| Current mood: |  jubilant |
| Current music: | DOES-Shura (Gintama) |
Cultural differences
August was 'hell month' for me quite literally. During hell month in Singapore, many Chinese people burn joss sticks and paper money to venerate their ancestors. They also leave large amounts of food out for them, but it's the burning that generates neverending clouds of smoke and ash that aggravate my allergies to borderline asthma attacks. Thanks to a timely diagnosis by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
judemustard, however, I'm back in trim and have even started going for my dance lessons again.
I passed my beginner's Japanese lessons and have gone on to the next level. Classes start in October and I'm trying to get ahead by studying Japanese kanji, which are more often than not Chinese characters. I need to study early, as everyone else in my class already knows Chinese - is Chinese- and will at least be able to understand the kanji, if not pronounce them.
Studying kanji is really really different from studying an alphabet. Example, a straight sideways line like this: '-' means 'one'. But depending on the other pictograms it's associated with, it can be pronounced as 'ichi', 'ikka', 'hito', and in one glorious case, 'tsuita(chi)'. So as I learn kanji, I find I need to learn as many words as can be made with it.
I've memorised around 27 kanji by now and practice writing them everyday. To my surprise, the Chinese writings all around me are beginning to make some sort of sense! I can only pronounce them - ok, pretend to pronounce them - in Japanese, but I can actually sort of understand what they say. Example: I was at a train station - City Hall - but the characters actually didn't spell out 'City Hall' , they spelled out words meaning something like 'big central station'. It's like watching a movie in a language you know, and realising that the subtitles, while good, are slightly off, just slightly off. As in, they translate 'Hi everybody, it's been a long time', to 'I'm so glad to see you all here'.
The latter is the actual subtitle for a line from a Japanese anime episode; the former is what I heard, now that I understand a teensy bit of Japanese.
Back to reading Chinese characters. Signs in Singapore are written in at least four languages - English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. As does tend to happen, I'd edited out the languages I don't know, so they didn't actually register during casual glances. Now, after 13 years in Singapore, the Chinese characters are suddenly popping up and registering themselves.
So sometimes I stop and stare open-mouthed and amazed at a sign saying 'slippery floor', because the thing is, reading the characters uses a completely different part of the brain. Reading Japanese kanji or Chinese ideograms is like looking at pictures and comprehending the sense of the story in the picture, because that's how I appreciate art - I don't tell myself 'the man is sitting with his head on his fist', I just look and go, 'Oh, he's thinking'.
I see pictures and more meaning everywhere now and I can't tell you how much more amazing the world has become to me. The very way the language is structured is different - I always knew that, but now I KNOW that.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Anyone have any similar experiences to share? I'd love to hear!
