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Hiragana Practice

I have been teaching myself hiragana, one of the three Japanese scripts. I’m using Mnemosyne, a flash-card program that schedules cards cleverly so that the cards you remember well get scheduled less and less.

I don’t remember learning to read English – as far as I am concerned, it’s as natural as breathing or walking. Actually having to learn to read is actually quite fascinating. To begin with, I actually got quite annoyed with the arbritrary nature of the characters – why does this character (さ) sound like “sa” while this almost exactly similar character (き) sounds like “ki” , and there’s even a reverse one (ち) that’s “ti”, only really it’s “chi” (that last sentence may look a tad crap if you don’t have Japanese language rendering set up). There’s characters that are exactly the same except for a little loop at the end “Re”, “ne” and “wa” are only distinguished the tails at the end: れねわ.

But of course, English is exactly as arbritrary – it’s just that I’m used to it. Why do “a” and “d” make such different sounds? And “d” and “b” are only reflections of each other. “q” and “g” are the same except for the loop. And so on. So I’m beginning to get some sympathy, not only for those who have to learn English as a foreign language, but also for those people who have dropped through the cracks of the education system and are illiterate adults. To learn to read from scratch is incredibly hard, especially if everyone around you learned as kids. Obviously, I don’t have the social stigma aspect – this is something I’m picking up for fun, not a crucial skill so ubiquitous that society assumes you must be a moron if you can’t do it.

Hiragana is one of the two phonetic scripts (a syllabary rather than an alphabet), which means I can now very slowly sound out certain words – not that I understand many yet, although I can recognise “tofu” (とうふ) when I see it (and laboriously say it out loud). It rather makes me feel six years old, only without the vocabulary. I’m even filling in those practice sheets with big letters.

Literacy is one of the things that defines me – reading is so effortless, that I do it for pleasure. It’s rather strange to have it taken away from me, even temporarily.

From Monday, I’ll also be taking up Katakana, so I’ll be functionally illiterate in two languages at once!