Even as a young boy, perhaps no more than 10 or 11 years old, I had already wanted to learn Japanese. It was the first foreign language I found interesting enough to want to learn. My 2nd tongue is English, but since I grew up using it, I don’t think of it as a foreign language.
My Dad bought me a Japanese book when I was still in primary school. I no longer remember the book’s title, but for some reason the publisher’s name stuck in my head: Charles Tuttle Publishing. To this day, when I see ‘Tuttle’, I feel a little nostalgic (and not unhappy that this company’s still around).
I know the very first word I learned: nani (what) and the very first sentence I learned: Kore wa nani desu ka? (What is this?) Since I was self-teaching myself, from a book, I remember pronouncing this sentence like this: ko-reh wah nah-nee deh-soo ka? All the while confident I was saying it properly. This was before the Internet and YouTube, so it wasn’t that easy to check on the pronunciation. I should have said it as: koreh wa NAN des ka?
Though I was interested in learning, I can’t say I tried very hard. You might call it a pastime. I never did get past individual words and phrases, even though I accumulated many of them. At some point I was also able to read Katakana and Hiragana, but without understanding what I was reading.
Tonikaku (anyway), I am currently listening to Michel Thomas’s Foundation Japanese course, and plan to write down what I’ve learned.
Will learning Cantonese and Japanese (and maybe a little Mandarin) be confusing? Perhaps. I don’t know.
