Hello, fair reader!
As I mentioned in my first (Japanese) blog post, I'm a third-year PhD student at Columbia University, studying Japanese. The language doesn't really have much to do with my field of study; I work in Computational Biology. I'd like to do a postdoc in Japan after I finish my degree. I have always loved Japanese culture and language; I'd previously studied it in undergrad around five years ago. Japanese is the sixth language in which I've had formal instruction, and it's by far my favourite. The structures, intonations, and writing styles are very different from anything else that I've learned before.
The biggest challenge I've had is not jumping too far ahead. While I'd forgotten most of everything that I'd learned in my Junior year of college, it's coming back to me really quickly, and I want to keep pushing myself to learn more and faster. However, I've been restraining myself; I'm really good at languages, and they come to me quickly and leave just as fast. Since I'd forgotten Japanese so easily last time, I'm focusing on memorizing everything in excruciating detail so it doesn't leave my brain so quickly if I take a break in the future.
In order to humble myself, I went to a Japanese bookstore in New York -- Kinokuniya, by Bryant Park -- and bought myself a book called "Breaking Into Japanese Literature." Obviously, I understand next to none of it. However, it is something to strive towards. The way the book is set up, it has the original text of short stories (such as one by Murakami) on the left-hand side, with furagana above the Kanji; on the right-hand side is the English translation of the text. There is also a built-in dictionary. I really want to be able to read Japanese literature in the original, so I hope this book gives me a tangible goal to strive towards.
Anyway, enough on the language. I'm excited to try my hand at writing in Japanese again -- it's embarrassing to see my old Japanese blog posts and realizing that I understand next to none of it!
~Ola
Hey Ola. It's very interesting to read your blog post. I'm impressed that you have such a rich experience in learning languages. I agree that Japanese has a very different sentence structure. At the first time I learnt Japanese, I found that it is very special for Japanese to have the verbs placed at the end of the sentence. So far I have seen that only Japanese and Korean have this kind of sentence structure.
ReplyDeleteHey, thanks! Yeah, Japanese is definitely different -- amusingly, of all the languages I've studied in school, I think that Latin has been the most helpful! I think it's because it also has a very fluid sentence structure (basically, any word can be anywhere because its meaning is inherent in the way it's conjugated/declined). I think it really helps with the particles used in Japanese, too.
DeleteYou're definitely right regarding placement of the verb. I think I saw a lot of it in Latin, but like I said above -- the verb could really go anywhere, so it wasn't always at the end, either.
Whoa, Ola, I didn't know you worked with computational biology! I'm a computer science major looking to work with computational genomics. It's actually really awesome seeing somebody else in the field (moreover somebody's who's already in grad school doing it) also taking Japanese language.
ReplyDeleteHere's to being able to read untranslated Japanese texts in the future! じゃまたあした！
Hey, cool! Let me know if you have any questions about grad school and stuff. I have some friends who work more closely with computational genomics (I guess I'm more systems biology, focusing on networks) that I could point you too as well.
Delete^-^