Japanese Class!

Over the last few weeks I have been taking Japanese. One of the attitudes that the language instills in you is to not make assumptions. In the beginning you feel as that the language is so different that to even assume anything about its structure would just lead to embarrassment. This makes you realize that in every language there are certain choices that are made about how words should be organized and paired. These rules are pretty uniform across the Scandinavian, Anglican, and Latin languages and as a result have never been questioned in my previous study of language. However, that being said it is also surprising how at times the Japanese language can turn out to be similar. For example, take the word kara, this is a word that translates to the word from. If you say Amerika kara kimashita it means I am from America.  Similarly, the word can be used to specify intervals of time yon-ji kara kyuu-ji made means from 4 to 9. It is in some sense remarkable that there would even be a word such as from that could be used in almost the exact same contexts as Japanese as in English. One of the other nice feelings achieved by studying Japanese is when you finally achieve the ability to understand certain aspects of the grammar well enough that you are able to use the language dynamically, constructing sentences that you have never said before but know to be grammatically correct. While one may argue that these types of realizations appear in the study of all languages, Japanese as a language that is so far away from that of western language heightens the effect.