Project To-Ki-YO!

Project "To-Ki-YO!" is oneof my non-game related side projects

The intention of this project is to learn and master the Japanese language, and be my first sort of language-learning experience. Well, not my first - my first was french back in my earlier high school years. And I wasn't that great at it, my french was terrible. I rebuked a while ago about how it wasted my time, and I still largely agree (even though I still know a few phrases).

Perhaps the biggest thing I got out of French was that it did not help me get a consistent knowledge of it; it was more of just write down new vocab, memorize them and regurgitate them for a nondescript test. Rinse and repeat.

Now, I don't need to study french - I have less on my plate (I only have History, graphics and photography), which allows me to learn Japanese. Why japanese? Why pick the most weeaboo language of all existence? You are just going to learn it to not need subtitles when watching anime aren't you?

Well maybe that might be a starting motive, but not the whole picture.
It's actually because I find the characters interesting; they look like odd symbols or something.

I first decided to learn Hirigana and Katakana - which I found out, was barely scraping the surface of Japanese. Filthy Frank (2011 - 2017) wasn't wrong when he made fun of Japan-obsessives learning Hirigana and claiming that they know plenty of Japanese.
Let me tell you why he did; they missed the completely brutal part of learning the language that would make them quit. It's not Katakana, it's Kanji. If you look at the majority of Japanese sentences, you will see at least one Kanji word embedded into it, it's so common that you've got to learn it, you don't have any other choice.
Worse yet, there's over 2000 of them!
Yes, I didn't make a typo there! Two-Thousand.

But, thanks to a few resources on the internet (namely MattVsJapan) it turns out there is a book called "Remembering the Kanji" which many Japaneses learners have used to learn Japanese in the most efficient way. The concept of this book is to create little stories to associated with the small Kanji strokes (known in the book as "Primitives"), which makes the bigger Kanji much easier to learn as you can just break it down into the aforementioned strokes. The Kanji with the least components are taught first so that you can associate them with objects (like "rice field" or "mouth"). This is also called "holistic" learning where you create links in your mind between two supposedly similar things (like, say mathematical concepts with programming concepts).

Lately (for about 2 or 3 weeks), I've been reading pages of this book (printed from a PDF format) every time I walk back home from school. I don't try to fully understand the Kanji but I try to cover as much as I can possibly do in the shortest space of time so I can spend more time trying to actually decipher these things. It's like speeding though a video lecture at 1.5x speed, you're just trying to get a basic idea of a concept rather than fully understanding it right away. Sometimes I have a freind assist me in coming up with stories - all in all, this gives me something to do on a tedious and drenching 1 hour and 30 minute walk back home.

I'm pretty sure people would be asking by now, "Do you want to go to Japan?"

Well, yes. I find the place quite nice-looking as if it were another London. However you can't guarantee these things happening, maybe my interests will change and it may have been some dumb pipe dream of mine meant to fill in some missing part of my heart at this point in time. Or Japanese politics may have gone down which would demotivate me from going there. I'm not too sure about this quite frankly.

But one thing I am sure about is that I'd love to keep learning Japanese, because if I just drop it, I won't see any benefits of learning it. You never know, it could definitely aid the learning of other things, or help with learning other languages efficiently or be a way to brag about knowing more than just English.

Perhaps I'll make a part two to this - once I have something to mention or say (like reaching a milestone). Maybe I'll do so when I have mastered most of the Kanji, I'm around 1,200 words into the coverage of Kanji so there could be some progress going on here.

That's all from me!