Hey there, a quick word before I start. Sorry I haven't been posting for the Alphabet Superset in a while, life decided to take matter into its own hands and I didn't really have a choice but to prioritize other things over this blog.
To make things somewhat easier on myself, I decided to merge the next two letters together and shorten it a little in general. The next letter "m" will be a stand-alone letter blogpost, but after that I might do merging again to be able to finish this challenge before April of this year. With that out of the way, let's get started!
Known to be somewhat of a controversial topic at times, I just want to start this off by saying that in some instances, this might become more of a rant than an insightful blogpost, because I wholeheartedly despise Katakana-Eigo. In case you've no idea what that means, let me reiterate to teach you a little somethin-somethin about the Japanese language.
Japanese has three separate alphabets called Hiragana, Katakana and the Kanji characters which they stole from China a long time ago (history of Japan by bill wurtz, a classic) and simplified them in a lot of ways. For people who speak Chinese, Cantonese or Mandarin, learning Japanese Kanji shouldn't be too difficult, as many of the characters are very similar. People from South Korea also study Kanji in school, so they usually don't have too much trouble reading them as well.
I believe this is one of the reasons why you see South Korean and Chinese speaking nationals often succeed in the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) way more easily than people from overseas, even if they can't really speak the language very fluently. The JLPT is a flawed exam that doesn't really indicate whether your speaking ability is high or not, but rather just a way to confirm to yourself and maybe your boss (or whoever requests you to take the exam) that you're good at studying and remembering patterns. Just as a reference; in 2022 I had some time to study for the JLPT and decided to tackle it head on in December. It was the N2, the second highest level and after studying relentlessly for a few months, focusing heavily on remembering the patterns and creating my own structures to be able to stay focused throughout since time is very limited, I managed to pass on my first try. Another exchange student I randomly met on the day of the exam told me it was their 4th try - and they weren't so lucky. But then when I asked them if they had studied, they proudly told me they won't study as they want to use this exam as a reference as to how much their Japanese has improved. I tried telling them that the exam was not intended to indicate actual conversational Japanese skill, but they insisted. They tried and failed again after that. And just to be clear - their conversational Japanese was fine at that point, I've heard them speak Japanese multiple times. This just goes to show how the JLPT is heavily focused on testing your ability to study rather than making out whether you can speak Japanese or not. But then that's honestly how most exams in Japan are structured, so no big surprise there.
But let me paddle back a little - what exactly are Hiragana and Katakana? Both of them are syllable alphabets, meaning there is one character written for every syllable instead of consonants and vowels separated like in the Latin/Roman alphabet. There are Hiragana and Katakana characters for the single vowels "a, i, u, e" and "o". Using this as a starting point, syllable characters after that are combinations of consonants with aforementioned vowels, meaning for example "ka, ki, ku, ke, ko" or "ha, hi, hu, he, ho", "ma, mi, mu, me, mo" and so on. There are a few exceptions, for example the single consonant "n", but for now, this is the basic overview.
(Taken from https://cotoacademy.com/japanese-writing-system-kanji-hiragana-and-katakana-explained/ )
Hiragana and Katakana are honestly identical in function, but for some reason Hiragana are used for Japanese words and Katakana for foreign words. Not always however! Katakana are also considered somewhat "cool" or even "manly", so sometimes in advertising Katakana is used to emphasize certain words to make them pop.
Foreigners names are usually always written in Katakana - and here is where my beef with Katakana-Eigo comes in. Eigo is the Japanese word for English and the word combination Katakana-Eigo describes a specific type of English that is unique to Japan. In this sense however, unique doesn't really mean good.
The problem with Katakana-Eigo is that Katakana syllables are used to write in English which doesn't really work most of the time. It just doesn't translate well. For example: My name, Eva, is pronounced with an "f"-sound in German (like the V in Volkswagen). The name Eva doesn't exist in Japan, but the very famous anime Evangelion エヴァンゲリオン usually gets shortened to "Eva エヴァ" when talked about. In Katakana-Eigo, there is no equivalent to the consonant "v", so the way it's written doesn't just look ugly but also differs a lot from the actual pronounciation (which I obviously can't get across via text, so you just gotta have to trust me on this). This is how my internet persona "efainjapan" was born, because I ended up writing my name with the Katakana syllable for "hu", which is usually pronounced "fu" in Japanese (e.g. the "fu" in Mt. Fuji). After the "fu" syllable I write a small "a" character behind it, which then negates the "u" in "fu" and instead produces the sound "fa". This way, Japanese people immediately know how to say my name correctly, even though it's spelled incorrectly.
But away from my name, let me show you a crasser example than Eva/Efa, which is a rather simple name. Let's look at Christina for example. You would write Christina in Katakana-characters like this: クリスティナ which would read "ku-ri-su-t(e)-i-na" in alphabet letters, so very different from the original spelling of Christina. Do you see where I'm going with this?
