日本語 |
|
26 January 2024 - Adetswil
Well, you knew it had to happen at some point. I've been studying Japanese for several months now, but it hasn't spilled over in too big a way onto this website. Tonight, however, I started writing humorous takes on various kanji. Like the pooping man, 太, and the man throwing a stick, 犬. The latter means "dog", of course. I also discovered that the linguistics section of my website is hilariously stale. The Deutsch Page is quite 90's (mostly unchanged since college) and I'd completely forgotten that I tried to teach Alora and Brittan the Devanagari syllabary when I was learning Sanskrit back in 2006. Of course, if you're reading this blog in the future then I've probably fixed all these quirks and styled everything consistantly pleasing to the eye. Riiiiight...
The crazy thing is that I always knew I would study Japanese one day. I've had Hadamitzky & Spahn's Kanji & Kana book in my tsundoku pile for a long time. The fact that I've been using the word 積ん読 to describe my proclivity to collect more books than I can read for over a decade probably also should have been a clue. But when Ridley was studying it intensely in his free time at PopResearch I never gave it a second thought. I just knew that some day I would get to it. When I was watching Hayao Miyazaki cartoons with my kids in English I never thought I'd be going back to them to watch in Japanese, but this month I did. The way everything around the language has unfolded over the past months has been like slowly opening a present the universe gifted me. There are layers upon layers upon layers. As restaurant signs suddenly have meaning I've been taken back to that youthful joy when I first learned my letters. I still remember "M" was the first letter to go up on the wall in preschool for us to practice. And maybe, one day, I will go to 日本...
