Note: If it’s okay with you, I’m going to write Japanese words and phrases in romaji when I’m not talking specifically about writing systems.

Before Iris and I took our first trip to Japan, in 2010, I took Shigeki Kajita’s conversational Japanese class. Kajita has been teaching the class since the mid-80s at the University of Washington Experimental College, which offers classes from the practical (Flirting 101) to less so (Shamanic Journeying). Hey, baby, let’s take a shamanic journey together.

Kajita got us started on the first day of class with the Japanese equivalent of Hello World: Watashi wa Matthew desu. (The “u” at the end of “desu” is silent.) This is a fine way to introduce yourself in Japanese: “I am Matthew.” We quickly moved on to identifying objects: Kore wa book desu. (“This is a book.”) Kore wa pen desu. (“This is a pen.”)

Yes, “kore wa book desu.” Learning a bunch of Japanese nouns is neither particularly difficult nor necessary, said Kajita, because everyone in Japan knows a ton of English nouns already. In fact, in “kore wa pen desu,” “pen” is a Japanese word, borrowed from English and written in katakana: ペン。(That little circle at the end of the sentence, incidentally, is a Japanese period, always written as a hollow dot. Or, if you’re a teenage Twilight fan, as a tiny heart.)

No, it’s not vocabulary (or, in Japanese, tango) that’ll kill you; it’s grammar.

The grammar of your own language is invisible. The grammar of the language you’re trying to learn? Painfully salient.

I’m grasping for a food analogy here, and came up with one that I’m sure has been used dozens of times before: Words are ingredients. If you want to make a familiar recipe but are missing an ingredient, big deal: you go to the store and pick up a bag of flour. Similarly, if I don’t know the word for “monkey” in Japanese, I can fire up the Google Translate app and get the answer.

Grammar is the finished dish. If you want to go from flour, butter, sugar, and eggs to cookies, you’re going to need a recipe. That can be a recipe from a book, or a formula you’ve committed to memory, like Michael Ruhlman is always telling you to do.

I’m skeptical of Ruhlman’s insistence that every cook move beyond recipes, because I know plenty of great cooks who always use recipes and are perfectly happy doing so. In the realm of language, though, it’s so true as to be tautological: proficient speakers don’t use phrasebooks.

This is all rarefied and theoretical. Let’s get practical. Here are a few sentences I can say in Japanese:

• I ate sushi in Tokyo.
• Bob is my friend.
• What time do you wake up?

That’s pretty good, right? But here are a few sentences I don’t know how to say:

• Will you be my friend?
• If it rains, I will bring an umbrella.
• I asked Bob about the weather.

…and about six trillion other sentences that aren’t the most simple declarations or questions.

This is the frustration of grammar: you are always stepping into mental quicksand. It’s so automatic to go from “you are my friend” to “will you be my friend?” in English that I didn’t even notice how much the language contorted itself to get from one sentence to the other until I wrote them both down. (Imagine trying to learn the general underlying rule here, and how tempting it would be to fall back on “You are my friend, yes?” In Japan, I will be Yakov Smirnoff!)

How am I going to fill in the gaps? (And at this point, it’s all gap.) For one thing, I’m going to school. And I’ve found a remarkable book, something like the Ratio of Japanese language. More on both in the next post.

Meanwhile, are there any topics you’d like me to cover? I’m planning a big assault on kanji soon.