Learning Japanese, because of the complicated relationship between the written language (especially kanji) and the spoken languages, feels sort of like I'm learning two different languages at once. I may pick up on words I hear around me or even sometimes simple sentences, that I can understand but wouldn't know how to write; and I'm finding, even after only a week of learning kanji, that I can read -- in the sense of understand -- quite a few of the things I see around me, but haven't a clue how I would pronounce them, were I to read them out loud. I can sound out words, or parts of words, that are written in kana; this is often quite useful for English loan-words, which are written in katakana and which are usually recognisable, like 'chii-zu' for 'cheese' or 'ho-te-ru' for hotel. Things can be written out entirely in hiragana as well, but unless I actually know the word itself, that doesn't help much.
The combination of kanji and hiragana is a bit more complicated; I thought initially that hiragana was mainly used to add the grammarly bits (verb conjugations and so forth) to the root word provided by the kanji, but it's not that simple. The same kanji can appear in different words, often with similar or related meanings, but with a different (sometimes similar, sometimes quite different) pronunciation given to the kanji itself and with different combinations of hiragana to construct the word. For example, 入 carries a meaning of 'enter, insert'; 入る is pronounced 'hairu' and means 'to enter / to go in', but 入れる is pronounced 'ireru' and means 'to insert / to put in'. So the hiragana always have a 1:1 phonetic correspondence (more or less) but can change both the meaning and the pronunciation of the kanji they accompany. And then they are also used to write the particles and word endings - for example, "-shimasu" ("-します") is a common verb form ending.
Anyway, the result of this is that when I look at signs, I get a strange combination of meaning and sounds in my head. Mostly there isn't quite enough of either yet to be able either to understand the full meaning or to read the whole thing aloud (I expect when I can do the latter I'll be able also to do the former, since knowing what sounds to assign to the kanji is related to knowing their meaning), but with very simple signs, I know what they 'say' even if I don't know what they say. Since my way of understanding, absorbing and remembering is to read things out loud to myself, or at least say them in my head when I see them, this results in some funny meaning-sound hybrids. For example, this, in my head, says: "pull-ku":
And here, I can understand 出 as the character for "come out", although I'm not sure what it's doing there; I can read "pe-e-pa-a", for 'paper' and then I know 押 means "push", as I see it every day on the other side of the door pictured above, so "PUSH バタン を 押します"
becomes: "PUSH ba-ta-n o pushimasu".
This reminds me of another instance of "push" giving rise to bastardisation / hybridisation of congruent-sounding words: my Mexican friend Laura, trying to explain to me in English how to lock her car door, told me to "push the manish!" But what is a manish? Well, what she wanted to say was "empuja la manija", 'manija' being the Latin Spanish word for 'door handle'. So if "empuja" becomes "push", why wouldn't "la manija" become "la manish"? Makes sense to me...
