29 days ago, I started learning Japanese using Duolingo. I don’t know enough about language studies to gauge whether this is the right or wrong way, whether there are superior or worse methods, and so on. But I know that I can speak a couple of sentences now. I don’t have any specific goals, it’s more of a curiosity thing. Can I actually learn a language that isn’t similar to my own in a reasonable amount of time?
I can ask for directions, order items in a restaurant, I can say which items belong to me and which do not. I can ask for the time and greet others when I meet them. It’s the standard vocabulary you would teach tourists who go to Tokyo for two weeks and don’t want to rely on English for their interactions.
I understand simple grammatical concepts and would be able to write whatever you want me to write if you give me enough time to go character by character. I’m studying about one (mostly) to two (rarely) hours a day, including weekends.
Learning Hiragana alone took me about two weeks, and by learning I mean I can now identify probably 80% of the characters quickly; the others still make me go into a deep think.
What I found most fulfilling, however, isn’t the Duolingo bird praising me for how awesome I am or how my smartphone’s notifications make it look like the bird is ready to kill me if I don’t start practicing right now. It’s the little things I enjoy, outside of the app, which makes me feel like a whole new world is opening up to me.
From random chaos to understanding and order
Maybe you have seen videos of a guy walking through a city while filming his surroundings — like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQw7MN7_e7o (sorry, no embedding allowed).
I watch (parts of) them sometimes because I like the unfiltered nature of these videos, without cuts, without edits, without commentary. It helps you get a little bit of insight into cultures very foreign to you.
What I notice now when I watch a video like this is that I understand some of the characters printed onto ads, on buildings, on signs, on postcards. They used to be lines, curves, circles, and dashes which were connected to each other seemingly randomly. I had no choice but to shrug at what I saw because I did not know what any of it meant or how to even pronounce them.
Now, when I see the same guy walking through Tokyo, I can read a couple of characters here and there. “Shi… Ma… Tsu…” What used to have no meaning to me now makes me form syllables and words, even if I don’t know what the words mean. Inner Tokyo seemed completely alien to me, but now a fraction of the city’s strangeness has stopped being strange. I can suddenly read the same characters the Japanese natives read; no longer is there a difference in my and their understanding of one of those syllables. It sounds banal, but actually felt like a big deal to me.
Hello!
Another incident occured when I read a Japanese tweet on Discord. I scanned the message for characters I know, deciphered some of them, went back to the beginning and saw こんにちは — ko-n-ni-chi-wa. Hello!
The Duolingo bird is basically bombarding me with this term while I use the app, so I can simply recognize it by now — which I did, and so I simply read the word as if it was in my native language or English. A greeting intended for Japanese audiences has now reached me in the same way as it reaches them. It felt great — like I was, in a tiny way, now a part of that culture as well.
Back to school!
The last time I learned a language was back in school, roughly twenty years ago. My schedule said I had to learn it, and so I learned it, but I had no intrinsic motivation to keep going — I did it because some authoritative figure said so.
In retrospect, that was a pretty terrible way to learn anything. I only became good at it when I exposed myself to large amounts of English via the internet — because I wanted to, not because a teacher told me to.
This current experiment feels like going back to square one, repeating the same basics I studied a long time ago, but in a different language. I discovered that this time, because I want to do it myself, I actually enjoy doing it, though (and I would have killed for an app that uses gamification to make learning fun; screw the stuff we had back then).
Let’s see how far I can take it. If I can have a decently fluid conversation about everyday topics in a year or two, that would be great.
I think I might update this once a month from now on with more concrete learnings and view this as something like a personal diary of sorts and for whoever is interested in reading how others discover completely new languages. I hope parts of it will be interesting to whoever reads this.
