The glorious mysteries of the Japanese language.

This is a post to encourage all those struggling to read and write the Japanese language. Fear not! The Japanese themselves can't seem to agree on how to read and write their own bloomin' words.

Background Information The First:
I've been learning Japanese for about 8 years. I work in a Japanese office, with Japanese people, through Japanese. So I'm pretty comfortable with the language, including reading and writing it.

Background Information The Second:
I work for a fairly traditional Japanese company. In such a company every document needs to be stamped by about 49 different people. I am not kidding - you need to get a special form stamped three times just to get the official stamp of a director put on your report. It's madness, but it's how 'we' roll and I ain't gonna hate.

So the other day a Japanese co-worker was swamped. They had written a report and it needed to be circulated. This is usually done through internal mail and can take ages. I knew we needed to get this document out asap, so I offered to walk around the various departments and get it stamped.

At my first stop, I show the report to the director and he gives it the once over. He stamps it reluctantly and says, 'I'll approve this but I want to show you some mistakes in your Japanese.' Bear in mind that a native speaker wrote this and I had nothing to do with it. But being a good little Japanese, I didn't want anyone to lose face so I just smiled and said thank you. The positive-thinking part of me felt that at least he thought I could plausibly write like someone born to it. Then the next director says almost the same thing, only this time he changes about half the previous guy's corrections back and then adds a few new ones. When the third and final stamper had more input about how to make 'my' Japanese more 'adequate for a business environment' my icy smile was starting to wear a little thin.

Moral of the story. I believe there is no such thing as a perfectly correct Japanese sentence. The language is so complex and full of nuance that there's room for everyone to give their two cents and still have the sentence be right but just different. This is frustrating as hell, but the other way to look at it is that you shouldn't waste your time aiming for accuracy. Just keep plugging away using Japanese as a communication tool and once the idea is getting across, job done!