The museum devotes considerable space to commemorating the first mechanical salmon processing machine, designed to do the work done by Chinese butchers before the Chinese Exclusion Act. The machine, I am sorry to report, was called the Iron Chink (this was not its nickname; it was cast in metal on the machine). The museum struggles desperately with this; there’s a brief acknowledgment that “Iron Chink” is horribly racist, but then they use the term a dozen more times.

So I was pleased when I wandered into a different section of the museum where they’d put out some Post-It notes and invited patrons to answer the question, “What makes a livable city?” People wrote down obvious things like parks and sidewalks, and some, of course, took the opportunity to be mildly obscene. One person, however, had written “Chinese people.” Amen to that, right? I smiled. Then I freaked out and yelled for Laurie to come over right away, because I realized the note didn’t say “Chinese people.” It said:

中国人

Best thing I saw all day, except for the 1992 Mudhoney/Nirvana ticket donated by my friend Rob Ketcherside.

For the first few hundred kanji, the author, James Heisig, provides you with a suggested story. For example, the kanji for “spring,” 泉, is a combination of “white” (on top) and “water” (on the bottom). So you imagine a bubbling mountain spring, with the top of the water white and frothy.

That’s an easy one. They get much, much harder as you go along, and at some point Heisig stops spoon-feeding you stories, and there’s only one set of footprints on the beach, and that’s you on your own, sucker. You have to write your own stories.

I haven’t gotten that far yet in the book. But the person who previously owned my used copy of Remembering the Kanji did, and they left a note sheet in the book. It included these gems:

撃 (beat): After the perp dented the man’s car with a missile, the man beat him with his bare hands.

怪 (suspicious): Data finds it suspicious that, after all his unitards were sewn shut, he found a spool in Riker’s pocket.

隻 (vessels): The shipper’s vessels at the marina are novelty boats shaped like the skipper himself, but with turkey heads. (Business is not good.)

Whoever you are, thanks for being awesome, and I hope you learned all the kanji.

I was curious how much long distance cost back when I was obliviously watching the Cosby Show in the mid-80s. According to the FCC, in 1986, a ten-minute coast-to-coast daytime call cost about $7.50 in today’s money. And an international call? Over $8 for three minutes.

Anyone prone to reminiscing about how cheap things were in the old days is not thinking of long distance service, although the carriers have certainly found a way to keep us sending a big check every month. (Today’s current AT&T vs Verizon commercials are basically identical to the old MCI/Sprint commercials, with less embarrassing haircuts…for now.)

Where am I going with this? Japan, of course. Last night I made a three-minute call to Tokyo, and it cost less than ten cents. I’m easily impressed by cheap phone calls. Less so by my language skills.

I was calling a Tokyo bakery to ask a couple of questions for a dessert-related article I’m working on. The conversation, translated into English, went something like this.

Me: Hello. Does anyone there speak English?

Bakery: Not really.

Me: Um. OK. I saw dessert on web site. You have, yes?

Bakery: Not right now.

Me: You have, uh, summer?

Bakery: [couldn’t understand response]

Me: I understand. Sorry to bother you. Goodbye.

This was discouraging, but it could have been worse. I think my accent was okay. Since it costs nothing to call Japan, maybe I should just call a couple of random businesses every night and ask stupid questions.

Some Japanese learners are lucky enough to arrive with kanji in their pockets because they grew up speaking (and reading and writing) Chinese. There are a few Chinese students in my community college class, and I sure am envious.

For the rest of us, there are a bunch of competing kanji-learning approaches, but we can boil it down to (1) Remembering the Kanji and (2) everything else.

In my class, for example, we are learning kanji in a watered-down version of the way Japanese kids learn it: beginning with the most common kanji, our sensei puts a character on the board and shows us how to write it and how it’s used in a few words we know, and then we practice writing it our workbook. Next week we have a quiz on the kanji we’ve learned so far, which include 大 (big), 四 (four), and 月 (month).

What’s wrong with this approach? Nothing, if you want to learn a few kanji. What if you want to learn all the kanji? Then you will meet up with James Heisig and his book Remembering the Kanji, or RTK for short.