With names it's one thing, because this really only affects the foreigners who decide to live in Japan or those who are studying Japanese and want to make or already have made some Japanese friends. However, it's a totally different thing if you think about the fact that this is the way most Japanese people study English in general. They study the language, but always try to find the pronounciation in their own language, meaning the usage of Katakana to write down and memorize an adjacent pronounciation that will inevitably differentiate from the original English one. There is almost no word in Japanese that ends on a consonant, so it can be very hard for Japanese people to find the right way to pronounciate words in languages foreign to them. That is apart from the fact that the Japanese language structure is also very different from that of English or German for that matter.
Edit note after publishing: I want to clarify something about the last paragraph that I forgot to mention when I was writing this up. There are in fact Japanese words that end on consonants like "san" (which means 3) or "nin" (which is one of the readings for the word 'person' or 'people'), but there are no words in Japanese that will end on let's say a 'g' or a 't' or even an 's'. It's usually only the 'n' that sometimes shows up at a consonant at the end of a word. You might hear Japanese people swallow the 'u' at the end of the word "desu" (which means 'to be'), but in all other cases most people won't be able to scrap the vowel after the consonant, because it probably just feels really unnatural to them. I often realize this phenomenom with my in-laws when they randomly ask for German words - and for anyone of you reading this who has studied German at some point of your life, you might know how it often ends words on really harsh pronounciations of consonants. My mother-in-law is unable to reproduce the pronounciation without adding a vowel to it. Example: She might ask for the word for 'money' to which I would then tell her it's "Geld", pronounced 'Gelt'. I would probably have to repeat myself over and over again, only for her to struggle to leave out an 'u' at the end. She might even put an 's' into it: 'Geltu' or 'Geltsu', even though it wouldn't belong. I think she probably wouldn't be able to hear the difference in me pronouncing it versus her trying and failing (no hate to my MIL btw, love her a lot) to reproduce the same sound. That is what I meant to communicate when writing this part.
Looking over to South Korea, I personally think the way they teach English in school there is a lot more intuitive. Whereas Korean is taught in Hangul, which is yet another syllable alphabet, English is taught with Latin/Roman alphabetic letters. They aren't trying to translate English words into the Hangul alphabet and instead just use the original Latin/Roman alphabet which in turn leads to people learning the actual English words in their standard pronounciation and spelling. I would like to hope that the Japanese school system is trying to shift to a similar way of teaching, but unfortunately I'm not very positive that that's the case, at least not at the moment. Most Japanese people that speak flawless English will have spent a significant amount of time overseas or are really into foreign media. Also, like always with most of the stuff I write about, Tokyo will be the exception to the rule - many Tokyoters speak at least a little bit of conversational English and some even speak perfectly fluently without ever having been to a foreign country.
So, the next time you speak to a Japanese national wondering what they are intending to say because you can't really grasp their pronounciation, keep in mind that it's probably due to them studying English by using the Katakana alphabet. I'll leave you with this funny gem from a few years back that sums up Katakana-Eigo in a nutshell:
Another problem with Katakana-Eigo is that there is no universal way to translate/transcribe it. This is why you will sometimes see names of corporations being written like "Mitu" in English, even though they are pronounced "Mitsu" in Japanese (みつ、ミツ). Even worse are transcriptions like "Syogakkou 小学校", which is how "sho 小" used to be taught in school. The people who introduced this into the educational system didn't think twice about the fact that no other country would look at the combination of "s", "y" and "o" and be able to pronounce it as "sho". As far as I am aware, this has been worked over, so that children in Japan nowadays learn to write an "h" to get the right pronounciation across - however, a lot of older folks might still be under the impression that "syo" is the right transcription for "sho".
The aforementioned exception to the consonant rule, "n ん", is another example of being transcribed incorrectly, however, I think this is done on purpose to get across a certain pronounciation. For example, the station name "Shinjuku Gyoen Mae" (新宿御苑前), which you might come across if you take the metro in Tokyo, is written "Gyoemmae" in Latin/Romanic letters. I believe this is to indicate to foreigners that when they say this stations name to Japanese people, they don't voice a space in between Gyoen and Mae and don't overly focus on pronounciating an "n" sound. To be fair, the Japanese pronounciation is a lot closer to "Gyoemmae" than it is to "Gyoen Mae", but as someone who has been studying the language for a long time, I'm just a tiny little bit annoyed by it (not overly, just a teeny tiny amount). I have also seen this way of transcribing with station names that include the word "Sakuranbo", which is the word for Japanese cherry. It really isn't necessary to put an "m" into that word to indicate the pronounciation and it really just looks off. Try voicing it yourself: Sakuranbo. Sakurambo. Does it make a huge difference? I don't think so. The problem here is that there is no universality, so said train station will write it with an "m", but if you ever see a package of Japanese cherries in the stores they will likely be written with an "n". I'll admit, it's a really troubling character to describe and transcribe, because sometimes it will act like an "ng" (e.g. as in the English "giving"), other times it will be an "n" just like in the Latin/Romanic alphabet languages and other times it can also be used as a bridge between words or even inside of one word.
