Kanji, comics

It is the start of week 3 of Project Literacy, and it is becoming readily apparent to me that whoever started the vicious rumor that "DUUDE Kanji are so forking hard, you can't learn those like ever, there's like a billion of them!" was smoking copious amounts of hash. The miracle is no longer how Japanese kids manage to learn all 2000+ kanji, bur rather a) how it takes them like...9 years to do it and b) how on Earth I managed to figure out the absolutely back asswards phonetic character system we use in English. "Sound it out" looks great on paper, but I think the reason why most kids can do that is that you're sounding out words you already know, and you're just figuring out how they're written. Watch any Japanese kid learning how to read English "sound it out" and you'll see how hard it is if you're not already steeped in tens of thousands of hours of English practice. By the time you're reading words like "hegemony" and "bifurcate" you've already seen those basic sounds so many times that you've got the instincts necessary to extrapolate pronunciation from the letters.

Kanji on the other hand let you sound out meaning. You have no idea exactly how profound that is until you start doing it. In English knowing 26, or lets be honest at least 52 since the upper case characters are in many cases significantly different, lets you sound out the pronunciation of most words to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Conversely, knowing 2000 characters in Japanese lets you sound out the meaning of most words to a reasonable degree of accuracy.

What. The. Hell.

Just think about how surreal that is for a moment. There are certainly some instances of that in English, pre/suffixes, words based on other words. But gosh golly how many of those do you think we have? And how often to you even realize that's what you're doing? I mean hell, they forced 3 years of Latin down my throat pretty much entirely on the basis that I would then be able to do just that, but hell if it actually took. With an obscene length of repeated exposure, maybe a native English speaker can get some degree of the prophetic powers that kanji can seem to bring out. I'm doing it after seeing these characters once, maybe twice.

It's pretty gosh darn cool.

It's allowed me to start blowing through Japanese reading materials like I was being paid to do so (and hey, lets be honest. Sometimes at the office I actually am). Once you realize that between kanji and context there is maybe one sentence every 5-10 pages which you cannot at least mostly grasp, reading gets a lot more fun. That whole "word, dictionary, word, dictionary" thing just wasn't doing it for me. It made reading feel like work, something which one should avoid at all costs. And the really, really surreal bit is when you start accidentally learning words, readings for kanji, grammar patterns, simply because you just read it a few dozen times in about an hour and a half. And half the time I don't even realize I learned it, until I'm chatting and it just comes out.

One of the reasons I was previously hesitant to read in Japanese before getting comfortably fluent was because I had this odd obsession with reading "works of great merit". I own way way way more Mishima than anyone who does not have a Japanese inner monologue should ever even see, much less pay money for. The problem with works-of-great-merit is that you feel bad skipping over a sentence you do not fully grasp, because you fear it will some day come back to haunt you, or that you are doing the work a disservice. Comics do not have this problem. I am not particularly concerned with failing to grasp the subtlety of the razor-sharp exchanges of ”絶対負けられねェ！！！” (something like: I definitely cannot lose!!!). Even the bits which have some substance to them generally are aimed at an audience with a relatively high degree of aloofness (as grade/middle schoolers are wont to) and thus are repeated, reworded, and reiterated numerous times. Like...once every page. "I don't kill anymore because I regret my actions. Did I mention that I am no longer a murderer? Notice how I am not killing you. This is because..." and so on.

Winter in the semi-tropics is a curious phenomenon. Most of the things which define it as a sub-tropic island suddenly become unavailable. Some degree of depression kind of comes along with it naturally I feel. Can't swim, can't dive, and it's cloudy and chilly every single day. But fear not, for I have found a fine cure for the winter blues. A great big rack of highly entertaining, nearly mindless fluff, doled out in ￥１００　increments, which also happens to magically teach me Japanese.