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By now my knowledge of Japanese is about good enough to more or less get me through every day life without any major incidents. I also know a bunch of Japanese people by now, with whom I can occasionally practice my language skills and actually start to get an idea of how people speak in casual situations, which can be quite different from textbook Japanese.

On some days I get the feeling that my intense studies (I usually study about 3-4 hours a day) start to pay off, and I can get really enthusiastic about actually having had a decent conversation with a friend all in Japanese, or even just a nice little chat with one of the skaters at my regular ice rink.

Unfortunately, every now and then I get into other situations where I feel still just as lost as I did a few weeks ago, and I am back to understanding just bits and pieces without getting the actual topic of the conversation, looking at my vis-à-vis with big question marks in my eyes, or even worse, responding something completely off topic because I misunderstood the question. Very frustrating, indeed!

The fact that the Japanese use a whole different set of vocabulary depending on the circumstances and the according level of formality often makes it more difficult for me to understand people than to actually express myself (although I may not always choose the most appropriate term, people can understand me, and luckily as a "gaijin" I am forgiven a lot of mistakes). The different levels of vocabulary add to my general impression that the Japanese language seems to be extremely rich in expressions and synonyms, which is nice in a way, but just makes learning the language even more challenging. And even though I theoretically know quite a few words by now, I am kind of slow in digging them out of my memory at the right time. Not only when speaking myself, but even more so when listening – I often have to mentally flip through my vocabulary book before I recognize the meaning of a word, and in the meantime of course at least three more sentences have been said and I have completely lost track of the conversation…

People often say that the most difficult part of learning Japanese is reading and writing Kanji, the originally Chinese sign characters. But actually starting to learn Kanji has really improved my understanding of the Japanese language, and it also helps me a lot to memorize new vocabulary, or to distinguish words which sounded really similar to me before. Each Kanji character has different "readings", depending on whether it stands alone or if it forms a compound with another Kanji. Sounds confusing, but once you become familiar with this system, some of the many synonyms and related expressions actually start making more sense.

As a matter of fact, there are about 2000 Kanji characters defined for common use. Of course I am faaaar away from knowing them all, so I often still have to revert to my old "illiterate method" of more or less qualified guessing, with all its pitfalls.

This is also the reason it took me two tries to get this black ("hijiki") seaweed salad done. I simply picked a package of dried seaweed from the supermarket shelf; the content looked right to me: thin strips of seaweed with a very dark colour. But unfortunately the different kinds of seaweed can look really similar when dried - so after putting it to rehydrate I was quite unpleasantly surprised by a strong, nasty smell in my kitchen and some long, grey-greenish threads in my bowl of water. Quite different from the hijiki seaweed I like so much…

I still haven't got a clue what kind of seaweed that was and what it is used for – but definitely not for this kind of salad! My second try was more successful, though. I just searched until I had found a package showing a picture of the kind of salad I was planning to to prepare. This method hardly ever fails...