"Old" language, new methods

When I first started studying Japanese, we didn’t have no "Internet," a good dictionary (if you could find one) cost half a week's wages, and I was still six years away from owning a real computer.

Needless to say, the concept of a language tool called an Input Management Editor that could let my type Japanese on an English computer AND give a word’s ふりがな(pronunciation) would have blown my mind. Today I have all those things listed above, plus a few more, which combined make studying miraculously less time consuming.

The way it used to be, if you didn’t know a character, you’d have to count the strokes, look it up in a dictionary, guess at the pronunciation, and rely on luck. If you got the stroke count wrong, you had to start all over. Now, I can either draw one with a mouse, copy and paste into the Microsoft's dictionary gadget, or simply highlight the word and click the "pronunciation guide" button.

My computer has also saved me from my own handwriting. Instead of hand-crafting my own flashcards, I can type things into a Word document and print out a one-page list. Much less time consuming...

It's also fun to look back at the words I've since learned in Chinese and Korean and compare the three languages. The Japanese word for "adult" is 大人. Although it looks like it should be pronounced （dai-nin だいにん） it's actually "otona おとな." They kept their original word (訓読み）and simply applied some Chinese characters to it.　In Chinese and Korean, they use different characters: 成人 (chéngrén / 성인).

In other cases, Japanese and Chinese have more similar ideas. The character for "who" is 誰 ("dare" or "shuí") in these two; in Korean it's 누구("nugu"). They don't use a Chinese character at all for that word.

There's another, more personal, application to all this playing around with kanji (漢字) pronunciations. Today I learned how to explain my kid's names in silly ways. For example, when describing my daughter's name, I'll say it's "美味しい　の　美. イギリス　の　英."

That's "the character for 'beauty' from the word 'tasty,' with the flower character from 'England.'" Those words are pronounced just as differently in Japanese as they are in English; they're just tied by similar underlying concepts.

(And if that makes no sense at all to you, don't worry -- you're the one who's entirely normal.)

So it's an old language (even for me) but with refreshingly fun methods. I'm actually looking forward to testing in May.