Japanese has four writing systems.
Let me say that again: Japanese has four writing systems. If you want to read and write it fluently, you have to learn four writing systems. This is like being told that if you want to pass the driving test, you will have to build a car from scratch, and that car will have to pass California emissions standards.
Luckily, of the four systems, you get one for free if you’re literate in English. This one is called romaji, and it’s used to write Japanese names and other words using the characters of the Roman alphabet. When you see “konnichiwa,” that’s romaji. It’s blessedly common to see place names written in romaji on signs in Japan, but it’s certainly the least used of the four systems.
When you were a kid, did you ever create a secret code where you replaced letters with simple shapes and could thereby pass notes to your friends without, well, I’m not sure who we thought was going to spy on our mail. Parents? Cops? Rival ninjas? In your home-cooked code, maybe A turned into a circle and B a bunch of wavy lines.
That cipher you created is something like hiragana. Hiragana, for reasons I’ll get to soon, isn’t literally an alphabet, but it is literally and figuratively loopy.
Let’s meet hiragana. Here’s an actual character:
ã¬
That one is pronounced “nu,” and it’s one of my favorites. Hiragana books tend to teach mnemonics for memorizing the characters. The one I used, Hiragana Mnemonics
As with any mnemonics, the dumber they are, the better they work. I initially dismissed Byrne’s mnemonics and said to myself, “I don’t need a crutch to learn a few characters,” and then found that, gosh, it’s hard to forget that the “mu” character (ã‚€) looks like a farting cow.
During the two weeks or so that it took me to learn the 46 characters of hiragana, I found myself thinking over and over that it’s funny how our English alphabet is so logical and straightforward, and this Japanese one is a hodgepodge of squiggly goofs. More specifically, I reasoned, our letters look like the sounds they make. I mean, an M looks like it should make the “M” sound, right? Whereas in hiragana, this thing:
ã¾
is supposed to sound like “ma.” Ridiculous!
Intellectually, I know that this is absurd. Our glyphs are just as arbitrary as theirs, although when I take a break from Japanese practice, shake off the wiggly weirdness of hiragana, and look back at the Roman alphabet, I start to notice some oddities, like the fact that you form your mouth into an O to speak the letter O.
My friend Neil has been to Japan several times, so I bragged to him that I’d learned all my hiragana. He’d learned the characters, too. “But I never got to the point where it looked like words,” he added.
Way to spoil my moment, dude. Fluent readers, in English or any other language, don’t read words letter by letter. We don’t sip. We gulp down whole words and sometimes whole phrases as single units. But hiragana doesn’t look like words to me yet. It still looks like code.
A couple of years ago, when Iris was in kindergarten, I spent an afternoon every week volunteering in her classroom. Seattle public schools use a “writer’s workshop†curriculum, where students in every grade are expected to write every day. This includes kindergarteners, who have a wide range of writing abilities, ranging from “can write†to “wouldn’t recognize the letter P if it peed on them.†I spent a lot of time helping kids try to recall which letter makes, say, the “K†sound. I did my best to empathize with the difficulty of the task, but remembering back to a time when I didn’t know the alphabet was simply beyond me.
Well, that nightmare about being back in school has turned real. Recently I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep until I remembered the hiragana that makes the sound “ho.†(It’s ã».) When I read hiragana, I sound exactly like a tentative five-year-old sounding out a word. (Incidentally, I frequently have the nightmare where I forgot to go to class all year and now have to take the final exam. I do not, however, sit bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat, when I wake up from it.)
Even if I get to the point where hiragana looks like words, I have another problem: most words in Japanese aren’t written in hiragana. Four writing systems!
I realize I’ve said little about how hiragana actually works, and how and when you use it to construct words; that oversight will soon be remedied at length.
Oh boy, you’re bringing back memories of when I started learning hiragana and katakana! Love these Japanese language posts.
I jar a variety of ways that I relate to this post. The first is the I took a semester of Japanese in college and it was SO hard to get my mind to learn that the symbols equaled sounds. I just wasn’t in a place in my life where I wanted to learn that badly, and so my commitment only lasted those 4 months. But I recognize the symbols you showed because like a kindergartener, we had the lined blue paper to draw out our “letters” to the appropriate proportions. My friends–who were all in Spanish–thought it was so funny. And I also have that nightmare where I have skipped class the whole semester and now I realize I will fail the class and it’s too late to do anything about it. I wake up stressed and it takes me a while to accept that it wasn’t real!
I used Heisig’s Remembering the Kana, which seems a little more austere than Byrne. One possible issue with Byrne is that from looking at a few sample pages it looks like it is more about recognizing hiragana than being able to write it. But as a tourist that’s probably all you need anyway.
dfan, I have Remembering the Kanji, but I haven’t gotten into it yet. (I’m starting to recognize more and more kanji, but I can hardly write any.)
You raise an interesting point, one I’m planning to write more about: I didn’t realize until studying the kana that going from character to sound is a different (and, to me, much more easily mastered) skill than going from sound to character. Like, I can now read hiragana and katakana without tripping up, albeit slowly. But I still get stuck on a character sometimes when writing.
I’ve been using Anki, which helps. Oddly, the characters I get stuck on are among the most common–vowels, even. Oh, and here’s a crazy one: I never forget how to write “wa” as in “watashi wa” but often forget how to write “ha” as in “hana.” But they’re exactly the same character!
Your experience with sounding out the words mirrors mine. Being able to read “fluently” came basically through repetition, and I’ve still got a long way to go.
Huh, “ã»” doesn’t look like a ho at all.
Too bad you aren’t learning Korean. The Korean alphabet, called “hangul”, was invented about 500 years ago when an enlightened philosopher-king, Sejong the Great, convened a bunch of scholars to invent a way of writing Korean. The consonants are all shaped like the way you make them in your mouth, so for example ㄱ is /g/ and shows the tongue sitting up in the back of your mouth, while /n/ ã„´ shows it sitting down in the front part, and ã…… /s/ is a picture of a tooth because you put your teeth together.
Mark, I know what Hangul looks like but I had no idea it was, uh, tongue-based?
I’ll make you a deal: after I learn all the Joyo Kanji, I’ll learn Hangul next.
I also love “nu”!
Unfortunately it is basically the “Q” of Japanese, appearing almost never in printed text.
Hey, great to hear from you, Mus! Your joke about CC Deville and Cecil B. Demille is still one of the funniest things ever.
For me, “nu” was the sound a person made upon encountering that rabbit in The Holy Grail (I always felt the character “nu” looked like a rabbit). “NUUUUUU!!!!” I’d usually make the sharp pointy teeth gesture at the same time. Odd, but it worked.
Real men go with 万葉仮å.