The conceit of RTK is that you should learn how to write and recognize the kanji before you learn how to pronounce them or combine them in words. Doing it all at once is too hard. From the perspective of the English alphabet, this is insane. The difference between the alphabet and kanji, however, is that kanji has a hundred times has many characters, and most characters are made up of miniature versions of other characters.

So if you want to remember the Kanji, says Heisig, you don’t start with the most common characters. You start with a few basic shapes and build with them. So you end up learning some uncommon kanji before more common ones. (For example, the kanji for an obscure volume measurement comes several chapters before the kanji for “person.”) Heisig assigns each kanji a keyword so you sort of know what it means, but the keyword is more about keeping track of all your new friends, not about communication per se. After you learn all 2000+ official kanji, then you can start thinking about plebeian concerns like pronunciation, and words, and meanings.

How do you actually remember the kanji? With stories. If a kanji is made of multiple elements, you combine those elements into a little story, as memorable as possible. Heisig feeds you stories for a while and then steps aside to let you concoct your own. Someone also cooked up a brilliant free website to go with the book, where you can test yourself with flashcards and borrow stories from other learners. My favorite so far: the kanji for “bullseye” is made up of “white + ladle.” So you imagine white bird shit plopping—bullseye!—into your ladle just as you’re serving up some soup. I have no trouble remembering this character:

的

You can download the first 100+ pages of RTK free. I recommend it, even if you have no interest in kanji, for…well, for sadistic reasons.

RTK, you see, is notorious for turning its students into cultish dickheads. As in, “I learned 300 kanji today. What did YOU accomplish?” I plead absolutely guilty to this, and if RTK adherents sound like jingoistic frat boys, it’s because kanji itself is something of a hazing ritual. Why do frustrated college administrations find it impossible to stamp out fraternity hazing? Because nothing produces loyalty to the group better than shared adversity. Even though I’m only toes-deep in kanji, I can already tell that when I’m finished, I’ll feel about it the same way I do after I learned calculus or learned to navigate Greenwich village without a map: everyone should have to go through this!

Luckily for my family, I am reaching my kanji capacity. The first few dozen kanji are quite easy, and you can feel your brain craning open to let you shovel in knowledge. Then, suddenly, you’re trying to cram new toys into an already overfull toy box. I learned two new kanji today. What did you accomplish?

That said, Iris and I had a semi-amazing kanji breakthrough today on the way to lunch. Every Saturday we get a plate of dumplings at a restaurant called Sichuanese Cuisine. Today we noticed that the sign has three kanji on it, and two of them looked like this:

四川

We knew what that meant: four rivers! Then, hey, wait a second. “Four” in Japanese is “shi.” I wonder if it’s “si” in Chinese. Does “si chuan” mean “four rivers”?

It does.

P.S.: If you do speak Chinese, please forgive me for referring to hanzi as kanji. Everyone else, forget I said that.

Kanji is the barbed wired that keeps civilians from getting too close to Japanese. Or as Maciej Cegłowski put it:

And don’t fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper.

Kanji are the complex characters, originally from China, used for writing most Japanese words. Think of the Chinese side of a Chinese restaurant menu. That’s kanji. (In China they’re called hanzi, but the characters are generally the same. Sort of. That’s another story.)

As my Japanese professor puts it: hiragana conveys pronunciation; kanji conveys meaning. Japanese has many homophones (words that sound the same) but few homonyms (words that sound the same and are also spelled the same), because words with different meanings are spelled with different kanji.

Japan is stereotyped as a nation where individuals happily leave the big decisions to elites for the good of society. There’s some truth to this, I’m sure, but get this: after WWII, a vocal faction called, charmingly enough, the Phoneticists, argued for the abolition of kanji and nearly won. Meanwhile, can we get the metric system over here, please?

The Phoneticists must be the folk heroes of every Japanese schoolkid and every foreign student of the language. Learning kanji brings all of your insecurities to the surface, because Maciej wasn’t really exaggerating: the official list of kanji that all Japanese kids have to learn is over 2,100 characters long, and each of them has at least two pronunciations and often more. Here’s how I visualize Japan now: to get to the good stuff inside, I have to get past these guys:

This is the hackiest of hack, I know, but kanji learning treats you to the five stages of grief. Denial: I can learn Japanese without having to learn kanji. Anger: Why didn’t they abolish this shit and get a normal alphabet when they had the chance? Bargaining: Maybe I could learn just enough kanji to read a menu. And so on.

