Konnichiwa Hivers! こんにちわ Hivers!
During the quarantine I decided to make use of my time in several ways so as that it was at least productive and of some benefit to me. One of the things I decided to apply my energy and time to was learning Japanese.
I'd started to learn a little and it was proving to be quite useful when I had Japanese guests at the dive centre as they were extremely happy that i would make the effort to greet them and introduce myself in Japanese. As we were so busy I found it difficult to dedicate much time to really study though. Quarantine changed all that.
Someone had advised me that it would benefit me to learn to read the 2 main alphabets , Hiragana and Katakana in order to pronounce the words correctly. At first I thought this might be a little too much but I actually found it very interesting. There are quite a few apps to use so i had some downloaded to my I pad and set about learning to read the alphabets.
I also did a little bit of video lessons with one of the Japanese instructors that was here in Panagsama in quarantine also. She would write characters on a board and I would have to read them. I remember reading す (su) and し (shi) and then realised what I was reading SUSHI and thought wow I am reading Japanese. A simple little thing like that was very inspiring and pushed me further to keep studying.
When I had progressed to the Katakana alphabet later on my sensei wrote on her board スキューバヘッド as i was mouthing the sounds of the characters I realised it was SCUBAHEAD and she'd done it as I was wearing my Scubahead t shirt. Now it made me laugh at the time but it also made me realise that I was actually getting it.Getting somewhere and making progress and this continues to spur me on.
I look forward to being able to go back to Japan and be able to use more of the vocabulary that i am learning. The last time i was there just being able to order things in a clunky way and say a few bits here and there was received very well so it will be nice to try out what i have learned on a future visit.
KYOTO
OSAKA
Japan is an incredible place with so many layers to their society. I am eager to be able to start to explore in more depth and I believe learning to speak Japanese will be a huge benefit in doing this. So at the moment i am dedicating 1 hour a day to study on both the app on the I pad and also manually writing the characters down as I think this will help with retention. During this quarantine I believe it's important to make valuable use of the time we have and this is just one way I have been doing this. I hope this inspires someone else to maybe start learning a new language.
Take care out there people wherever you are on the planet right now