A New Language, a New Life

As I prepare to spend the foreseeable future in Japan and am passionate about the culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, it feels only natural to learn the language. And where better to embark on this journey, one I hope will ultimately broaden my intellectual horizons, than in the heart of Japan? Exactly. With that in mind, I visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library in the vibrant international district of Roppongi. Armed with textbooks, a notepad, and a pen, I began learning my third language after German and English, immersing myself in a world I had chosen for myself. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Amen, brother.

To make this process both efficient and enjoyable, I decided to invest in the Minna no Nihongo textbooks, purchased from the Shosen Book Tower in Akihabara. This set of books has been an invaluable resource, guiding me through the intricacies of Japanese: Learning the hiragana, katakana, and kanji scripts, expanding my vocabulary, mastering grammar, and picking up useful phrases for everyday life. Like any ambitious student of Japanese, my journey begins with the first alphabet: Hiragana. The word literally means flowing or simple kana, making it the counterpart to the more complex kanji, which no human in the world truly masters because they’re so difficult to learn.

Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, and with a few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by a character or digraph in these sets. Translating words from the Latin alphabet into hiragana is relatively straightforward - I just have to follow the character table consistently. However, two challenges arise: Navigating tricky rules and knowing when certain words are transliterated not into hiragana but into the more Western-oriented katakana. Mastering hiragana is the easiest hurdle on this linguistic adventure. Once I tackle my first kanji, I’ll look back at the simplicity of hiragana with nostalgia. But let’s not dwell on that future just yet.