Japanese Beginnings

My introduction to Japanese during these past two weeks has been quite exciting, although the process of continuing to accumulate knowledge of the language will, I'm sure, also be fraught with some frustrations and difficult moments. Before beginning this course, I had no working knowledge of Japanese, with the exception of a few words I had picked up here and there from friends who speak Japanese and a basic familiarity with the character の from reading store signs in Taipei. As a student of early modern China and Ming/Qing dynasty literature, I hope to develop a functioning reading ability of Japanese so that I will be able to use it as a research language in the future, and thus gain access the wealth of scholarship written about China in Japanese. Of course, my interest in Japanese also stems from a more culturally-informed curiosity -- I hope to learn more about Japan itself in order to broaden my conception of "east Asia" as a geographical, political, and socio-cultural entity, and am especially interested in exploring the relationship between China and Japan. Further, I have quite a few friends in my department who study Japan/are Japanese/speak Japanese, and, quite honestly, it will be nice to have some idea of what they all are talking about.

In these first two weeks of studying Japanese, I have been struck by both the numerous similarities and vast differences in Chinese and Japanese as languages. I imagine I'll be discussing this to a larger degree in later posts, so I will only note some very basic thoughts here. I feel that my previous experiences with learning Chinese have seasoned me for the study of Japanese -- I am familiar with reading characters, although hiragana and katakana are pretty different from the Chinese characters/kanji I am more used to dealing with. Even so, I am trying to prepare myself for the likely confusion of learning kanji in a Japanese, rather than Chinese, language setting (different pronunciations, some variant character meanings, etc.). Nevertheless, my experiences with Japanese so far have suggested that it is a very logical language, and I hope that I continue to find it so in the weeks and months to come.