I’ve broke yet another ceiling… 801. It’s absolutely downright amazing at this new found kanji-wielding power.

[singlepic id=19 w=320 h=240 float=left] Bit by bit– the strange becomes the usual, the unfamiliar becoming ritual, and Kanji slowly becoming a new appendage to that which I will call ‘common knowledge’. But really, it’s more then all that… It’s literally the act of self-taught literacy.

Think about it.. For years you attend classes at institution you respect and love. You take Japanese courses only because there’s not a better excuse not too. You learn, you struggle, you fight the kanji and in the end– you walk away with a second language. But it’s not really yours.. Let me explain– Click ‘more’ to um… read more. (It’s interesting trust me!)

From early Jr. High School to when I was a sophomore in College I played the Tuba in Band. I was a band geek, a musical brass junky, I learned the tuba so well I could play the trumpet part in Johann Pachelbel’s “Cannon.” Ok maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but I played it for a long time and maybe one day I’ll go back– Anyway, that’s not important, what is important is that there were times when no Tuba part for a song existed– and all there was were Trombone parts. In those cases what I had to do was transliterate the trombone (which was often two keys higher) into the tuba key in my head then play it in a way that made sense with the rest of the band. This isn’t an easy ability to do at all, and it took years for me to do it well.

In the case of language learning and literacy in a foreign language… Teaching people this method of transliteration– that is.. listen to Japanese– translate it in your head to English– think of the proper response in English– Then translate it back into Japanese in a way that people can understand you- sounds like bad form.

Slowly I’m realizing through the assistance of Mr Heisig’s book that Kanji learning can be an apparatus for learning Japanese as if I learned both English and Japanese simultaneously… For me it all has to do with prompts and values.

A prompt in language is a keyword that in your mind associates with an object, act, emotion, etc. Take “Cheese cake” for example… The actual word prompts an object which has a value that may invoke a responce of desire (or distaste).. This is because as native English speakers we’ve been raised with such prompts and associated them with things. Kanji is a Japanese prompt of sorts, perhaps even more vivid then words due it’s symbolic and pictographic nature. What I would find to be most valuable at the conclusion of this fantastic endevor is if Kanji Prompts (and their spoken Japanese equivilants eventually) envoke the exact same reaction as if you used an English prompt– Thus instead of transliterating– kanji prompts invoked individual values for you without the English assist. This ability is the absolute meaning of ‘literacy’ in my humble opinion, while the other method seems like an elaborate “English-word-association/translation” ability.

I’ll have to think more about all this..

Anyway 801– w000t!

~J out

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