I swear, I honestly (sometimes) do things besides whine about my kids

[mereilin]

So I kind of randomly decided to learn Japanese.

I don't have a really good reason why but it seems to be related to an anime I started watching. This reason makes me feel like a stupid teenager, but there it is. Also I'm kind of addicted to point and click "escape the room" games, which are often made by Japanese developers and sometimes not translated.

On a less geeky note, my mother-in-law is Japanese. She never taught her kids the language because she was totally into assimilating the American culture (also it was immediately post WWII when she moved to the U.S.), although my husband told me last night that she did try to teach him how to write the characters (without much success, because why bother to write in a language you can't speak?).

I'm foolishly proud of myself right now, because I got my "Japanese word of the day" email -- the one that gives me a random Japanese word and asks me to guess what it is. When it's something written in kanji it's hopeless; I haven't started figuring out any of that yet. But I have sorted out hiragana and katakana, so when I saw the katakana characters I knew it had a good chance of being a "foreign" word (and likely English). Still, I had to painstakingly sound out the kana like a preschooler trying to read C-A-T. But when I put it together and recognized the sounds, and clicked the link for the picture and saw that I was right? Let's just say I haven't had my eyes light up from reading a damned word in a lot of years -- and it was such an unexpected source of joy. (It was バイオリン -- violin -- if anyone cares to know.)

My husband patiently looks at my chicken-scratch kana practice and doesn't make fun of me. Last night he gave me random Japanese words to write out for him, which was kind of fun. His vocabulary is limited to the usual obvious Japanese words that most Americans have heard, like "kimono" and "arigato" -- I was surprised how many words I could recognize once I learned the kana. I'll probably lose interest before I develop any sort of fluency, but right now it's still kind of fun.

Right. Back to doing the mom thing, now.

Comments

[htnatch.livejournal.com]

Wow. I lived there and barely got beyond kore wa hon des, however you spell "this is s book". ;) I was really good with wakaramassen. ;)
I think it's an admirable goal.

[mereilin.livejournal.com]

"Hon" is one of the few kanji I've learned. I'm not holding out much hope, but Sadie is getting interested so maybe we'll keep each other going. :)

[bluedano.livejournal.com]

I think that's really cool! I hope you manage to keep on with it and gain some fluency. :)

[mereilin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the encouragement! :)