読書 | わたしの日本語修行

The other day, I read a book written by Donald Keene, the title of which is "My Japanese Training"( わたしの日本語修行) published from Hakusaisha(白水社). 

According to this book, he studied French, German, and Spanish in his school days. At the age of sixteen, he was allowed to enter Columbia University and got interested in Japanese literature. But he didn't study Japanese in the university. 

It was at the age of nineteen that he began to study Japanese in earnest. When he entered one of the navy schools, he was given some books related to Japanese such as English-Japanese dictionaries and some textbooks. 

As I have been interested in how he's mastered Japanese, I enjoyed myself when I was reading several parts of the book on his Japanese training. 

He didn't receive a Japanese grammatical training. What he did in the navy school was read and read a single  textbook thoroughly. Besides, he was forced to see many Japanese movies. As he had studied Chinese before entering the navy school, he had already known many Chinese characters. But he had not paid attention to the drawing orders of them. 

To take an example, he didn't know how to write the character of 十(Jyuu or 10). 
When we draw 十, we firstly draw a horizontal line (－) and then draw a vertical line ( Ⅰ ). Learning the drawing orders of Chinese chracters seems to me difficult for foreigners to master, however, he said in the book "It was a lot of fun." 

He wasn't taught the conjugations of verbs, but he instictively mastered it. Come to think of it, I never thought of why the negation form of the verb "払う"(ha•ra•u or pay) is "払わない"(ha•ra•wa•na•i, not pay) ,not "払あない" ("hara•a•na•i"). The reason for that is that the form of the verb "払う" was originally "払ふ."

Donald Keene began to study Japanese at the age of nineteen. Generally speaking, we Japanese begin to study English when we are in the first grade of junior high school. It is never too late to study English, I thought.