Japanese rendered un-inscrutable

For our second outing back into the real world post-lockdown we had an upliftingly healthy turn-out (last month we were a bit thin on the ground and I worried that people might have become permanently less inclined to go out). Our speaker was Tim Eyre and his subject was The Japanese Language. This might seem like rather a large and sprawling subject to try and cover in under an hour but Tim, as ever, was lucid and engaging. He was specifically looking at what Japanese is like as a language to learn, its easy and difficult aspects and its structural peculiarities. He looked at pronunciation, how subtle changes to the length of a vowel can completely change the meaning of a word, the various particles that denote the subject and object of a sentence and the suffix that turns a statement into a question (which, frustratingly for English speakers, comes right at the end of the sentence). And he looked at Japanese writing—several different alphabets that can appear side by side in a sentence. The kana characters are phonetic, while kanji characters represent a whole word, name or concept. There are about 8,000 of these; people leave school having learned some 2,000 and are expected to learn as many again to get to the point where they can read a newspaper. Many thanks to Tim to an enlightening and accessible talk. You can see a video of it on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/qJ0_ZxhDeMg.