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I'm up to page 四十四 (44) in my copy of The Basic Kanji Book and I should probably get to bed. I guessed it was about midnight (十二時) when I looked at the clock and saw it was quarter to two (一時四十五分). Yeah, definitely time for bed.
But I wanted to write about how excited it makes me that I can read actual, vaguely interesting sentences in kanji at this point. Things like あの小さい山まで一時間ぐらいかかります (It's about an hour to that little mountain), or 森と森の間に川があります (Between the two forests is a river). Japanese is so context-sensitve; I think whether that second sentence would be 'the two forests' or just 'two forests' would really be dependent on the context the sentence is in (not to mention 'a river' vs. 'the river'). There's a great deal of that, and the differences excite me. It's neat to think about what sorts of basic concepts are encoded in speech in different ways in different languages.
I've been taking my classes in Japanese (日本語) for seven or eight months now and still couldn't hold a conversation to save my life, but I keep finding little milestones that make me feel like I've accomplished something.
I'll be very interested in how the learning curve compares between the classes I've been taking in Japanese and the ones I plan to take in Spanish in college.
But I wanted to write about how excited it makes me that I can read actual, vaguely interesting sentences in kanji at this point. Things like あの小さい山まで一時間ぐらいかかります (It's about an hour to that little mountain), or 森と森の間に川があります (Between the two forests is a river). Japanese is so context-sensitve; I think whether that second sentence would be 'the two forests' or just 'two forests' would really be dependent on the context the sentence is in (not to mention 'a river' vs. 'the river'). There's a great deal of that, and the differences excite me. It's neat to think about what sorts of basic concepts are encoded in speech in different ways in different languages.
I've been taking my classes in Japanese (日本語) for seven or eight months now and still couldn't hold a conversation to save my life, but I keep finding little milestones that make me feel like I've accomplished something.
I'll be very interested in how the learning curve compares between the classes I've been taking in Japanese and the ones I plan to take in Spanish in college.