Japanese My Way

I was reminded today of an incident from when I had just started learning Japanese.  I was all excited that I had found my new best friend: word lists!  They had the Japanese written in both kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese, kana, the phonetic Japanese characters, and an English meaning.  I blazed through all ten pages of the list and was feeling very satisfied that I had learned about 200 words in only a few days.

Wanting to try my new found powers, I decided to explain a recipe in Japanese. The following words were part of my list, so I figured it would be easy enough since I knew the basic rules of Japanese grammar.

The phrase I proudly came up with was 熱い水を追加して….  Let’s just say that it generated quite a few laughs because no one would ever describe it using those words in Japanese.  In English, “Add hot water,” works perfectly well, but in this context the words used to describe that action in Japanese are much different than I has assumed using the list. It turned out that お湯を入れて… is the right way to say what I wanted to.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the same idea can be explained in both Japanese and English. The problem occurs when you rely on your knowledge of English sentence patterns and word lists. In this context in Japanese, hot water is お湯 and is a completely separate word from water, 水. Similarly, in this case 入れる can be used and 追加する can’t even though both can be found in a Japanese-English dictionary with the meaning “add”.

After this, I realized that it was critical to learn Japanese sentence patterns and not just words from a list. Of course, the best place to learn Japanese sentence patterns from is natural Japanese.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 at 04:51 and is filed under How to learn Japanese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.