Here’s the problem with not learning kanji: it makes you illiterate. Imagine coming to the United States for a month, armed with a tourist map in your native language and feeling confident because they have photos on the menu at McDonald’s and Denny’s. Yes, the parallel is overblown because of the long arm of English. Directional signs in Tokyo are written in romaji for the benefit of foreigners, and many restaurants have English menus and plastic food. Iris and I spent a week there last year and were never particularly troubled by the fact that we couldn’t read a single Japanese character.

But as I start to pick up a kanji here and there, parts of the world that were a meaningless smudge have become, if not clear, at least an out-of-focus blur. This is true even in Seattle, where there are thousands of kanji to be devoured in the Chinese and Vietnamese parts of town. I walked Iris to Japanese school this morning and recognized a kanji on the side of a Chinese food distributor. It was this one:

品

I don’t know how it’s pronounced, but I know it means “goods.” And that’s one of the weirdest things about kanji. Because kanji convey meaning but not necessarily pronunciation, it’s possible to recognize a word in kanji and know approximately what it means in English without knowing how to pronounce the word.

Although, given how often English serves up heinous irregular pronunciations, I guess the average ESL student knows exactly how that feels.

I started out with the book Learning Perl, which is a real classic, now in its sixth edition. It brought me up to speed on the language features, but only a comparative linguist cares about language features. The rest of us just want to do something with the language: make fireworks appear on the screen, order noodles, etc.

Learning Perl, for all its charms, isn’t really designed to do that. You learn enough to avoid syntax errors, but not how to solve problems. I didn’t get good at Perl until the Perl Cookbook came out.

Perl Cookbook is 500 pages of “recipes” for how to do actual useful stuff with Perl. They’re specific enough that each recipe might solve your problem, and general enough that if you don’t find the exact recipe you’re looking for, you can probably adapt a similar one. The cookbook approach has become popular in computer science, but less so—as far as I know—in language learning.

When you learn any language, but especially a human language, you end up with weird gaps. I know how to say “I love sushi,” but not “I want sushi.” How different could it be? Well, I don’t know. Maybe it involves switching out a single word, like in English. Maybe not. Languages differ in unexpected ways. Have you ever studied Spanish? How much did it make your stomach lurch when you learned there were two ways to say “to be,” and you’d have to figure out when to apply each one? (Japanese has three “to be”s—at least, three that I’ve learned so far.)

Luckily, I came across an amazing Japanese grammar book that is the equivalent of Perl Cookbook for Japanese. Whoever coined the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” had exactly this book in mind:

It’s called Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, by Taeko Kamiya. The title is even more compelling than the cover, isn’t it? Japanese Sentence Patterns is the book equivalent of a skeezy hole-in-the-wall restaurant: great food, no decor.

Anyway, the book presents over 100 model sentences. Say you want to say, “I went to the park yesterday, but not today.” There’s a sentence pattern for that: number 55. You get the model sentence and three more examples (“I swam in the pool but not in the ocean.”) Then there’s an exercise: translate three sentences from English to Japanese. Each exercise comes with the vocabulary you need to complete it, so you’re being tested only on the grammar.

The overall effect is that you can practically feel mental marching feet laying down new pathways as you work through the practice sentences. I’ve been making Iris test me, and I think she enjoys the funny faces I make while trying to produce a grammatical sentence (“He drank at home, but not at a bar”).

Are there books like this for other languages? If you know of one, please post a comment.

In other words, when you look at a Lego model, you say, “Wow, Legos!” When you look at a Greek sculpture, you don’t say, “Wow, marble!”

This is similar to the way the katakana writing system works in Japanese: it takes foreign words and uses Japanese building blocks to synthesize something that is obviously borrowed and obviously Japanese at the same time.

First, a quick recap of the two Japanese writing systems we’ve met so far.

Romaji means Japanese words written with the Roman alphabet. It is the one your Japanese teacher will try to get you to stop using, because it’s brain-rotting training wheels.

