pinch me

Oh the joys of learning a new language! Fascination meets frustration, obsession transforms into hopelessness and then cycles around again.

Yesterday's Japanese class had me and my classmate quite frustrated because we've gone from learning how to count to 100 a few weeks ago, to how to tell time, then days of the month and yesterday to talking prices, for which we were introduced to thousands and up (since C$1 = 106 yen).

What's the big deal you ask? Well, to put it briefly, numbers in Japanese are a huge mountain to climb, especially for the mathematically challenged, such as myself. For example, the name for X number of minutes is not necessarily the same as for that number! For example, the number one is ichi but one minute is ip (with -pun for minutes, so ip-pun) and the numeral 6 is rokku but six minutes become rop-pun. And then there are dates; for most days of the month you have to learn yet another number! The 1st, rather than having ichi or ip as a root is tsuitachi, and the 6th has nothing to do with rokku or rop-pun but is muika! Arrggghhh!

And this, my friends is just the tip of the iceberg. Anything from 10,000 to 100,000,000 are counted by ten thousands (eg. 10,000,000 is sen man, which translates literally as one thousand ten thousands). There's no million of course. I personally hold no hope of ever being able to say numbers over 10,000 (ichi-man, or one ten-thousand). Alas, it's not like I'll have those amounts to worry about in my day-to-day life.

Now the next chunk of the iceberg to swallow, perhaps with the help of its vodka form, will be learning the different counters. You see depending on whether you're counting something small like eggs or sushi, something long like a pencil or bottle, or something thin (paper, plates), etc., there are different ways to count! Again, using 1 as an example, it's ikka for one egg, hitori for one person, ichi-mai for one sheet of paper, etc., etc. So wish me luck with numbers...

Aside from the dreaded numerals, this week I promised myself I would finish memorizing the basic hiragana alphabet (the 50-odd characters used mainly for pronunciation). I'm anxious to learn this because signs and things are often written in these characters -- for the benefit children and gaijin like me, I suppose -- instead of (or as well as) in kanji, the chinese symbol-based characters, of which there are thousands.

So I'll be taking my trusty hiragana flashcards with me wherever I go. Like when I sat in the park yesterday evening to study and ended up sparking the interest of a couple of friendly workermen who had just finished their snack break, which apparently included some alcohol, on a bench nearby. I didn't understand anything they tried to tell me except that they didn't quite approve of my shuffling of the deck; they apparently thought I should keep my flashcards in order at all times (a, i, u, e, o; ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.)!

Anyway, it will all hopefully start to fall into place in a few months from now. I'm just impatient: I want to speak Japanese NOW not in 2 years from now! In the meantime, my politically incorrect revenge for all the diffculties is in the giggles I get when I remember how funny it can be when a Japanese person tries to pronounce the L sound. Thanks to a helpful English-speaking salesgirl who recently extolled the virtues of rambskin.