangeable and have to be used in the right way given the sentence structure.

All of the above examples in my list have special ways of saying the intended phrase that does not correspond with any rule other than the ‘this is just the way you say it’ rule. They have to be memorized in order to use the language. Though some of the phrases may seem obscure, and maybe possible to avoid learning, like ‘I already decided’ versus ‘I decided right now’, most are things that you use in almost everything you say, like ‘because’,‘more’, and 'and'.

My notebook, which started as an attempt to help me keep track of my learning and progress in my language ability, has left me befuddled. If I’m trying to talk to someone and a verb conjugation comes up that I know I covered, it takes me about a minute to pour through all of my notes in order to find the precise one that applies to that context. It takes me about another thirty seconds to add it to a comprehensible sentence. And in most cases, I still have to look up new words in order to make what I’m saying sound complete.

That’s where I am in my Japanese right now. I have an idea about what I’m supposed to say, but know that I am most likely making grievous errors. I can piece simple sentences together, but I am sure that I sound like Tarzan. I know maybe a few hundred vocabulary words, but the average fluent speaker uses a few thousand. I can plan climbing trips with Japanese friends, order food at a restaurant (if I can read the menu), and make small talk with strangers. That’s about it.

What I can’t do: I couldn’t even begin to write good enough sentences for t-shirts or Kleenex boxes, nor get even close to writing a Japanese poem worthy of a Chinese notebook.