Friday, March 02, 2007

Is Japanese Hard?

飲み物 a 人 this buy probably should you, questions these both to responses 同じ the share you if. 新幹線 or, tickets express limited reserved 買います, "go just" rather you would, Week Golden during 京都 to travel booking were you if. 2) Younger were you when travel overseas/snowboard/ski you did? 1)
:Are this of sense good a you give can that questions two. Life in fundamentals similar share or/and, compatible are 私 and 人 this if wonder I. More know wanna and curious I'm. "Person this 好き I, hey"--Yourself to wonder might you, new someone 合う you when.


Can you read this? Do you understand this? This is what Japanese is like.

The characters I have scattered through the paragraph are pretty basic and easy. But if you don't know or like Kanji....good luck being literate here.
Even if you know the vocabulary for every word in a sentence, if you get stuck on a Kanji, it can drive you crazy.

Here are the Kanji for this paragraph.
飲み物 drink 人 person   同じ same   新幹線 bullet train   買います buy  京都 Kyoto  私 I   人 person  好き like  合う meet

Now, can you understand the paragraph? If you hadn't noticed, the order of the words of the paragraph are just written backwards. From left to right. As you can probably attest, reading backwards or up or down isn't really much of a challenge. Japanese reads from top to bottom left to right.

The real challenge in reading is learning Kanji.
The real challenge in listening is accustoming yourself to the jumbled, almost backwards from English word order.

So even if I were to use English (words that you've listened to your whole life), if I were to read this paragraph again to you.

Drink a person this buy probably should you, questions these both to responses same the share you if. Train bullet the take or, tickets express limited reserved buy, "go just" rather you would, Week Golden during Kyoto to travel booking were you if. 2) Younger were you when travel overseas/snowboard/ski you did? 1):Are this of sense good a you give can that questions two. Life in fundamentals similar share or/and, compatible are I and person this if wonder I. More know wanna and curious I'm. "Person this like I, hey"--Yourself to wonder might you, new someone meet you when.

Could you understand it?
Welcome to Japanese.
Sure there's many more details I could give, but they'd probably bore you faster than this may have already.


POST SCRIPT
On the flip side, should you know native Japanese speakers who you can understand when they speak to you in English, and vice versa, then congratulations is in order, because the difficulties and challenges go both ways!


1 comment:

  1. Do books start with "The End"? cause i would think there would be alot of dissapointed readers... oh thats what happens? why read on?

    ReplyDelete