Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 203, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1918 — JAPANESE DIFFICULT TO LEARN. [ARTICLE]

JAPANESE DIFFICULT TO LEARN.

To learn to read ordinary Japanese—to say nothing of the luxury of being able to appreciate the nuances of style in Japanese composition—is the laborious effort of long years for Japanese themselves, writes “A Student of Japanese” in the New East (Tokyo). A Japanese schoolboy haS to s take lessons in penmanship for a matter of nine or eleven years and even then he may find himself hopelessly stumped by an oddity in an ordinary post card. Small wonder, then, that the attempts of Westerners to learn Japanese in their own lands have been rather heartbreaking and profitless work on the whole. Yet even so, some small measure of success has been attained now and then. The old Jesuits had Japanese to teach them in their great seminary at Macao, as some of the Spanish orders had later on at Manila in the seventeenth century.