Hiragana is the syllable-based character set used to write certain simple words. It is also used by children and novice students of Japanese (hello!) to write everything. When you succeed in learning hiragana, which doesn’t take more than a week or two, you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something. You have accomplished nothing. (How is this drill sergeant zen master routine working for me?)

Katakana is hiragana’s evil twin. The name reminds me of the classic 80s computer game Karateka, in which a black-belt karate master tries to learn the four Japanese writing systems and gets so mad he just goes around kicking people. Like hiragana, katakana has 46 characters, and each character represents a legal syllable in spoken Japanese. But katakana is used to write different stuff. No, really. It’s as if we had one English alphabet for writing some words and another, Dr. Seussian, alphabet for writing other words.

Katakana’s main raison d’être is writing foreign words and loanwords. (I don’t know if “raison d’être” is something they say in Japan, but if it is, it would be written in katakana.) When I took French, we learned that France has a snooty (even by French standards) government department charged with maintaining the purity of the language and defending it from foreign interlopers like le meeting and le weekend. This effort has mostly failed, of course, but there have been occasional successes, like “l’ordinateur” for “computer,” instead of, perhaps, “le computeur.”

Japan hasn’t even tried. Japanese is so full of English words, it reads like a bicultural ransom note. Those English words, along with some assorted French, German, Portuguese, and recently borrowed Chinese words, are rendered in katakana. For example, here’s how you say “computer” in Japanese:

コンピュータ

which is pronounced “konpyuuta.”

But katakana’s responsibilities don’t end there. My katakana workbook, Let’s Learn Katakana, explains that it’s also used for onomatopoetic words (Japanese has many of these), sometimes for the names of plants and animals, and most important: for writing domestic telegrams. (Let’s Learn Katakana was published in 1986.) Also, sometimes people write words in katakana just to look cool. You know, like how Americans use Comic Sans.

The good news is that katakana is very easy to spot. You will practically never look at a word and wonder whether you’re reading hiragana or katakana, because one is sinuous and the other is jagged. Here, side by side, are the hiragana and katakana for “ma”:

ま マ

If it’s cuddly, it’s hiragana. If it looks like ninja weaponry, it’s katakana.

Now, back to those English loanwords. It’s hard to fathom just how many thousands of English words have made their way into Japanese, from “aisu kurīmu” (ice cream) to “zero.” A huge section of Let’s Learn Katakana is devoted to recognizing and writing these words, and I didn’t understand why until I started paying closer attention to Japanese packaging and labels. (Incidentally, Japanese packaging and labels are the world’s best; the Japanese invented frustration-free packaging back when Amazon was just a river.)

The other day, for example, I was doing some laundry and noticed a shirt with a label that said エディーバウアー. My brain clicked over into Japanese mode. (Is it a sign of progress when you can feel your brain switch gears like an automatic transmission?) Written in romaji, that would read: “ediibauaa.” Eddie Bauer!

Meanwhile, Iris peered at another label and saw ナイロン. That’s “nairon,” i.e., nylon.

Katakana and Japanese loanwords make me a little queasy, because if you’re an English speaker committed to speaking Japanese well, you’ll spend a considerable amount of time essentially speaking English with a stereotypical accent. I asked my teacher, Toshiko Smith of the Seattle Japanese Language School, whether I could tell people in Japan that I’m from “Seattle,” instead of having to say シアトル (Shiatoru). Sorry, said sensei: if you want to be understood, use the Japanese pronunciation. Indeed, in Japan, Ms. Smith would be known as スミスさん (Sumisu-san).

Because, you see, Western names are also written in katakana. Here’s mine:

マシュー

There’s no “th” sound in Japanese, so it’s pronounced “Mashū.” I’m not sure how I feel about this. Is it too late for me to choose an alias like ターミネーターさん？

Because Japanese is built from these syllables rather than letters, most Japanese words go consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, like when they made you sit girl-boy-girl-boy in elementary school. (Seriously, everything about learning Japanese makes me think about elementary school. When is nap time, again?)

This also explains why there are 46 hiragana characters, even though the range of allowable sounds in Japanese is much more limited than in English. There’s no character for “k”; instead, there are five characters for ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko:

かきくけこ

Learning a character set involves at least three different skills: remembering the sound (and perhaps also the meaning, if the character represents a whole word) that goes with the character; remembering the character that goes with the sound; and producing the character by hand with a pen (or calligraphy brush).

