would be especially true if you put it into an appropriate Japanese sound structure—basically sequences of syllables comprising consonant plus vowel, as will be discussed in Part Two. But even if you didn't feel confident about "Japanizing" a word, there would be little misunderstanding, for example, if you just said "biscuit" instead of the properly Japanized word bisuketto. As an extra plus, the use of English terminology in Japanese can actually appear very stylish, just as using French in English seems a little chic and conveys a certain je ne sais quoi.
Japanese has fewer sounds to master than English, and there is no need to worry about stress or tones, as in Chinese. There is however a differentiation in pitch (making a sound high or low), which in particular can help distinguish between certain homophones (words with the same pronunciation) or near-homophones. Many students, especially in the past, have not worried about pitch at all, but it will help your accent and communicative efficiency greatly if you pay attention to it. We will return to this in Part Two.
In reading and writing too, at least in the kana scripts, the pronunciation and spelling of words are also much easier than in English, as there is a more consistent correspondence in Japanese between symbol and sound—not completely consistent, and not perhaps as straightforward as some languages such as French or Italian, but more so than in English.
There are many other pleasant surprises you will find along the way, when you discover that the particular aspect of Japanese that you are learning at a given time proves to be much easier than you expected.
2.2 The not quite so good news
Being in a language category of its own, it is not surprising that many of the more challenging aspects of Japanese can be attributed in large part to unfamiliarity—as foreshadowed earlier. In this section we look at the main features that most English speakers would consider challenging, but lessen the challenge by giving you advice along the way.
2.2.1 Japanese as "the Devil's language"
In the sixteenth century a certain Portuguese priest, one of the first-ever Westerners to visit Japan, became frustrated at his inability to master the language rapidly so as to spread God's word through it, and even termed it "the Devil's language."
It does indeed take time to become fully competent in all four skills of the language—listening, speaking, reading and writing, with the last two being very much more time-consuming. In fact, for native English speakers it takes about five times longer to achieve equivalent full competency in Japanese than in French, with its easier script and greater familiarity to English speakers. To start off your study without an awareness of this relativity can result in considerable frustration.
But let's put this into context. The skills of listening and speaking are by no means difficult to master in Japanese, though it is true you are disadvantaged to some extent if you can't reinforce verbal material by reading and writing it. But certainly, the spoken language is not quite so super-humanly inaccessible as our Portuguese friend suggests.
Its accessibility is borne out by (among other things) the increasing numbers of Japan-based Westerners who quite quickly become fluent in Japanese, even to the point of appearing as regulars on television quiz shows or similar conducted in Japanese. The Japanese word for a TV star is tarento, from the English word "talent." While these foreign personalities may be talented performers, they are not all abnormally talented linguists. Nevertheless, they have responded highly successfully to the challenge of spoken Japanese, showing clearly that it is very "doable."
And as for the skills of reading and writing, individuals differ in their approach to learning Japanese. Some prefer to tackle the written language straightaway, which is the norm for most second languages. Others, mindful of the time-consuming nature of the writing system, concentrate first on the spoken language, to provide a sound base for later study of the written version—and of course, "later" can be anywhere between "just a bit later" and "so much later it's close to never." The "spoken first" approach is certainly how we learn our mother tongue, so it is by no means unnatural and ineffective. Unless your circumstances leave you no option, we suggest the obvious: choose whatever approach you feel most comfortable with.
FIGURE 2a: The Devil's language?
2.2.2 The big written challenge
Overwhelmingly the single biggest challenge for most Western students lies in the writing system. As you will see in detail in Part Four, it is one of the most complicated writing systems in the world. To read a newspaper you will need to know not only the two phonetic kana scripts of around 50 symbols each, but also around 2,000 kanji, each typically with two or three readings which may be based either on ancient Chinese or native Japanese, or in most cases both. It takes considerable time and gray matter to remember meanings and readings, and then on top of that, whicn readings are used in which circumstances.
This contrasts strongly with French, for example: native English speakers take a short time to learn correspondence patterns between spoken sound and Roman script, plus a few accent-signs, and they are able to read and write very quickly almost anything they speak or hear in that language.
As cold comfort for Western students, even Asian learners who are already familiar with Chinese characters are only partly advantaged by their prior knowledge. They are generally able to understand simple signs written in Japanese characters, such as for "Exit" or "No Smoking"; they can probably make an educated guess as to the basic gist of some formal Japanese texts heavy in characters, especially if there are lots of nouns (even though character forms nowadays often differ to some extent between Japanese and Chinese). However, for further understanding they would still have to learn the kana scripts, since the characters are used only for stems of words and not endings such as tenses, nor for particles. And they would also obviously have to learn the rules of grammar.
In addition, they would find the pronunciation different, even when it was meant to be a "Chinese" reading. For example, the characters for China, are in Chinese spelled Zhongguo and pronounced rather like jong-guwo, but in Japanese are spelled Chūgoku and pronounced chew-gockoo. (We will explain the letter ū in Part Two.)
Also, in some cases the same characters have evolved rather different meanings in each country, and likewise, some compounds do not necessarily have the same meaning in Chinese and Japanese. A classic example is combining the characters for "hand" and "paper." In Japanese this means "letter" (correspondence), but in Chinese means "toilet paper"! So, in some regards, prior knowledge of Chinese characters—or at least their Chinese pronunciations—might even be considered counter-productive.
FIGURE 2b: Now then, which one should I choose?
So, what can you do to lessen the challenge? First of all, as suggested in the previous section, you can postpone learning the writing system, maybe even indefinitely. This would mean that when it comes to having to write something in Japanese you would be stuck with romaji (or nothing). Most Japanese can manage to read romaji, if slowly, though few are really comfortable with it, so you would not be terribly popular.
A far better alternative is to communicate in the kana scripts (or even just one of these), which can be learned in just a few dozen hours or so as both kana scripts are based on the same sounds in the same sequence, comprise only a few strokes, and have only 46 basic symbols each.
An even better way, for those prepared to make the next step, is to learn a few basic kanji, such as the 80 that are taught in the First Grade at elementary school. These are generally quickly learned (again within a few dozen or so hours), easy to remember (many being simple pictographs), comprise only a few strokes,
