Sarah Et Cetera

Whatever your thoughts about President Obama, you have to admit, the man can read. Set a teleprompter in front of him and he’ll read it so well some people actually get chills. Japan’s Prime Minister, Taro Aso, isn’t so lucky:

He’s made so many public blunders that an opposition lawmaker tried to give him a reading test during a televised session of parliament.

The Japanese leader bungled the word for “frequent,” calling Japan-China exchanges “cumbersome” instead. Another time, he misread the word “toshu” (follow), saying “fushu” — or stench — and sounded as if he were saying government policy “stinks.”

Irish Cavalry sent me the article, Japan PM’s reading blunders spark study spree, because he thought I’d like it, and I really do. It seems that Aso’s gaffe’s are inspiring his fellow citizens to run out and get books to improve their reading. They hear his errors and realize they make the same, all the time.

While I’ve been fortunate enough to study languages with non-Latin writing systems, I haven’t been able to study logographic languages (beyond pinyinaries for silly fanfic purposes). But reading this article, thinking back to some of what Poptart has told me about her study of Japanese, and looking at other information, it just intimidates the hell out of me.

The writing systems is layered: kanji, ideographs from Chinese characters; Hiragana, a syllybary rather than an alphabet; Katakana, a different syllybary used to incorporate foreign words; and the occasional bunch of Latin letters thrown in for abbreviations. It wears me out just thinking about it.

My whole concept of language is so alphabet-centric that the idea of trying to learn something else gives me, frankly, the tingles, but not the good Chris Matthews kind.

I started thinking about it for the first time last fall reading Anathem. The Saeculars get their information from moving symbols, or kinograms. We’re never told whether or not this makes them illiterate, aliterate or post-literate, just that that is how they get information. I was reading washing instructions on a shirt this weekend. It had both words and a series of symbols below that. I tried to match the symbols, non-moving ones even, with “machine wash cold like colors.” And couldn’t, really. My mind sort of shut off. My eyes moved right back to the words. In a kinogram word, or a syllabaric world, I would be completely lost.

The article concludes:

According to a 2007 government survey, one-fifth of Japanese 16 or older often encounter Chinese characters they cannot read, while one-third have trouble writing them without looking them up. Nearly half said they still need to master the 2,000 characters considered necessary for daily life.

“Japanese is difficult,” the best-selling primer on reading said. “But we don’t want to humiliate ourselves in public.”

Gives me an urge to learn it just for moral support purposes. It’s strange to confront your own potential illiteracy.