Because I’m over thirty years out from learning the three R’s, however, I’d forgotten than writing involves any skill other than mechanical reproduction. (Hmm, when I put it that way, it sounds like robot sex.) It turns out that, for me at least, learning how to read the character is pretty easy; learning how to write the character is almost as easy; and making my brain cough up the character that goes with a particular sound is stupefyingly hard.

This is what Dan Schmidt was getting at in a comment on my previous post:

One possible issue with Byrne is that from looking at a few sample pages it looks like it is more about recognizing hiragana than being able to write it. But as a tourist that’s probably all you need anyway.

Byrne is the author of the hiragana mnemonics book that helped me quickly learn to read all of the hiragana. Exactly as Dan warned, however, I still struggle to go from sound to character—that is, I can see the character ほ and know immediately that it’s pronounced “ho,” but if I need to write a word with “ho” in it, I often get stuck remembering which character makes that sound.

This is not a big deal for hiragana or katakana, which have a few dozen characters each; sooner or later I’ll remember them all. It’s a serious problem for kanji, the Chinese characters used to write the bulk of all Japanese words. Kanji are more complex than hiragana or katakana, and there are a hell of a lot more of them.

James Heisig, who we will meet again soon, warns about this problem in his book Remembering the Kanji. The very title of the book hints at it: there are over 2,000 kanji to remember. It is one thing to recognize a kanji and know what it means or how to pronounce it. I can recognize about a dozen kanji at this point, the most complicated of which is the character for “eat,” which looks like this:

食

It’s quite another thing to be able to write that character from memory, or even to remember what the character looks like when all you have is the concept “to eat.” It’s like the difference between recognizing that you’re eating lasagna, and making lasagna from scratch without a recipe. Here’s how Heisig puts it:

If you try to shortcut the process by merely learning to recognize the characters for their meaning without worrying about their writing, you will find that you have missed one bird with two stones, when you could have bagged two with one. Let me repeat: study only from key word to kanji; the reverse will take care of itself.

He’s onto me! Oh, well, if I don’t make every single beginner mistake, what will I have to write about?

Next up: The secret connection between katakana and Legos.

Let me say that again: Japanese has four writing systems. If you want to read and write it fluently, you have to learn four writing systems. This is like being told that if you want to pass the driving test, you will have to build a car from scratch, and that car will have to pass California emissions standards.

Luckily, of the four systems, you get one for free if you’re literate in English. This one is called romaji, and it’s used to write Japanese names and other words using the characters of the Roman alphabet. When you see “konnichiwa,” that’s romaji. It’s blessedly common to see place names written in romaji on signs in Japan, but it’s certainly the least used of the four systems.

When you were a kid, did you ever create a secret code where you replaced letters with simple shapes and could thereby pass notes to your friends without, well, I’m not sure who we thought was going to spy on our mail. Parents? Cops? Rival ninjas? In your home-cooked code, maybe A turned into a circle and B a bunch of wavy lines.

That cipher you created is something like hiragana. Hiragana, for reasons I’ll get to soon, isn’t literally an alphabet, but it is literally and figuratively loopy.

Let’s meet hiragana. Here’s an actual character:

ぬ

That one is pronounced “nu,” and it’s one of my favorites. Hiragana books tend to teach mnemonics for memorizing the characters. The one I used, Hiragana Mnemonics by Bob Byrne (actually, I used the app), says “nu” looks like a pair of chopsticks trying to capture an errant NOOdle. “Nu” for “noodle.” Not bad. This is one of the easier ones to remember.

As with any mnemonics, the dumber they are, the better they work. I initially dismissed Byrne’s mnemonics and said to myself, “I don’t need a crutch to learn a few characters,” and then found that, gosh, it’s hard to forget that the “mu” character (む) looks like a farting cow.

During the two weeks or so that it took me to learn the 46 characters of hiragana, I found myself thinking over and over that it’s funny how our English alphabet is so logical and straightforward, and this Japanese one is a hodgepodge of squiggly goofs. More specifically, I reasoned, our letters look like the sounds they make. I mean, an M looks like it should make the “M” sound, right? Whereas in hiragana, this thing:

ま

is supposed to sound like “ma.” Ridiculous!

