Literacy

I know what it’s like to be illiterate. Here, I am illiterate. I look at billboards and have no clue what they’re advertising (which, come to think of it, isn’t so bad). Japan has three written languages: kanji (thousands and thousands of Chinese characters), hiragana (a simpler phonetic alphabet for Japanese words), and katakana (a phonetic alphabet for foreign words). I’ll never be much good at kanji, though I appreciate learning new characters and their roots as much as possible. My hiragana is a bit rusty, and I’ve never bothered much with remembering katakana (which is dumb, since I would normally actually know those words if I could read them clearly). I had big plans to brush up on my reading skills in the past few months, but the baby had other plans for me!

It turns out that grocery shopping takes a long time if you can’t read (especially with a fussy baby in the stroller), and being fluent in both kana languages would be quite helpful. So, to prevent the friendly staff at my local suupaa from thinking of me as that crazy gaijin who keeps asking where the jamu (jam) and co-hi (coffee) are, I’m putting myself through kana bootcamp. Already I can identify where the “baby salon” (baby changing room) is and which is the correct tofu for making kitsune udon.