I knew from my studies at school that a country called Japan existed. I also knew it was a wonderful country, developed in many areas, popular for its technology, famous for the flowers that bloomed there and well know for its flower and temple festivals.
But at that time, I never knew Japan wasn't English. I was perhaps 10 years old then and knew only one language well enough to be called fluent in it (besides my mother tongue).
Japanese cartoons were just making its first appearance on cartoon network. They called it Anime. And the first Japanese anime I watched on TV was Card Captor Sakura and I loved it.
But many times, I had to miss watching the serial because of my exams, and to research more, I used Yahoo! Search online to find out the storyline. Unfortunately, with two seasons, CCS was over. But then I found lots of other animes online - Sailormoon, Fuushigi Yuugi, and the list went on.
But downloading the videos was too much for my limited broadband. That was when I discovered these beautiful things called "mangas". They were Japanese black and white comics that were uploaded onto the net from which many animes were made. But not all the works were translated to English; many were uploaded raw. I started by learning that Japanese was read from right to left; that "Ohaio" means "Good morning", "Baka" means "Idiot", "Kawaii" means "cute", and lots of other wonderful words.
Even now, I've learnt only a few words in Japanese; but I've also learnt that the Japanese is not an easy to conquer language as it has many sub-languages like Romanjii, Katakana, Kanjii etc.; the Kanjii being the toughest of them all as there are over 50,000 characters used in it. Kanjii is also the "formal" Japaneses. If you want to write a letter, it's formal to use Kanjii characters and you're name is better looking if its in Kanjii.
I also love the way the Japanese people pronounce English. For them, “Red” becomes “Reddou”, “Holland” becomes “Olanndo”, “Jupiter” becomes “Juptha” etc.
My class has started writing Kanjii on the board every noon as a fun contest. The first person who figures out how to read it and also tells the meaning wins. Yesterday the word was “Mizuki” which means “friend”; the day before, it was a single Kanjii “Ame” which meant “Rain, water”.
There are two kinds of ways to read a Kanjii - The Oon-reading and the Kun-reading. Oon-reading is the Chinese way of reading Japaneses where the pronunciation is the same as how a Chinese would read. Yesterday, I learn that “Ichi” is the Oon-reading for “One” and “Tsu” is the Kun-reading for the same character.
Hehe!
Yes, I feel Japanese is a fun language to learn. “Arigatou” means “Thank You”.
