Language learning (Japanese & Latin)

Written September 06 2025

My girlfriend and I started learning Japanese a week ago and it’s been really fun. I just got (pretty much) done with my term papers so it’s been nice to study something that’s not got anything to do with university for once – I do like my fields of study, but it can get exhausting sometimes. We started by learning Hiragana and Katakana and even just being able to somewhat fluently read and write words written in Kana after a week has been really exciting and motivating. We’ve still got a long way to go (we finished chapter one out of twelve of our Japanese textbook), but I’m looking forward to it. I bought a Japanese-language copy of Yotsuba&! with Furigana and I’ve been leafing through it to see if I can understand anything. I can’t. Not much at least. Maybe an anoo or the names of characters and a desu here and there but that’s pretty much it. I do want to keep at it, though. Yotsuba&! is a great series and I only ever finished the first volume, so I am looking forward to being able to read the whole thing in its original language some day. That and Japanese horror movies. Or Japanese movies in general. I still have so many more Kurosawa Akira to watch.

I also started relearning Latin some time ago. I already had Latin in school, all the way up through high school, but I never studied much for it. I was still good, but that’s probably due to well-developed dictionary look-up skills and a general feel for the language more than studying. I was never really able to recall all the conjugations and declinations or anything like that and I basically didn’t learn vocabulary at all. I don’t really need Latin anymore – aside from maybe helping with my history classes – but I still want to get back into it, just for fun. It’s a nice language and actually pretty useful for linguistics. Also, a lot of English vocabulary is just lifted straight from Latin. About half of commonly used English words are borrowed from Romance languages, i.e. Latin or French via Latin. Even just opening a Latin dictionary at A and looking at the words makes that connection pretty obvious. Here’s just some random ones:

And so on and so on. I have been turning a list of some 1900 basic Latin words into an Anki deck and every second word or so I can think of an English equivalent. As such, it’s actually pretty useful to be good at English, since a lot of the words just don’t have similar Latin-derived German equivalents. For example, ‘to abstain’ just means ‘enthalten’ in German. There’s also ‘abstinieren’, but I’ve never seen or heard anyone use that, whereas in English the word ‘abstain’ is perfectly normal and lags only slightly behind ‘withhold’ (which would be the equivalent of Germanic origin) in usage, if Google trends is to be believed. It’s incredible how much – especially specialized – English vocabulary is non-Germanic. Some really common words too. For example ‘take’ comes from Middle English ‘taken’ which in turn comes from an Old Norse term, i.e. not from the Germanic Anglo-Saxons. There was a term of Anglo-Saxon origin for ‘take’, which was called ‘nimen’ and which died out hundreds of years ago. Granted, the Norse were still Germanic, but there is so much influence from other languages on English that it becomes hard to tell where some words are even from. I find this kind of historical linguistics really fascinating. Learning some Old or Middle English might also be fun (and a lot more interesting than Middle High German, which I had the pleasure of being subjected to recently).

Anyway, I just need to brush up on my grammar skills and then I’ll be good to go as far as Latin is concerned. I got a book with some ancient sources on Pompeii and I think working through that might be a pretty good way to quickly relearn all that grammar and get back into the language. I also just like Pompeii. I took a seminar in Pompeiian art history and archaeology once and that was one of the best university courses I’ve ever done. I do want to visit the place at some point, but for now I have to contend myself with reading about it.

Also, Anki is fantastic. I have used it for pretty much all my university learning for the past year and I’ve aced all my exams thus far. It really is the perfect tool for learning, especially language learning. Go download it, now!

Also also, I am writing again.

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