I'm a visual, rather than aural learner, perhaps because I have difficulty distinguishing among some sounds. In English, I'm always filling in the blanks left by the words I don't quite catch and picking out the appropriate word from context. This results in my "hearing" a lot of puns; but, it requires a large vocabularly to guess what has been said. My lack of vocabularly in Japanese prevents me from using this splinter skill. Plus Japanese has less sounds to begin with and many more homophones than English.
Therefore, unlike many students of Japanese, I've always gravitated toward learning the written language rather than the spoken language. Although it takes a long time to learn a kanji, once I know it, I'm able to hear words that were previously inaudible.
For example, shortly after learning the kanji for hare, clear. I was watching old videos from Japan. The weather report came on and I heard for the first time. "Hare, tokidoki kumori." (Clear, with occassional cloudiness.) I was so excited.
"Congratulations." said my housemate. "All this studying and you finally know what the weather was going to be like ten years ago."
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
May 01, 2002
Share Your Thoughts
It's easy to remember that it's clear skies ahead when you see sun and blue.