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Up Nihongo
Apr. 8th, 2005 02:15 pmI’ve been studying Japanese like a bitch recently, both in preparation for my job change and because I’m taking the 4級 Kanji Kentei in a couple of months. This level corresponds to the level of the children I teach. It is with a mixture of embarrassment and anticipation that I await the reactions of my students when I stroll into the exam center early Sunday morning to take the test with them. It should be a scream.
The Kanji Kentai has nine levels – 7 through 1, with preparatory tests before the 2nd and 1st levels. I technically know all the kanji needed to take the first level, but here’s the catch – unlike the JLPT, the Kanji Kentei is geared toward native speakers of Japanese, which means it assumes that its test takers already know the obscure-ass vocabulary they are learning the kanji compounds for, unlike foreigners such as myself, who must learn the vocabulary and kanji simultaneously. And when I say obscure, I do mean obscure. In the past few days, I have learned the vocabulary and corresponding kanji for the parts of a Japanese castle; all things relating to sericulture, and ‘karmic merits accrued by one’s ancestors in previous lives.’
Perhaps because I’ve been studying so avidly, I’ve been having lots of nice little Aha! moments with the Japanese language.
For instance, I happened to glance at the signboard of a local wagashiya (Japanese-style confectioner) as I was walking past a few days ago. The name of the shop was written in kimbun, which is a very old-fashioned, stylised version of the standard Japanese characters and thus often incomprehensible to people such as myself. But as I looked at this sign, the kanji rearranged themselves in my head into something not only recognizable, but logical. The first kanji was for nishi (西), which means ‘west,’ and looking at it, I realized that it was a picture of the sun setting below the horizon. (That large rectangle in the character is written as a semi-circle in kimbun.)
Having figured that out, I realized that the kanji for ‘east’ (東) is a picture of the sun rising and casting its rays out over the landscape. Kanji originated as ideograms, so of course they all have meanings, but I’ve never studied them. I thus felt a great sense of accomplishment thanks to this epiphany. (I should note that the aforementioned epiphany did not extend to the kanji for ‘north’ or ‘south,’ the latter of which seems to consist of a sheep in an enclosure with the ideogram for ‘earth’ on top of it. (南) You got me on how that’s supposed to suggest ‘south.’)
Sometimes kanji’s meanings are inherently discernable. 人 is obviously a person, and 月 does look like a crescent moon. Sometimes you can figure them out with a little imagination – 母, the kanji for ‘mother’ is a fat person with two breasts. It can get a little trickier. 雑is the kanji for ‘various.’ It consists of the kanji for ‘nine’ over the kanji for ‘tree’ on the left, while the right side is composed of an archaic kanji meaning ‘bird.’ So nine trees and some birds, or nine birds in a tree – I can kinda get ‘various’ from that, but it’s stretching a bit.
Another little Aha! – Most Japanese have extremely short, stumpy legs and long torsos, which makes them seem very out of proportion to my Western eyes. I tower over a coworker of mine, who barely tops 5’5”, but when she sat down next to me the other day, she was taller than me by several inches. Which, I realized, is probably why the Japanese don’t say that someone is ‘tall,’ they say that someone’s ‘back is tall.’ This always seemed strange and arbitrary to me, but it makes perfect sense now, given the fact that the majority of an average Japanese person’s height is in their spine, not their legs. And in a nice bit of synchronicity, one of today’s obscure-ass vocabulary words was 座高, or ‘one’s height while sitting down.’
That will be all.
The Kanji Kentai has nine levels – 7 through 1, with preparatory tests before the 2nd and 1st levels. I technically know all the kanji needed to take the first level, but here’s the catch – unlike the JLPT, the Kanji Kentei is geared toward native speakers of Japanese, which means it assumes that its test takers already know the obscure-ass vocabulary they are learning the kanji compounds for, unlike foreigners such as myself, who must learn the vocabulary and kanji simultaneously. And when I say obscure, I do mean obscure. In the past few days, I have learned the vocabulary and corresponding kanji for the parts of a Japanese castle; all things relating to sericulture, and ‘karmic merits accrued by one’s ancestors in previous lives.’
Perhaps because I’ve been studying so avidly, I’ve been having lots of nice little Aha! moments with the Japanese language.
For instance, I happened to glance at the signboard of a local wagashiya (Japanese-style confectioner) as I was walking past a few days ago. The name of the shop was written in kimbun, which is a very old-fashioned, stylised version of the standard Japanese characters and thus often incomprehensible to people such as myself. But as I looked at this sign, the kanji rearranged themselves in my head into something not only recognizable, but logical. The first kanji was for nishi (西), which means ‘west,’ and looking at it, I realized that it was a picture of the sun setting below the horizon. (That large rectangle in the character is written as a semi-circle in kimbun.)
Having figured that out, I realized that the kanji for ‘east’ (東) is a picture of the sun rising and casting its rays out over the landscape. Kanji originated as ideograms, so of course they all have meanings, but I’ve never studied them. I thus felt a great sense of accomplishment thanks to this epiphany. (I should note that the aforementioned epiphany did not extend to the kanji for ‘north’ or ‘south,’ the latter of which seems to consist of a sheep in an enclosure with the ideogram for ‘earth’ on top of it. (南) You got me on how that’s supposed to suggest ‘south.’)
Sometimes kanji’s meanings are inherently discernable. 人 is obviously a person, and 月 does look like a crescent moon. Sometimes you can figure them out with a little imagination – 母, the kanji for ‘mother’ is a fat person with two breasts. It can get a little trickier. 雑is the kanji for ‘various.’ It consists of the kanji for ‘nine’ over the kanji for ‘tree’ on the left, while the right side is composed of an archaic kanji meaning ‘bird.’ So nine trees and some birds, or nine birds in a tree – I can kinda get ‘various’ from that, but it’s stretching a bit.
Another little Aha! – Most Japanese have extremely short, stumpy legs and long torsos, which makes them seem very out of proportion to my Western eyes. I tower over a coworker of mine, who barely tops 5’5”, but when she sat down next to me the other day, she was taller than me by several inches. Which, I realized, is probably why the Japanese don’t say that someone is ‘tall,’ they say that someone’s ‘back is tall.’ This always seemed strange and arbitrary to me, but it makes perfect sense now, given the fact that the majority of an average Japanese person’s height is in their spine, not their legs. And in a nice bit of synchronicity, one of today’s obscure-ass vocabulary words was 座高, or ‘one’s height while sitting down.’
That will be all.