Japanese class began last night. On the way there, our BART train went out of service and we had about fifteen minutes of delay, making us fifteen minutes late for class. It didn’t really matter, though.

I like our sensei. We hopped right in with some pronunciation drills and learning to write the hiragana alphabet. I fear that this class might be really hard for me, since Japanese is said to be one of the most difficult languages for a Westerner to learn.

My last experience learning a language was high school French. I took it for two years, got all A’s, and retained at least two thirds of what I learned. My teacher, Mrs. Eling, used a radical new type of method that involved not showing students the written language until midway through the term. This way, when the student first saw the words that they had already been speaking, they wouldn’t be as prone to automatically mispronouncing them, and the words wouldn’t be a total mystery.

For the first couple months of class, she would teach us vocabulary and verbs by saying the words slowly while indicating an action or an object. For example, my first day of French class, the teacher stood in the front of the room next to a chair, and indicated without speaking for us to all stand up. Then she said “asseyez-vous” while sitting down and pointing at us. Naturally, we followed her action, and had not only just learned what the words meant, but how they sounded.

For me — and I’m not saying this would work for everyone — this way of learning French was much easier than looking at an incomprehensible word on a page, mispronouncing it horribly, and then being told in the abstract what it meant. That is how my Japanese class went last night, and I hope that this method doesn’t add too much confusion and distraction.

I reckon the reading and writing are going to be the hardest things to learn. It kind of sucks to learn this all at once… after all, once a kid starts reading and writing their native language, they have already mastered the basic rules of spoken grammar and have several thousand vocabulary words. They can already communicate.

Anyway, the good news is that our trip to Tokyo happens to fall during a week with no scheduled class.