When I was a stupid kid…

Do you remember what insane things you used to believe when you were a kid? I mean…these things probably made SO much sense to you too…OF COURSE Santa could travel over the entire world and deliver presents…it makes sense!

I had something I used to believe…see, as a kid who got involved in video games early, I became acquainted with Japanese early on (no, I’m not a complete weeaboo japanophile). For some reason though, I thought that Japanese – and all foreign languages – were just English using different alphabets. It might be really hard to learn how each kana or kanji were pronounced, but I was sure that, at the end of the day, I could find out how to say exact English words using those sounds.

I really should have known better. I mean…I used to live in Canada and I used to live in Korea. I’ve had a brush with French and with Hangul…and neither are just English with different characters. Actually, scratch that…the evil French alphabet enabled me to believe my fantasy – after all, a latin alphabet is a latin alphabet. Maybe I should’ve grown up in Russia?

Somehow, I got this idea that other languages *did* have their own words (which explained why you couldn’t understand a Japanese person or a French person speaking unless you knew that language), but that also they made sure to have characters that could easily pronounce English words. Japanese tricked me once again; katakana can be used to approximate the sounds of foreign words (America becomes Amerika? Mcdonalds becomes Makadonarudo? Totally awesome!)

So…when I was a stupid kid…I wanted to learn Japanese so I could translate video games. That way, I could play games before they came out in America and be super cool!

Or so I thought. I failed to realized that the process of hacking and cracking into a video game’s innards to take out the script and then translate it to English isn’t so easy (unfortunately, when I was a kid, I thought that computer programming ALSO followed an English-type language). Even though katakana can be used for foreign words, it’s not like the Japanese people just speak English (or Engrish, for that matter) all day. Unfortunately for a stupid kid, they speak Japanese.

I think I heard something from a video game that doesn’t really apply to this specific issue, but it does apply to the generic issue. You can’t take the genes for an “elephant’s trunk” and put it into a giraffe and then get a giraffe with a trunk. There *are* no genes for an “elephant’s trunk.” What you CAN do with genes is chemistry…like take the nitrifying tendency of one plant and augment another plant with it.

In the same way, you can’t say, “Go go English grammar.” But what you can do with languages is linguistics. Look for similarities and common vantage points with seemingly different languages. I decided to stop pursuing Japanese a long time and hopped over to Mandarin, and although I’m nowhere near fluent, it’s easier if I try to relate some concepts to English equivalents. I simply need to realize that I can’t directly view Chinese as an English-type language, so when there ARE differences, I have to be aware of those.

I think the key to learning a language, then, isn’t memorizing characters or things like that (although…you won’t get very far if you don’t do that)…the key is to learn the system by which the language is founded. Fortunately, as English-native-speakers, virtually every language makes more sense than this cultural hobknob we have so cheers! Yes, tones suck. Yes, measure words suck. Yes, anything that has to do with 把 grammar will make me pull my hair out. But eventually…eventually…it makes sense.