Twelve years ago I stopped studying Japanese after studying Japanese for about 3 years at university.
I was surprised by how much I had remembered. Distant memories of words and sentence structure came back to my fingertips, and my speaking was still fairly decent.
Now I have decided to look back at basic materials on Japanese grammar and refresh what I had forgotten, so that I could continue to improve on top of that knowledge. Of the many countries I’ve visited, Japan and Turkey had been some of the most frequented ones. I had gone to Japan at 3 times, the last two times short layovers during other Asian country travels.
What I still remember about Japanese basics:
- There are casual and polite forms to the vocabulary
- Particles are difficult, and sometimes I remember how to use them, and other times I forgotten.
- Learning kanji will help clear up ambiguity especially with words such as 彼う, 帰る, かえる which have different meanings depending on the kanji or not.
- Someone told me this, but there really isn’t a past or future tense in Japanese. I can’t recall this very well, but I will have to explore these tenses further.
- But I believe that Japanese does not have grammatical gender like Hindi or French, so that should make it slightly less complex
Learning languages has always been an interest of mine, and Japanese culture and language is very fascinating. I recently recalled some old anime I used to watch Fruits Basket and Sailor moon, and remembered why I enjoyed the Japanese culture. Really looking forward to the journey to reviving my basics in Japanese and further growing my ability to understand and use the Japanese language. やった！
