I started learning Japanese* for what is very possibly the stupidest reason ever.

It wasn't because of anime, or because of games, or because of anything that might vaguely, logically lead to me deciding to learn it. It was a result of two things.

The first was reading a review of Power Japanese in Computer Shopper. I can't remember exactly what the review said, but it must have been pretty good.

The second was unlocking stuff in Super Puzzle Fighter 2.

J-Pop ladies. If only this was like that record shop bit in A Clockwork Orange.

See, one of the unlockable options in that game is a song called ‘I Want You To Know’. It's a fairly cheesy J-pop song, but it was the first time I'd heard a song in Japanese, and I was struck by how musical the language sounded. A switch flipped on in my head and I just wanted to know what it all meant. I wanted to know the structure by which it meant things.

I wanted to understand it. Particularly because one of the lines sounded like ‘kakete uteru kono karada no shi wupiwu’ and I really wanted to learn a language in which 'wupiwu' was a word.

Since then, I've encountered a huge variety of attitudes to learning Japanese* amongst gamers and anime fans and others. By far the most common is that learning Japanese* is impossibly hard and therefore a complete waste of time. So, what I'd like to try to do here is to dispel some of that. If you're interested in Japanese videogames or comics or films or culture, then learning Japanese* is something you can do, and something that will be useful and hopefully fun.

Yes indeed. ‘UuuuH!?’ in Japanese means
‘Fuck me! Massive demon thing approaching!’

The big sticking point for many newcomers to Japanese is the alphabet ("But Japanese has 3000 written characters! You can't possibly learn that!"). Fortunately for everyone, this isn't quite accurate.

Japanese has four alphabets. One of them, romaji, is just the English alphabet, so that's not likely to be a problem. The next two, Hiragana and Katakana, are phonetic alphabets, and have 46 characters each (plus two accent marks). Learn those, and you can write anything in Japanese. You should also be able to read at least some games, and many game manuals.

Katakana is also a great one to learn because it's the alphabet used for writing words that have been imported from other languages. Especially on game option menus and similar, it's not uncommon for most of the ‘Japanese’ text to be English written in Katakana. Hiragana and Katakana can be learned in about a week each plus practice, and all you need is a Kana table which can be freely downloaded off the net.

Look. It says ‘tit’. Not far off ‘tits’. Yeeeees.

The fourth alphabet, Kanji, is the one with 3000 characters - but it isn't quite as bad as it sounds. First, even Japanese natives would have trouble remembering all 3000, so not all of them are actually in regular use. Second, the vast majority of those characters are made up of combinations of standard sub-characters, of which there are only a few hundred. Still a formidable learning task, but not as totally beyond the realms of reason as 3000 would be.

There y’go. Perfect, if you want to talk about beautiful bananas
on battleships and bat-like baboons playing badmington…

And finally is the fact that Kanji isn’t totally distinct from the other alphabets, because it isn't a phonetic alphabet. Instead, each symbol has a particular meaning, and exactly how it's pronounced will vary depending on the context it appears in.

As an example, imagine that in English, we decided to use the symbol ‘&’ to mean ‘woman’. Then, ‘&’ on its own would be pronounced ‘woman’, but we could also write ‘&inist’ or ‘&inine’ (pronouncing ‘&’ as ‘fem’), and ‘miso&ist’ or ‘&acologist’ (pronuncing ‘&’ as ‘gyn’). This also means that in many game manuals and similar, the pronunciation of the Kanji is written out with small Hiragana symbols over the top of them – which is all you need to crack out the dictionary and find out what they mean…

Fortunately, there's an excellent dictionary available for free on the Net: EDICT, which also has several different interfaces for use on local machines, over the web, on handheld devices, and with lots of different input methods. This is where Kanji becomes your friend, since if you can enter the Kanji part of a word into the dictionary, you'll usually get a pretty fair idea of what it means.

Interestingly, there is no Japanese word for ‘Japanese’.

Of course, if you want to actually remember what anything means, you may have a bit more of a problem, because (with only 46 phonemes in the language) many of the words sound similar. In fact many of them are pronounced exactly the same, which is a good part of the reason why Kanji is used to differentiate them in writing.

For example, ‘koi’ is a poetic, romantic word for love; but it also means, well, koi - a bloody great fighting carp. So if you get a note from a nice lady promising you ‘koi’, you might need your Kanji knowledge to know if you should invest in a big bunch of flowers or an armoured fishtank.

And finally, there's the grammar to deal with. Japanese grammar is, shall we say, a bit strange. It's technically not as complex as English grammar, but to learn it when English grammar is what you’re used to can send your internal parser for a good few loops.

Basically, each word is followed by another word which tells you what the significance of the previous word was. So ‘nezumi wa tabeta’ means that a rat (nezumi) ate (tabeta) something; but ‘nezumi wo tabeta’ means that something else ate the rat.

Way Of The Nezumi.

Of course, things can get a lot more complicated than that. Ask a student of Japanese to explain the difference between wa and ga, or kara and node, and prepare for a confused expression and a lot of stuttering.

And then, finally finally, maybe you’ll get round to actually understanding something. It's a long haul, sure, but incredibly satisfying when you get there. The first Japanese phrase I ever understood was as stupid as my reasons for starting Japanese: ‘toriniki desu ka, sakana desu ka’ - that's "Is that chicken or fish?", as said by a Japanese person behind me in a cafeteria queue. But when I realised I'd understood it, I was far happier that a person really ought to be at such a thing.

“Ha-do-ken!”… “What-everrrrrrr!”

So now, I'm still only kinda understanding Japanese games, but that ‘kinda’ means a lot. It took a big effort to put it there, but now I see every random bit of Japanese text in a game as potential for practice. I may not have any certificates to put on my wall, but it's been a good trip getting to where I am, and there's still a hell of a way to go.

Oh, and ‘wupiwu’? I misheard the line. It's actually ‘kakete yuteru, kono karada no shinpu, ooo’. And is, apparantly, a teenage girl worrying about getting fat.

HYPHZ, November 2004.

*I think I’m learning Japanese I really think so.

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