I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school. I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet. It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own. It enforced discipline and practice. It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary. Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”. That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound. Makes things much harder for children to grasp. This...
It was around this time last year that I was first considering learning Japanese... This year, I went to a ぼねんかい last week hosted by the Nijikaewa group, was cheerfully wishing people よいおとしを &あけましておめでとうございます( & 楽しいクリスマス・メリクリスマス a week earlier too), and yesterday, at a regular check up appointment at the doctor's office, was studying Kanji while I was waiting - which I assume is the reason that when they called my name, I automatically, loudly, called "はい!" in response - and why on my way hoping and trying to find the nearest branch, I typed "starba" into google maps, instead of "Starbucks"... 😵 Luckily, Google knew exactly what I meant (often, it suggests the right thing until you misspell it, then it disappears off the suggestions list. That didn't happen this time, and when I automatically hit enter without thinking, Starbucks still popped up as the searched for item. It is evidently used to people googling starba 😁).
I was playing a game on my tablet and I found that I already had the last of the five items I needed to level up… and when I saw it and as I dragged it across to merge it, my brain was going “あー、かんぺき!” And I thought “really brain? That means perfect? You’re just making things up now!” So I went and checked it in the dictionary and I owe my brain an apology 😳 I had a similar thing happen the other day with a crossword clue - I had just binged about 6 episodes of anime before deciding to do the crossword puzzle and the clue was “sufficient, nice, fine, pretty, quite” and my brain instantly said “けっこう” which I thought was highly implausible as I would have sworn we had never had it as a vocabulary word - despite all those hiragana (& more) being available in the answer candidate pool for the app. But I entered it in anyway, and it was right…then realized that I had heard the word multiple times in the anime episodes that I had just binged and my brain must have...
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