My first Japanese Class

The first 'Nihongo no Jyugou' is one of my cherishable experiences in Japan. Offered by the Company, I was one of the early birds to register for the class. The class was scheduled for Thursday evenings every week. It was about the beginning of march, 2006 and I was too new to Japan and my Japanese language skills were into negative. i was not even knowing the basic greetings like 'Good Morning', 'hello', etc,.I was very much excited about the class...

I entered the class, 3 minutes late as I lost some time locating the conference room. The room was full with 14 philipinos, 3 Indians and 3 Japanese. There was a young lady in the Japanese group, and I was just thinking that it would be nice if she is the teacher.Was that plain chemistry or lol.......all my language teachers have been from the opposite gender, to get into descending order, Learnt Francaise from Sunita-ma'm ,Elisabeth-ma'm and Cecilia ma'm, Hindi from Poongothai-akka,Tamizh and English in school from all female teachers...Sita-miss, Indra-miss, Savitha-miss, Sundari-miss, Maheswari-miss, Devasena-miss................oh my goodness. Keeping my fingers crossed (the french way), I was eagerly waiting for the class to begin. As it turned out to be, our Sensei (Teacher) was not that lady, but the old man in the grey shirt, Hagitani-san.

He started with a small introduction on Japan, the people and the language..........and was explaining about the phonetics of the language; I was not able to understand anything, was literally feeling out of the world. Then he taught us some spoken language, everyday expressions ......'ohayo gozaimasu', 'arigato gozaimasu', 'o-genki desu ka'. . . . The phillipinos were just masters of these expressions, some of them living in Japan for the past 2 years. Spell bound with mouth open, I was gazing at all of them.

The second part of the class was to learn the Japanese script.....It is so strange that Nihongo has three scripts
Hiragana - syllabic script for writing Japanese words consisting of 50 characters
Katakana - syllabic script for writing Non-Japanese words consisting of 50 characters
Kanji - pictorial script borrowed from China more than 2500 characters
Any sentence can contain all the three scripts together.....If you want to write 'Nagappan lives in Yokohama'
Got to write, 'Nagappan' in katakana, 'lives in' in hiragana and 'Yokohama' in kanji;

Having taught this funda, Hagitani-san moved on to writing hiragana . . . He wrote the characters a, e, u, eh, o in the board....and as I was the one sitting closest to him, he asked me to copy the character 'a'. I did that effortlessly which amazed him. He asked

"Do you know Japanese already?"
"No, not really"
"But, You have written like an expert, no flaws in the script"

I felt like, he is encouraging me and did not show much of myself and returned back to the seat. Got some thought over, I told him,

"This hiragana character 'a' is a bit similiar to the character 'ka' written in my mother toungue"
"oh, really? Which part of India are you from?"
"South India"
"Then, your mother toungue must be Tamil"

huh........duk duk uk................a big quake, am I in my senses; What am I hearing? A Japanese fellow talking about tamil; I was not able to beleive my own ears. But, there was Hagitani-san, standing so real and cool was continuing,

"There is a Japanese linguistics professor by name Ohno, who beleives that Japanese might have originated from Tamil. Although the theory is not well accepted, it is one of the famous theories on the origin of the language" (For more info, check http://arutkural.tripod.com/tolcampus/jap-tamil.htm)

This moment, I knew that I was going to enjoy learning this language.

Nagz