As a quick note on Kanji characters, I just want to make clear that Japan couldn't only depend on those. The Japanese language is simply very different from Chinese, so the Hiragana in between the Kanji characters are basically the Japanese languages way of using "spaces". If you've ever seen a Japanese text, you might have wondered where the spaces are. Where does one word end and another one begin? That is basically where Hiragana come in handy, or rather: are necessary, since Japanese doesn't use any spaces. Until recently, Japanese didn't even use question marks at the end of a question, but luckily they've started to incorporate those almost everywhere.
When I was younger and still in the babyshoes of studying Japanese, I often looked down on the usage of way too many characters and the combination of three different alphabets. However, nowadays I'm able to read and write in Japanese and it opened up a very different world to me. It made me realize that neither one is better - of couse, the Latin/Roman alphabet is way easier to learn, because there are just 26 letters (plus a few extras in other languages like ä, ö, ü in German), but that doesn't necessarily make it superior to the Kanji and syllable alphabets that Japanese has to offer. I vividly remember in my youth that children (and later even adults) would often pick on another for not knowing certain words - marking them as "stupid" for not knowing the meaning of said word. This is something that people will likely never do in Japan, because everyone is learning new words all the time. It is simply impossible to learn all words and their adjacent Kanji characters throughout the duration of school education and this is widely accepted as fact. Scholars of buddhism are said to be the most knowledgable in Japanese Kanji characters, for they have to learn about 3000 of them (or even more in some sects of buddhism). Normal Japanese people and people who have studied the language very thoroughly will be able to read about 1500 - 2000 Kanji characters and even then, sometimes you just forget "how to read" them. They are still able to get the point across, like for example I sometimes see a Kanji that I have studied before and I know what it means, so the message is translated into my brain and I know how to act accordingly. However, I have never seen the Kanji used in a sentence this way before, so I can't say for sure how to read it correctly (as in: voicing it out loud), since all Kanji have various readings in different settings. I also constantly forget how to correctly write certain characters, which is something that even happens to Japanese people due to most of them rarely using handwriting in everyday life anymore. In general I'd still say it's a positive of the language however, because it is way easier to get a point across with way fewer words. This is extremely apparent with road signs. Whereas you have signs like "Road Work Ahead" in English, which potentially could be interpreted in an ambigious way, the adjacent Japanese is absolutely clear in it's meaning: "koujichû 工事中", which only has three characters and therefore is a lot easier (as in cost- and space-efficient) to put on a road sign. Other examples that are interesting to me are "tachiirikinshi 立入禁止" which translated means "it's forbidden to enter this area" and of course, English tries to bypass this by shortening it to "Do Not Enter", but whereas the Japanese Kanji "kinshi 禁止" literally mean "to forbid", there are other times where it might not be necessary to convey that something is forbidden, but just not desirable, so people are "asked to stay out" instead of telling them entering is forbidden. "Do Not Enter" doesn't have the ability to convey these tiny nuances and I find this to be so interesting.
Lastly, to give you another example of something that I found really fascinating with Japanese Kanji characters, let me introduce you to the words "mokushoku 黙食", "mokuyoku 黙浴" and "mokumusu 黙蒸". Those words were words that didn't exist before the pandemic hit, they just literally didn't exist. However, the Kanji characters used to make up these completely new words were able to convey a message: to be quiet when eating, to be quiet in the onsen, to be quiet when "steaming" (meaning in the sauna). Whereas Germany tried to use already existing words to put into an acronym for people to easily remember health guidelines, Japan just literally made up new words. This really helped me understand why Kanji characters are very special and couldn't just be scrapped in favour of Latin/Roman alphabets. It would rip out a part of Japanese culture entirely.
This is where I'm going to leave you for today - until next time! As always, thank you so much for reading.
EFA
I hope I was able to give you a little introduction to the Japanese language and the struggles with Katakana-Eigo. If you are someone who is trying to study Japanese and looking for resources, I'd suggest checking out the world wibe web. There are much better resources now than there were when I was starting out, so just give it a quick Google/Youtube/whatever platform you prefer-search and you'll probably find some answers! Just be aware that actually studying in a setting with another human being, be it a teacher or a Japanese speaker, are inevidable if you want to actually become fluent.
Thank you for taking time out of your day to read my blog and I'm looking forward to have you with me again for the next one!
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