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:

ぬ

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 by Bob Byrne (actually, I used the [app](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dr.-mokus-hiragana-mnemonics/id387585135?mt=8)), says “nu” looks like a pair of chopsticks trying to capture an errant NOOdle. “Nu” for “noodle.” Not bad. This is one of the easier ones to remember.

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:

ま

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 ほ.) 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.

A quick note before we get started. I’m confident that when I write about Japanese, I will make occasional (probably frequent) errors of fact. Please let me know when I do, or if there’s a topic you’d especially like me to cover.

For a shallow person like me, part of the frustration of learning a language is knowing that there are millions of people—not especially smart people, just regular people—who are better at this than I will ever be.

A few years ago I taught myself to sharpen knives. Knife sharpening is a great skill to acquire if you’re a showoff. Anyone could learn to do it with a couple of months of study, but almost nobody knows how to do it already. So with a little time and money, you can become the amazing knife-sharpening neighborhood superhero. Complete with jumpsuit, if that’s your scene.

Language learning is so entirely the opposite. Even if I exceed my own wildest expectations for soaking up Japanese, I’ll still be lapped by throngs of children.

Oh, I had my chance to get an early start. In sixth grade, my best friend Alex, whose mother was Japanese and made exquisite homemade potstickers, taught me to say ohayō gozaimasu (good morning). That was 25 years ago.

Even before that, in fourth grade, my class spent several months studying Japan for Social Studies. Every student had to write a paper on some aspect of Japanese culture, and I somehow ended up saddled with textiles, probably because I had no idea what the word meant and figured it probably involved robots. We were also forced to taste sushi, which was disgusting, and threatened with the fact that Japanese has four different writing systems, and if we were Japanese kids we’d be learning all of them. (Plus, Japan had the gall to make better cars than America. The nerve, right?)

I came away from this believing that Japan was the world’s most annoying country. Since then, my relationship with Japan has followed the classic romantic comedy progression. That country is so annoying! Why can’t I stop thinking about it? Probably because it’s just so annoying. It’s not that I like Japan or anything.

So why am I studying Japanese? Yes, I enjoy the mental workout and the potential to read menus at places that don’t cater to foreigners. But on top of those good reasons, I think, is a more absurd reason.

Before Iris and I went to Japan in 2010, we had a draft list of future dream vacations: Thailand, Rome, Hawaii, Sweden (mainly because we might run into Robyn or Peter Bjorn & John). Japan just happened to be at the top of the list. Once we got back, however, all we wanted to do was turn around and go back to Japan. Those other places? Someday. Maybe. Who cares?

I think about Japan every day, especially about Tokyo and how the city seemed like a funhouse built just to delight us. If you’re in love with someone, or some country, of course you make an effort to learn their language. What kind of jerk wouldn’t make that commitment?

Next up: Let’s get our hands dirty with a bit of hiragana, writing system numero uno.

Every time I’ve traveled to a non-Anglophone country, it’s been like pulling up to a fast-food drive-thru. You give your order and are rewarded with a barrage of incomprehensible static. Please drive forward!

I’ve walked into the same scenario in Japan, Thailand, and France. (At least the food was better than drive-thru quality.) My mouth is pretty good at producing sounds in other languages. I can say the French R and the Japanese R/L and the Spanish…why is it always the R, anyway?

It’s not that people take me for a suave native speaker. My American accent comes with me like I packed it in my suitcase. But they can tell I’m trying. My attempts to speak are proficient enough that they don’t come across as the usual foreigner’s cry for help: _Please put me out of my misery so we can switch to English, already!_

So I ask, confidently, “Where’s the bathroom?” But if the reply is anything more complicated than a pointed finger, I have to put on my linguistic dunce cap and say, “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

I’m ashamed of this. I love unraveling a mystery, and a language is a box of moving parts. How do they work together? What are the rules and the exceptions?

These puzzle-box aspects of language also, as it happens, had an intuitive appeal to the proto-geeks who invented modern computing. A geek’s got to eat, and as Steven Levy explains in his book _Hackers,_ MIT computer scientists fueled their nocturnal coding sessions the same way their counterparts here and abroad do today: with Chinese food.

> Chinese food was a system, too, and the hacker curiosity was applied to that system as assiduously as to a new LISP compiler…. They went back loaded with Chinese dictionaries and demanded a Chinese menu. The chef, a Mr. Wong, reluctantly complied, and Gosper, Samson, and the others pored over the menu as if it were an instruction set for a new machine. Samson supplied the translations, which were positively revelatory. What was called “Beef with Tomato” on the English menu had a literal meaning of Barbarian Eggplant Cowpork. “Wonton” had a Chinese equivalent of Cloud Gulp.

In the 70’s, Calvin Trillin wrote about his fantasy of eating in New York’s Chinatown accompanied by Mao Tse-Tung. Trillin had no sympathy for Mao’s politics (also, Mao was already dead at the time); he just wanted the Chairman’s help translating the specials written in Chinese and posted on restaurant walls. He should have just brought some hackers from NYU.

Well, I want to be my own Chairman. I want to walk in to an _izakaya,_ a Japanese bar, ask about the day’s specials, and order off the wall. Reading, speaking, and listening. Oh, and I want to be ready to do it next summer, because I’m going to be in Japan for a month.

Nearly everything I’ve ever read about learning a language has come from either an expert or an idiot. The expert, found mostly in textbooks, is in the business of teaching you how to get your mouth and your brain around a bucket of new concepts. If you don’t fall asleep or accidentally swear at someone, the expert has done her job.

The idiot appears in books you might actually read for fun. The quintessential language idiot is David Sedaris, who struggled with French under a tyrannical professeur in Me Talk Pretty One Day:

> “If you have not _meimslsxp_ or _lgpdmurct_ by this time, then you should not be in this room. Has everyone _apzkiubjxow?_ Everyone? Good, we shall begin.” She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, “All right, then, who knows the alphabet?”

The idiot is an underdog, and we all love rooting for those, so it’s no surprise that Sedaris would cast himself in the role. To Sedaris and to many travel writers, language is a necessary evil, a problem to be mined for jokes, at best. You slog through the language study so you can order the _croissant_ or the _gyōza_ without being reprimanded. And that’s how I saw Japanese before I began studying it: an obstacle between my mouth and the catch of the day.

Then, well, you know. I started _liking_ Japanese. And I thought: how come nobody writes about language the way food writers write about the process of cooking? Lots of great food writing features neither experts nor idiots but talented amateurs who enjoy the process of cooking as much as the end product. Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue can be clownish, sure, but he’s an extremely smart guy and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. When you go down the rabbit hole with Steingarten, you are going to come out knowing the best way to skin, truss, and roast a rabbit.

Amateurs have a special power that experts and idiots lack. Becoming an expert means losing touch with how you do what you do. I know how to speak English. This doesn’t qualify me to teach English, because I’ve completely forgotten what it was like to Dick and Jane my way through a sentence, sounding words out letter by letter.

Admittedly, it’s possible nobody writes about the process of learning a language for the same reason they don’t write about the process of paint drying. So let’s find out!

One of the most frustrating parts of learning anything is seeing someone make it look easy. Well, the amateur knows where it hurts. So over the new few months, I’d like to check in periodically when I encounter something odd, puzzling, or thrilling about the Japanese language. I won’t assume that you have any prior knowledge of Japanese–or even any desire to learn it.

And I promise not to make it look easy.