So I’ve been living to Tokyo now for the past 3 weeks and it has truly been a blast. The people are kind, the food is amazing and it is as exciting and crazy as you want it to be. (will write a separate post with other activities).

Given I’m here for a while I thought I’d make the effort to try and learn some language basics. Language not being my strongest asset, as my BBC (British born Chinese) friends will attest my Cantonese sucks big time. But the main reason for learning is mainly out of courtesy to the locals. As Brits I feel we tend to fall into the trap of speaking English to foreign visitors and try and get by with broken English when abroad. I’ve always tried to pick things up when abroad for basic conversational politeness, but Japanese was always going to be something different. One they don’t commonly use Romanised characters and I’m conscious its a culture that has even more formality and traditions than the Chinese ones I’m partially aware of.

I’ve signed myself up for 3 weeks intensive course which consist of 3 hours of lessons a day. The hope is it will give me an opportunity to explore and experience Tokyo, whilst developing some language basics.

Lessons so far have been pretty tough. Sentence structure seems alien and lots of different particle words which join other words and seems to vary for every sentence type I learn. Its a bit Yoda-esk so I’m keen to watch Star Wars in Japanese to see if he speak with an English word order. A quick google search later and seems its not just me that thinks so:

Numbers too are challenging. They have a unit for 10,000s with a handful of exception variations for some units which augment the base number. Then they have a different number set for dates, counting objects (like ordering stuff), floors in a building.
Lots of augmentations for words for negatives, past tense and negative past tense depending on the ending letter and the direction the wind is blowing at the time.

Then I’m also trying the learn the Hirigana character set which is like the basic alphabet that typically a vowel ending sounds.

Not even going to try and learn the kanji set which I’m told I need to know 2000-3000 characters to read a newspaper. With it’s inheritance from from the Chinese character set I do recognise a few that helps me determined if I want a big or small flush of the water closet.

My class is comprised of two french body builders who work out all week and party all weekend. They are good fun, but lewd connotations toward the unaware staff start to get tiresome after two weeks. Feel they aren’t here for the same culture experience as I, but try to make the most of the interaction for conversations.

Lessons continue to be tough but Ben helps me daily, correcting my incorrect pronunciation and I practice some phrases with some very kind Japanese friends I’ve made, as well as some unfortunate staff at various Japanese shops.

A couple more lessons to go and feel I’ve got some basic formalities under my belt, but need a fair bit of practice before daring to engage in any real conversation. Working on a few conversational sentence for the back pocket standard conversations with a lot of help from my friends, but I’m in hope that will be enough to show the locals I’m making an effort with their language and culture.