In middle school, I took Spanish. In high school, I took French. In college, too, I took French, though I was unable to minor in it due to the fact that they didn’t offer me enough classes to actually do that, and I had a different professor (and thus different teaching style and syllabus) every year, so I’m forever bitter about that. (Fund foreign languages!)
Leaping from Spanish into French in school, it was actually somewhat easy; both are Romance languages, and share a nice pool of roots with English. I still remember enough French to string together a few basic sentences, but it has tragically largely left me.
Right now, I’m learning Japanese. I’m completely teaching myself, reliant on several apps, a website, and a couple of books I’ve picked up. From my best guess, I’m hovering in the N4 category after about a year of learning during my lunch break, which is grade schooler level comprehension.
But I also had to learn three new alphabets, and learning kanji is a lifelong endeavor, so I’m cutting myself some slack.
Anyway, onto the main moral of this story—learning other languages as a writer is a GREAT IDEA!
I don’t recall doing this much learning French, but while learning Japanese, I have thought SO MUCH about the English language! Japanese is a very structured language. English is three root languages in a trench coat, mugging other countries’ languages and rifling through their pockets. While there was a lot more crossover (cognates, recognizable roots, etc) with French, having something so heavily contrasting to English is making me examine it more.
While my grammar is and always will be a, shall we say, flexibly utilized part of my writing, it is fascinating to look at basic Japanese sentence structure and compare it to English.
English is very flexible with how sentences are structured. (Also, characters like Yoda come to mind; he speaks English, and not normally structured English, but it is understandable to speakers of the language.) All languages have some flexibility with how they are used, but, so far, I have seen less of the random “at all”s thrown about in Japanese.
Think about it a moment. You can put the phrase “at all” in a lot of places in an English sentence.
I don’t at all like cabbage. I don’t like cabbage at all.
That’s a super basic example with a super basic sentence, but think of all of the little flavorful throw-ins—like, at all, very, and so on. (For the record, in Japanese, they traditionally come before the verb. Which is also traditionally toward the end of the sentence.)
And this is to say nothing of emphasis on words. My brain would explode trying to write that blog post.
But since I am still a little baby Japanese learner, I am still consciously translating everything. “I like cats” still comes before “neko ga suki desu” in my mind, and likely will for years and years. I’m fine with that. It means I get to think more about languages!
And since I am now in the process of learning many, many kanji, I am now looking at how English words themselves are made.
“Meat” in Japanese is a really good, easy example of this. “Meat” is one word in English; “flesh” is a synonym and does also describe it accurately, but colloquially, only “meat” tends to be the stuff we eat. In Japanese, it’s similar—“meat” is one word, “niku”, and can also mean flesh. Nice and easy to remember!
But let’s get into the topic of meat. In English, we have beef, pork, chicken, mutton, venison, and more. (Like many countries, the Japanese don’t exactly consider fish “meat”. A note for other vegetarians and vegans out there when traveling!)
In Japanese: cow-meat, pig-meat, chicken-meat, and so on. You simply add “niku” to it to denote that it is the meat of the animal. And how easy is that?! English has roots from French, Latin, Old English (and more). “Mutton” looks nothing like “sheep”! “Beef” comes from French (“boeuf”). “Cow” comes from old Indo-European onomatopoeia, according to a quick search. We stole those words. We stole them and more and ran far away and put them in a big sack and shook them all around so no one could tell where what came from anymore. Our meat language alone is in shambles.
And yes, “chicken” is an outlier, but just the word itself, you cannot differentiate whether you are talking about the whole, live, entire bird, or a lump of flesh ready for marinating.
Japanese also tends to do this with baby/infant things—you add “ko” in front. Instead of “cow/calf”, you simply have “baby cow”. “Kitten” and “puppy” become “koneko” and “koinu”. Do you know how much easier that is to remember than whatever we’re doing with English?!
Learning other languages as a native English writer has not only made me pay more attention to sentence structure, but our very words themselves. And frankly, that’s pretty damn cool.
It also makes me so glad I did learn English natively.
