27. To Know Japanese -
is Eddie's first year project. If I am going to make Tokyo my Haven, I must do it in Japanese, he thinks. So I shall start communicating with Ryo outside the pidgin.
His reading, teaches him that Japanese is split between the non-written language of the North Asian conquerors of the islands and the written language of the Chinese symbols used when Chinese monks introduced writing to Japan a thousand years ago.
Many foreigners learn spoken Japanese but only a very few learn the Chinese symbols - the Kanji.
So Eddie starts 5 days a week at Berlitz and speaking to Ryo and Yuko only in Japanese, and having them to speak back to him in Japanese. And he studies the reading and writing by private tutor. After 6 months, he is able to stop the tutoring and, using Nelson's Japanese-English Character Dictionary, he studies, obsessed to crash-learn it all in a year. Here follows some of the highlights Eddie puts down about Japanese.
The basic structure of a sentence is not so different from English. In Japanese it is subject, object and verb; in English, subject, verb and object. Japanese say I food eat and Americans, I eat food. In Japanese many modifiers and phrases and relative clauses are added and the personal pronoun is dropped, being understood from the context. For example, I eat hamburgers is understood in Japanese by my saying, in Japanese, Hamburgers, eat. (The comma here in Japanese being a sound that indicates something is being done to hamburgers) A sound that follows words and indicates action is a post-position (cf preposition in English).
There are 4 main post-positions - wa, wo, ni, and ka, the last after a verb for a question. The wa, which is at the start of a sentence, is like a comma or a colon or a separation phrase from the rest of the sentence; while the wo means something is acting on what it follows (I eat hamburgers in English is hambahga wo tabemasu in Japanese). But Hambahga wa tabemasu ka means, Hamburger? Do you (want to) eat it?
The ni places something. Nihon ni sunde imasu is very literally Japan in, living am, or in English word order, I am living in Japan. Note the personal pronoun, I, in Japanese, is assumed because it is obvious from the context of me speaking about myself.
What the scholars who introduced writing to Japanese did, was take Chinese symbols and the Chinese word sound that went with the symbol and apply it to the Japanese sound for the same meaning. Thus the Chinese symbol for voice, which looks like a small square box and had the Chinese sound kou, was used for the Japanese same meaning that has the Japanese sound koochi. So each written Japanese symbol has two sounds - the original Chinese and the spoken Japanese. For a voice, kou and koochi, for a metal, kin and kane, and so on. Thus, in learning to read and write Japanese, one must not only memorize the Chinese symbol for each word, but also the original Japanese sound and the written old Chinese sound and, one must know when to use each because the Chinese sounds ended up infecting the Japanese language to the extent that today's spoken and written Japanese is the original Japanese word structure and grammar onto which has been laid Chinese vocabulary and phrases.
A last point is that the Chinese symbols if they were each for separate memorization would be impossible for anyone but a genius to learn. Happily there is a system of 212 basics that are used to construct the many thousands of word symbols in the Japanese language. So if one memorizes the 212 basics, one can figure out (or use a dictionary) the many thousands of symbols in written Japanese.
This is what Eddie discovers and wonders over; and after a year, he has become fluent conversationally; and from now, Ryo's Japanese speech will be rendered as Eddie translates it in his mind into his English.
End of Chapter. To continue next, click 16.28 Eddie Sets Up a Computer in the Shack
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