mission.japan

Learning Japanese is (or is supposed to be) a big part of missionary work in Japan. TEAM’s requirement for language study for missionaries such as myself and the Shipps is 10 hours per week, an appeciable percentage of which should be spent in a classroom or private instruction setting. For new career missionaries TEAM has the Karuizawa Language School, which most missionaries attend for two years before heading out into the field. (Since I’m technically here on short term I am supposed to study part-time while I work, which is why I haven’t been to KLS.)

Fortunately studying Japanese is one of the things I like to do, although since I started keeping track of my hours spent studying during the week I don’t think I’ve quite reached 10 hours during any one week. I get various opportunities for conversation practice during the week, so I have been focusing my studies on reading and writing. The long-term goal is to be literate in written Japanese so I can use that skill to continue to improve my overall Japanese through books and articles after I leave Japan.

Written Japanese is often cited as the most difficult part of learning the language. There are literally thousands of characters with varied readings—after high school most students will have studied around 2,000—and while there are patterns left over from the original Chinese versions, in the end it comes down to hours upon hours spent in rote memorization of each character. A flash card program helps with this, and I’ve found Pauker to be ample for my needs.

I’m in the middle of sixth-grade characters right now, so the number of characters I can recognize is about 900 or so. After sixth grade I’ll be halfway through the basic set of characters everyone should know, with 1,000 left to learn. At a pace of 200 characters per month (approximately what I’ve kept for the last few months) I should get to 2,000 characters at the end of January 2007. From there I imagine I will spend time reviewing and relearning (some characters are less frequent than others and drop out of your memory faster).

I get plenty of practice with actual reading these days as I’ve started reading manga (Japanese comics). You have to be careful about what you pick up off the shelf here, because something that looks interesting could be worth exactly none of your time. Besides the reading practice, though, one of the benefits of manga is the dialogue itself, which is often in natural, everyday Japanese, and is in general acceptable for using in daily life. The series I’m reading right now are Yotsuba&!, which is a fun, light read from the author of Azumanga Daioh (usually I don’t need the dictionary for it), Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE, a cute but well-written fantasy story that I found out about through the anime fansub while I was in the States, and Shakugan no Shana, which was originally a series of novels but has been adapted into comic form. Most manga have furigana to indicate the reading of each character, but I’ve found that a couple (such as Shakugan no Shana) don’t have much in the way of furigana, so I can’t read it entirely. In those cases, however, I can pick up enough to get the gist of the dialogue, so it’s not too bad.

I really don’t watch a whole lot of television, but there are a few shows I try to keep up with if my schedule doesn’t interfere. At least a little bit of hearing spoken Japanese does help with listening and speaking ability, as I found out back home last year, when I watched a lot of fansubbed anime. I typically don’t watch anime anymore because a) most anime shows are on at the insane hours of 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning, and b) a lot of it isn’t worth watching anyway. If there’s something I really want to see (like the Kyoto Animation remake of Kanon that will start in October), I can always wait for the DVD to come out and borrow Matt’s Tsutaya card to rent it.