Nihon-go Benkyo o shimasu

How's Osaka?
It was great to be here. So, the training was fun, yet challenging.
Lately I can hardly spare-off some time to update my blog due to many homeworks given by sensei.

The weather here is a little bit cold. Colder than Kawasaki. Not because the temperature, but our training center is just next to the sea. You'll have some idea when you watch the map down there. The red circle is the Cosmosquare, where I am now. It can be consider as an island (I guess), in the middle of the bay. So, can you imagine how you feel when the wind blew in a cold day?


After completed the first training of Japanese Culture, we continue with the second training. For this time it is the language training. The Japanese Language or Nihon-go.

So, this is the book that provided by the training committee. "Japanese For Busy People" by AJALT. This is a good book to learn, with examples and exercises. Amazingly, we have finished almost half of the book in 4 days. It was a bit fast for me, but it was the only way to finish this book by the time the training ends.

Studying a foreign language is not an easy thing compare to our mother language. When we start to study a foreign language, we started to compare the grammar and the structure of the sentence with other language that we'd already master. That's make the process even harder.

Japanese language has alot of difficult point. Here I list some of them which I have found in this 4 days lesson:
1. The particles is always confusing. Too many of them and all of them are critically important. Words such as wa, no, ka, o, mo, de, to, ni, yo and so-on and so-forth.
2. The politeness levels. Depending on situation, one must use a different kind of expression, and words must be choose wisely. For example for the words 'sorry' the hierarchy is as follows: Gomen, gomenasai, sumimasen, moshi waki arimasen, moshi wake gozaimasen.
So, when we go to exclusive restaurant, the words level will be different compare to McDonalds.
Besides, for male and female, there are different kind of words to be used. Example: Female - watashi, male: boku.
3. 3 types of writing. Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. I think only nihon-go have this 3 kind of writing which is mixed in a sentence. Malay people may have 2 types of writings; which called rumi (romaji) and jawi. But they never use both in a sentence. Besides, jawi writing is difficult to find nowadays.
4. The counters. Unlike other languages, if you wish to count, you just memorized the number. But for nihon-go, there are several types of counters. I give you some examples:
1 = ichi, 3 = san
1 apple = hitotsu, 3 apples = mitsu.
1 paper = ichi-mai, 3 papers = san-mai.
1 bottle = ippon, 3 bottles = sanbon.
1 person = hitori, 3 peoples = sannin.
and so on.... (this is not include the date in a month... I have no idea how they memorized all of them)

It sounds like complaining too much, but the fact is, Japanese language is a fun language to learn. Hopefully I can talk a little bit Japanese once I leave this Cosmosquare Training Center.