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Japanese (and Others)
Japanese (and Others)
I began my linguistic journey in January of 2021, and have since then read up on dozens of different languages. I can read English and Japanese pretty well, Russian, Urdu, and Korean less well.
Of all the languages I've spent hours studying, reading about, or writing about, Japanese was my first, and has remained my absolute favorite. It's such an eccentrically unique language, and vastly different from pretty much everything else out there. Out of hundreds of different languages, only 6 syllabaries are still in use, with a third of them belonging to Japanese!
It can take a lot to start studying a new language. It's a lot of time, effort, energy, but mostly it's about patience. Since college I've been pretty on-off with my language study habits (whoops!) so I'm still not completely fluent. But I can read and write, understand some songs and conversations, and I have about 600 Kanji memorized! It's been a long and slow journey, but it's always enjoyable. Honestly though, I'm in no rush to achieve fluency and if I can keep extending the enjoyment out for a few more years I won't complain.
Language learning to me is a vast, ever-changing, and exhilarating puzzle. The best part it? The learning literally never stops. Language lives and breathes; it's never static and always morphing. It's a hobby I plan to carry with me for the rest of my life.
International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The cheat code to all languages!
I love the IPA. Not the beer, although I know that's probably more popular than this one is. The International Phonetic Alphabet was created to be a standard written representation of phonemes (unit of sounds) in any oral language. This includes different vowels, consonants, and anything in between made and pronounced in every language. It's incredibly cool.
I call IPA the language cheat code because it has been my absolute favorite tool in my language learning journey.
What shocks people is that reading a new language can be sped up exponentially when you know how to properly pronounce the phonemes. The chart is first categorized by either consonants or vowels, then sorted based on where in your mouth the sound is made and how in your mouth the sound is made.
One of my favorite websites ever is the Interactive IPA Chart, which is exactly what it sounds like. I've spent hours on this site just listening over and over to each different phoneme, matching them to languages, and trying them out for myself. Aside from reading and speaking languages, the IPA chart has also strengthened my ability to simply recognize different languages based on how words are spelled.
If you have the time or interest, I definitely recommend checking the IPA out. Even if you're not planning on learning a language any time soon, it's a lot of fun to just listen to all the different sounds. Have fun learning!
My Blog!
My Blog!
The Linguist started out as a mandatory semester-long project for my freshman year WRTC 103 class. (Noticing a theme here?) We were tasked to start a blog with any topic that was interesting enough for us to write multiple entries about.
It went about forgotten and unused for a few years, until I rediscovered it in the fall of 2024. It's not updated crazy frequently, but every so often I'll pop in to ramble about some linguistic thing I can't stop thinking about.
If you're at all curious about this, I'll link it right now. Come check out my blog!
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