Intellectually, I know that this is absurd. Our glyphs are just as arbitrary as theirs, although when I take a break from Japanese practice, shake off the wiggly weirdness of hiragana, and look back at the Roman alphabet, I start to notice some oddities, like the fact that you form your mouth into an O to speak the letter O.

My friend Neil has been to Japan several times, so I bragged to him that I’d learned all my hiragana. He’d learned the characters, too. “But I never got to the point where it looked like words,” he added.

Way to spoil my moment, dude. Fluent readers, in English or any other language, don’t read words letter by letter. We don’t sip. We gulp down whole words and sometimes whole phrases as single units. But hiragana doesn’t look like words to me yet. It still looks like code.

A couple of years ago, when Iris was in kindergarten, I spent an afternoon every week volunteering in her classroom. Seattle public schools use a “writer’s workshop” curriculum, where students in every grade are expected to write every day. This includes kindergarteners, who have a wide range of writing abilities, ranging from “can write” to “wouldn’t recognize the letter P if it peed on them.” I spent a lot of time helping kids try to recall which letter makes, say, the “K” sound. I did my best to empathize with the difficulty of the task, but remembering back to a time when I didn’t know the alphabet was simply beyond me.

Well, that nightmare about being back in school has turned real. Recently I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep until I remembered the hiragana that makes the sound “ho.” (It’s ほ.) When I read hiragana, I sound exactly like a tentative five-year-old sounding out a word. (Incidentally, I frequently have the nightmare where I forgot to go to class all year and now have to take the final exam. I do not, however, sit bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat, when I wake up from it.)

Even if I get to the point where hiragana looks like words, I have another problem: most words in Japanese aren’t written in hiragana. Four writing systems!

I realize I’ve said little about how hiragana actually works, and how and when you use it to construct words; that oversight will soon be remedied at length.

For a shallow person like me, part of the frustration of learning a language is knowing that there are millions of people—not especially smart people, just regular people—who are better at this than I will ever be.

A few years ago I taught myself to sharpen knives. Knife sharpening is a great skill to acquire if you’re a showoff. Anyone could learn to do it with a couple of months of study, but almost nobody knows how to do it already. So with a little time and money, you can become the amazing knife-sharpening neighborhood superhero. Complete with jumpsuit, if that’s your scene.

Language learning is so entirely the opposite. Even if I exceed my own wildest expectations for soaking up Japanese, I’ll still be lapped by throngs of children.

Oh, I had my chance to get an early start. In sixth grade, my best friend Alex, whose mother was Japanese and made exquisite homemade potstickers, taught me to say ohayō gozaimasu (good morning). That was 25 years ago.

Even before that, in fourth grade, my class spent several months studying Japan for Social Studies. Every student had to write a paper on some aspect of Japanese culture, and I somehow ended up saddled with textiles, probably because I had no idea what the word meant and figured it probably involved robots. We were also forced to taste sushi, which was disgusting, and threatened with the fact that Japanese has four different writing systems, and if we were Japanese kids we’d be learning all of them. (Plus, Japan had the gall to make better cars than America. The nerve, right?)

I came away from this believing that Japan was the world’s most annoying country. Since then, my relationship with Japan has followed the classic romantic comedy progression. That country is so annoying! Why can’t I stop thinking about it? Probably because it’s just so annoying. It’s not that I like Japan or anything.

So why am I studying Japanese? Yes, I enjoy the mental workout and the potential to read menus at places that don’t cater to foreigners. But on top of those good reasons, I think, is a more absurd reason.

Before Iris and I went to Japan in 2010, we had a draft list of future dream vacations: Thailand, Rome, Hawaii, Sweden (mainly because we might run into Robyn or Peter Bjorn & John). Japan just happened to be at the top of the list. Once we got back, however, all we wanted to do was turn around and go back to Japan. Those other places? Someday. Maybe. Who cares?

I think about Japan every day, especially about Tokyo and how the city seemed like a funhouse built just to delight us. If you’re in love with someone, or some country, of course you make an effort to learn their language. What kind of jerk wouldn’t make that commitment?

Next up: Let’s get our hands dirty with a bit of hiragana, writing system numero uno.