I started learning Japanese 2 days ago. I was in a hangar and had nothing to do, and didn’t feel like studying for upcoming AP exams, so I decided to start learning Japanese again. Also, recently I have been reading no game no life, and the English translation completely butchered the shiritori game played in volume 2 against Jibril.

I wrote down the shiritori game terms and the English translation so here it is:

水爆 H-bomb
九遠第四加護 Bú Li Anses
精霊回廊 spirit column
馬 nag (horse in poor condition) 
まんこ gash (slang for vulva)
====
ビーチ beach
乳首 headlights (archaic slang for breasts, can mean nipples)
ビキニ string bikinis
荷物 saddlebags (can be slang for womens thigh fat but here it means luggage)
つむじ squall (sudden gust of wind, for upskirt)
女性服 ladies' clothes
===
マントル mantle
ローオオシ蛾 echo (wrong)
外核 outer core
クロック ergonomic timepiece (bad)
クリーチャー entities
灯り sandal (wrong)
岩石圏 lithosphere
朝 eve (wrong)
酸素 eighth element
ソナタ tetratonon 
種植え natura
空気(エア) aria
大気圏(アトモスフィア) atmosphere
闇弱 erratic (wrong?)
クーロン力 columb forc

As you can clearly see above, the shiritori game has completely changed in mood when the characters are using such archaic English from the start, in constrast to the original version where they are only using common words. As such I decided to give learning Japanese another shot.

I have learnt a bit of Japanese in the beginning of 2022 by using duolingo, but it wasn’t really productive as I don’t think the pace of the lesson suited me well, especially not going into kanji, which I am quite familiar with already. But duolingo was able to drill hiragana and katakana into me well I guess.

Currently the resources I am using as these:

The idea is that I will learn using genki textbook, but since I am able to recognize kanji, I will just learn as much kanji as possible at this stage, since I am able to recognize them easily from being able to read Mandarin Chinse. Actually learning the kanji also helps me to remember the pronunciation of some words as they are similar to the Mandarin Chinese pronounciation. For example, 図書館 is としょかん which is kind of similar to the Mandarin Chinese pronounciation (to sho kan) vs (du shu guan).

And of course, my learning is not limited to only things I see in the textbook, if there is a term that I already know, how to say from being exposed to Japanese pop culture, I will just add it to my anki deck. That way, while I still have some sort of grounding to learn Japanese systemetically through genki, it will still be sort of natural? And naturally the terms in my anki deck will be ones that I would want to use. Currently, my anki deck is sitting at about 200 cards.

Another interesting thing I have noticed about Japanese kanji is that it has been simplified from traditional Chinese character, but in a different way than simplified Chinese characters. A double example is the word for economics. In the 3 writing systems it is:

  • 經濟 (Traditional Chinese)
  • 経済 (Japanese)
  • 经济 (Simplified Chinese)

Also, sometimes the meaning of the Japanese kanji totally does not match their Chinese character counterparts. Take for example the kanji and carrot and study in Japanese, which are 人参 and 勉強 respectively. In Mandarin Chinese, these would be understood as ginseng and reluctantly respectively.

Today I also tried to read song lyrics from a Japanese song (ラブソングが歌えない), but it seems that I have still not completely learnt any grammar L, but being able to understand Chinese and read katakana means that one has the most vague understanding of the meaning anyways.

Also, I’ve been using the flick keyboard, it’s quite fun to type. I feel like I’m building quite a bit of muscle memory already.

Anyways, I told my mother about learning Japanese and she brought up learning Singaporean Hokkien. But it seems like a hard thing to do because no one has wrote it down, I could only find this dictionary written in 1950 . And indeed, most Singaporeans only learn how to listen and speak hokkien, they literally have no way to write it down. They could use English with diacritics but hokkien has way too many phonemes to do so.

But ok, maybe I will try to learn Pe̍h-ōe-jī or Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols to be able to write down Hokkien and write them in an anki deck.

While there is Taiwanese Hokkien dictionaries, my mother claims that is only about 80% similar to Singaporean Hokkien and the tones are slightly different such that Singaporean Hokkien sounds like a gangster is speaking it. But perhaps this would be a good starting point to learn Singaporean Hokkien anyways?

It is sad to see a language die in real time, where most people in my social circle cannot speak the native tongue of their parents, which is confirmed by this news article . In fact, my native language, English is my parent’s third language…

It seems weird that there is no sign of someone trying to prevent the death of such language. As far as I know, no one has made a website to allow people to learn Singaporean Hokkien for free, or even create a dictionary for that. Maybe this is one of those situtation where I should just do it myself and try to document Hokkien as much as possible from my parents, seems like a cool long-term project to document this language to make learning it accessible to other English first language people.

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