Editors' Diary #2: My Journey with Japanese - Battling and (Somewhat) Befriending Kanji

As a translator, I get asked a fair amount about how I learned Japanese. When I tell people my mom is Japanese and I lived here as a child, they nod understandingly. However, when they learn that I can also read and write the mysterious hieroglyph-like characters of hiragana, katakana, and especially kanji, they are often taken aback.

No doubt kanji is difficult. My Chinese is limited to xie xie and wo ai ni, so I won’t go there. Japanese kanji consists of about 3,000 commonly used characters, though if you can read at least 1,000 you can probably read the newspaper. Many Westerners living in Japan can speak Japanese and read hiragana and katakana but often hit a wall when it comes to reading and writing kanji. But it’s important.

I’ve gotten into discussions with Westerners where they argue that Japan should abandon kanji for the alphabet. They say that kanji is inefficient and takes too much time to learn. I tap back with Japan has had a higher literacy rate than the US and Europe for hundreds of years. And for the longest time, China was the most advanced civilization in the world. So, no, I don’t think a writing system that you might be having a difficult time learning has held them back. And let me introduce exhibit A—the spelling and pronunciation mess known as the English language. Furthermore, I would argue that the Japanese language with its many homonyms would lose its subtle distinctions and expressiveness. Kanji is complicated but it also provides visual cues for the reader.

So, how did I learn kanji? To be honest, I’m still crap at handwriting kanji. I chalk that up to laziness and smartphones. However, when I arrived in Kobe in 1998 for my study abroad, I could barely read kanji at a 3rd-grade level. It took some time and tears but I got there. But that might be getting ahead of things, so let’s go back for a moment.

I was born on a U.S. military base in Japan. My father is African American from the southern state of Mississippi, and my mother is from Yamagata in the Tohoku region. By the time I became aware of my surroundings, we were living in Ohio, and later we moved to Hawaii. My mother worried that not being a native English speaker might negatively affect her children, but at that time, Hawaii was already a multicultural place. Many households there spoke languages other than English. Because children are adept at learning languages, the school told my mother, "Keep using Japanese at home, and leave English to us."

I acknowledge that I had the cheat code when it came to learning to speak Japanese. (By the way, it’s Up Up, Down Down, A B A B Left… ) Old gaming console jokes aside, when I was in third grade, my family moved to a residential area in Yokosuka. Within less than half a year, I could speak Japanese, which I had only been able to understand until then. I remember running home and asking my mother what "zurui" meant after a Japanese friend I was playing with said it to me and then responded with "zurukunai" (it's not unfair).

Even after I could speak conversational Japanese and read and write hiragana and katakana, kanji remained a significant challenge. As I mentioned above, handwriting kanji is still a challenge. Nevertheless, I love kanji. Though it may not be efficient, it is a beautiful reading and writing system, with characters formed by combining parts to create meaning.

Studying abroad made me face kanji properly for the first time, and I gradually improved. When I had a hard time reading my professors’ chicken scratch, I borrowed notes from classmates and copied them. I used an electronic dictionary, popular before smartphones, to look up unreadable kanji in the expensive and boring professors’ books we were made to buy. It was common for it to take me an hour to read a single page.

Recently, I attended a wine and book discussion event. The book I chose was "Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata. It might be considered old-fashioned literature by Japanese people, but this book is my favorite novel in both English and Japanese. I'm not the type to reread books often, but I've read this one four times. Each time, I struggle with the kanji and the ambiguity of the sentences, yet I'm overwhelmed by the expression.

So, that was a little bit about me and my journey with the Japanese language in general and kanji in particular. I guess the takeaway is that the cheat code will only get you so far. As usual, finding an interesting hook along with a fair bit of elbow grease is key.