Gaining literacy, one square block at a time

It’s that time of year again: time for me to try desperately not to psyche myself out while I fill out the form. This form represents the first step towards being officially recognized as competent in the Japanese language (and thus able to function in capacities other than “language teacher”), and as such, I am quite anxious about the exam that it entails. That exam is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, and after I got a respectable passing score on last year’s Level 2 outing, I’ve decided to commit myself to mastering the language to the point so I can pass Level 1. Basically, that means three frantic months of preparation while I desperately try to keep in my head everything that I’ve learned over the past five and a half years, plus a big heaping spoonful of Chinese characters on top of that.

Ah, Chinese characters. I think I may have mentioned them before, but there really are few things quite the same as them. Imagine, instead of having a set of several dozen letters that (at least loosely) represent particular sounds in sequence, that you have several thousand distinct squarish blocks that all mean something, and you have to know what sound each one makes before you ever set eyes on the page. That is only the beginning of the absolutely convoluted, maddening spiral of kanji in Japanese.

Chinese characters, as you might suspect, got their start in China sometime earlier than 3200 years ago. The inscriptions found from that period, on bronze vessels and on animal bones used for divination, already meet the qualifications for “written language” at this time (rather than “pretty symbols”), however pictorial they were. And while modern Chinese characters are extremely simplified and standardized compared to those earlier writings, their history goes back far enough to make them technically the oldest writing system in continual use. Of course, China, with its age and prestige, just had to go and give other countries ideas, and so it was that around the 5th Century AD, the Chinese writing system (along with Buddhism) gained a permanent foothold in Japan.

Japan at the time had no written form, and at least initially, it stayed that way; anything that was important enough to be written down was written in proper Chinese. But then, sometime in the 7th Century or so, someone got the bright idea to start using Chinese characters for their sound value (meaning? what meaning?) to convey Japanese as-is. This Manyogana (named for the poetry collection that made it famous) was just a stepping stone to what became two full-fledged phonetic alphabets: one started, ironically, by Buddhist monks as a guide to making sense of pure Chinese, and the other by the increasingly-cursive handwriting in the private correspondence of courtiers in Kyoto.

Over the centuries, these three distinct forms of writing melded together into one big unwieldy system of conveying Japanese on the page. The end result is that for the kanji alone, you have multiple readings, made up of: one (or two) based on the original Chinese reading; one (or several, or a lot) based on the meaning of the character but read as a native Japanese word; and really weird, idiosyncratic usages that bear absolutely no relationship to the character used, when it shows up in certain combinations. As you can imagine, all this results in one big headache. Or rather, about 2,000 headaches, since that’s how many Chinese characters I’m supposed to know. At least I’m only being tested on how to read the things, since my handwriting is bad enough with Latin letters, let alone other writing systems.

It’s not really a hopeless situation, though: I mean, I already have a fairly substantial number of characters (over 1000, for last year’s test) underneath my belt, and being exposed to the language every single day, there’s plenty of characters I recognize, but simply haven’t developed a conscious knowledge of their meaning yet. And while there are some completely baffling ones out there, the vast majority of characters can be split into a “general meaning” portion, and another portion that crops up in multiple other characters and has some relationship to the (Chinese reading’s) sound. Because of this, the more characters you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. But I’m convinced there’s got to be some kind of limit to this after a while, and I’m always worried about running into it before I’m satisfied with the extent of my literacy.

Of course, Chinese characters are by no means the full extent of the Japanese writing system, nor do they represent the entirety of really weird choices made in the history of the language. For one thing, there’s tons of grammar on this year’s test that (as far as I am aware) never comes up apart from in works of literature. I mean, I can understand an author wanting to sound erudite, but few works of modern English literature are written like Shakespeare, aside from Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the early 1600s. So having to learn specific patterns I know I will never personally use in my everyday conversation (except to sound really weird) is just another one of those Japanese language quirks I can add to the pile.

Overall, learning Japanese has been and remains an enjoyable, if sometimes perplexing experience for me, but things like this can feel just a bit overwhelming at times. But of course, only half-understanding a block of solid text is much more frustrating than not understanding any and ignoring it completely, so I must press on. It may be cold comfort, but I can at least take some solace in the fact that the Japanese writing system as it currently stands is actually the postwar simplified version. Pity the ones made to learn it before then…