“Lost time is never found again.” – Benjamin Franklin
Time! What a crazy concept. You move through time and “spend” it. Right now, you’re “spending” said time so that you can learn Japanese. Use your time well and you’ll be able to communicate with Japanese people in the future, or read manga, or understand Japanese drama. It’s amazing what you can do with time.
But time isn’t just something you live – it’s a concept that people talk about, a lot. “What did you do today?” “What time is it?” “What time do we have to leave?” “How many weeks will you be here?”
The list goes on and on. I could spend a lot of time going over it all, and I will, but we should break things up into smaller chunks. Time is a complicated mistress. Here is how we’ll do things:
- Years: This will give us a big “overhead” view of time and how it works in Japanese. It will allow us something to work off of, allowing us to move forward.
- Months: Months are smaller and introduce a couple of new time-based rules.
- Weeks: There are weeks inside of months. What is inside of weeks?
- Days: Days are great. You can get a lot done in a day. Days are also really confusing and complicated, though.
- Days of the week: This gets its own section because it’s basically seven exceptions in one. Also, it uses all the time-based grammar and structure that you’ll be learning with the other lessons.
- Hours: Now we’re really getting into “time.” It’s easy for people to measure hours, but what happens when you need to get specific?
- Minutes & Seconds: Minutes are easily measurable, but there are a lot of them. This will require all the knowledge from the previous time-chapters combined, not to mention seconds!
As you go through these chapters you’ll notice how each one works off the other. As time gets shorter it gets more complicated, though, which is why we’re going to go in this particular order. As you go through, you’ll learn various grammar that has to do with time (and can be used with these time-related chapters).
Time is one of those things that you need to know about (and know well) for daily Japanese. I bet not an hour goes by where you don’t think about time in some way, whether it’s years or seconds or something in between. Am I right?
First, though, let’s learn some kanji that you’ll be using throughout this season (and beyond!).