Shamed

So, some years back I was semi-regularly visiting friends in Japan.

"Semi-regularly" is four trips in roughly a two year period.

The visits inspired me to try to actually learn the language. While I have a fairly good ear for mimicking accents and pronouncing foreign words, I very much suck at retaining word meaning, grammatical structure, and especially meaning of foreign characters.

Good thing I write for a living.

Japanese words are pretty easy to pronounce, in my opinion. I've been exposed to spoken Japanese for most of my life, so it's not that much of a biggie to me.

Written Japanese is a whole other deal.

Japanese uses multiple character sets for their words:

Kanji - essentially Chinese characters
Hiragana - phonetic characters that represent sounds
Katakana - same as Hiragana, but "simpler to write". Kids write in katakana to a certain age. Foreign words are written in katakana (such as my name).
Romanji - essentially roman characters. Writing "arigatou" is writing in romanji.

I can handle romanji. The rest? Not so much. Especially the kanji/Chinese characters. I have multiple reference books from when I was all jazzed to self-train myself, but lacking that self-discipline trait... I haven't used them. I'm not even sure where most of them are in the chaotic mess that's my apartment.

I have cheat sheets for hiragana/katakana and I can more-or-less tell the difference between the two character sets.

That's about all I've retained from studying. It's been about three years since I've really tried to study written (or spoken) Japanese.

One of my friends at work is on a tear to learn conversational Japanese. She can already read/write Chinese, so she's got the hardest part out of the way (in my opinion). She was under the (mistaken) impression that I'm fluent in Japanese, so she asked for my help.

I explained the reality of the situation and loaned her several books as well as my notes from my time with a conversation partner as well as the one class I've taken.

It hasn't even been two weeks. The woman can read Japanese 1000% (yes, one-thousand percent) better than I can.

She's persuading (pressuring... whatever) me to get back into my studies so she has someone to help her parse out the lessons.

In all honesty, at this point she'd serve as an instructor for me. She knows way the hell more than I do, but now I'm inspired a bit to get off my lazy arse and start studying again.

Now if I would just follow-through when I'm at home...