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Oct. 8th, 2010 05:20 pmAs I work in my Japanese workbook, I've started filling in the all the blanks with hiragana, Japanese characters, and writing the English text in very small characters below them. Though it makes for a little difficulty squeezing it all in, the simple repetitious use of the Japanese text helps me get very comfortable with the foreign symbols.
The process reminded me yesterday of years and years back when I was playing a lot of Ultima IV and Ultima V. That must have been about two decades ago, give or take. The cloth maps that came packaged with the games (because this was in the days when games came with really awesome bonus items, like pewter symbols, cloth maps, or a pair of Joo-Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses) were covered in runic script. Runic, in the world of Ultima, was a language that used characters taken from traditional Norse runic script and assigned to each of them a single letter or a common two-letter pair like 'th' or 'ee'.
I, being the odd andoccasionally obsessive child I was, decided I was going to learn this script by heart. I did this by getting a hold of a spiral notebook and proceeding toward the goal of translating the entire Book of History (one of the two texts that accompanied Ultima IV) into runic. By the time I made it through about five pages, I had the whole script, along with it's English substitutions, down cold. Even now, I can look up at the map I have framed on the wall and read the place names with little hesitation.
I'm getting to that point with the Hiragana. It's a little more complex; there are more of them, and the addition of small marks can change the pronunciation in a couple different ways, as can combining two of them in certain ways. But I can get through text purely in hiragana and do a decent job of sounding it out, even if I don't necessarily know what I'm saying.
But what I really want to write about is the interesting feeling I have of the way, in my mind, letters themselves form the sounds that they represent. As I read words in English, as I look at an "M' or a 'W', the shape and form of those letters is directly associated with the sounds that arise from them. As though, if I were to actually see the sound made by a pursing of the lips and that little twitch of the tongue and the puff of exhalation that forms the leading sound of the word 'why' or 'where', that sound would look like a 'W'. I can imagine the individual sounds of phonemes as these Platonic ideals that individual sound-recording marks approach.
(And I can see this as a completely silly idea too, with there being little to no direct relation between the kind of sound a collection of lines and curves and dots stands for and the sound itself. But for me there's a sort of connection, much like the way, when I count, or even more so when I multiply, single digit numbers in my head, I think of the specific pattern of dots that go around the numbers 1 through 9, and have since grade school.)
I'm feeling that connection of vocalized sound to it's representative character as I work through writing out lines of hiragana, muttering to myself in Japanese. There are a few slippery characters that don't seem to want to settle in; 'ko' doesn't quite feel like those two horizontal lines, one with a little hook to the end, yet, and I forget 're' and 'mu'. But others like 'yu', with it's alluring line and curve and slash, or 'ka', with it's strong back and little dash above, seem so naturally full of what they are that I can't imagine them being anything else. And when I write the characters that mean 'dream', 'yu' and 'me', they look beautiful together, in that context, with that meaning.
I don't know how many levels of classes it will take to get to kanji, the symbolic set of characters that are entire concepts in themselves. But a couple years ago, when I was figuring out how to write Stormdog in Japanese, I remember writing a journal post about how beautiful it was that the kanji for rain and snow were so similar. The way they looked like falling drops of water under the eaves of a temple.
I'm kind of fascinated by the ability to think and write not in letters and sounds but in concepts. I haven't gotten anywhere near there yet (I'm still having trouble with all this vocabulary!) but Japanese seems more alluring to me the more I work with it. In sound as well as in spirit. (I've thought for a long time that the Japanese 'u' is the most beautiful sound in spoken language that I know of.) Being able to continue taking the next levels of classes is one of many reasons I want to keep living in Chicago.
But for now, I still have five or six more classes in the level one course. I may make some vocabulary flash cards to help remember the difference between shopping 'kaimono' and a traditional female garment 'kimono'.
--------
And now: weekend!
The process reminded me yesterday of years and years back when I was playing a lot of Ultima IV and Ultima V. That must have been about two decades ago, give or take. The cloth maps that came packaged with the games (because this was in the days when games came with really awesome bonus items, like pewter symbols, cloth maps, or a pair of Joo-Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses) were covered in runic script. Runic, in the world of Ultima, was a language that used characters taken from traditional Norse runic script and assigned to each of them a single letter or a common two-letter pair like 'th' or 'ee'.
I, being the odd and
I'm getting to that point with the Hiragana. It's a little more complex; there are more of them, and the addition of small marks can change the pronunciation in a couple different ways, as can combining two of them in certain ways. But I can get through text purely in hiragana and do a decent job of sounding it out, even if I don't necessarily know what I'm saying.
But what I really want to write about is the interesting feeling I have of the way, in my mind, letters themselves form the sounds that they represent. As I read words in English, as I look at an "M' or a 'W', the shape and form of those letters is directly associated with the sounds that arise from them. As though, if I were to actually see the sound made by a pursing of the lips and that little twitch of the tongue and the puff of exhalation that forms the leading sound of the word 'why' or 'where', that sound would look like a 'W'. I can imagine the individual sounds of phonemes as these Platonic ideals that individual sound-recording marks approach.
(And I can see this as a completely silly idea too, with there being little to no direct relation between the kind of sound a collection of lines and curves and dots stands for and the sound itself. But for me there's a sort of connection, much like the way, when I count, or even more so when I multiply, single digit numbers in my head, I think of the specific pattern of dots that go around the numbers 1 through 9, and have since grade school.)
I'm feeling that connection of vocalized sound to it's representative character as I work through writing out lines of hiragana, muttering to myself in Japanese. There are a few slippery characters that don't seem to want to settle in; 'ko' doesn't quite feel like those two horizontal lines, one with a little hook to the end, yet, and I forget 're' and 'mu'. But others like 'yu', with it's alluring line and curve and slash, or 'ka', with it's strong back and little dash above, seem so naturally full of what they are that I can't imagine them being anything else. And when I write the characters that mean 'dream', 'yu' and 'me', they look beautiful together, in that context, with that meaning.
I don't know how many levels of classes it will take to get to kanji, the symbolic set of characters that are entire concepts in themselves. But a couple years ago, when I was figuring out how to write Stormdog in Japanese, I remember writing a journal post about how beautiful it was that the kanji for rain and snow were so similar. The way they looked like falling drops of water under the eaves of a temple.
I'm kind of fascinated by the ability to think and write not in letters and sounds but in concepts. I haven't gotten anywhere near there yet (I'm still having trouble with all this vocabulary!) but Japanese seems more alluring to me the more I work with it. In sound as well as in spirit. (I've thought for a long time that the Japanese 'u' is the most beautiful sound in spoken language that I know of.) Being able to continue taking the next levels of classes is one of many reasons I want to keep living in Chicago.
But for now, I still have five or six more classes in the level one course. I may make some vocabulary flash cards to help remember the difference between shopping 'kaimono' and a traditional female garment 'kimono'.
--------
And now: weekend!
