I learned something today.

A nice lady emailed me asking what this meant:

何カ国語 nan ka koku go

I told her I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t look right and asked for context. She emailed back saying a friend’s Japanese teacher gave it as an assignment and there was no context. The assignment was simply to make a sentence out of it.

This threw me for a loop. Normally 国語 kokugo means the Japanese language, but I knew it could also mean a country’s language in general. Also the カ seemed like it should be the small ヵ or ヶ as in:

(more on this on a different post next week)]

After Yumi assured me it wasn’t wrong but perhaps a little strange out of the blue, I looked it up in my Casio XD-GW9600 (In case you weren’t paying attention, the link was a cunning plug for our store).

Under the entry for 国語, the first meaning given is a general language (of a country). But the immediate examples caught my eye:

• ２か国語に通じている人 ni ka kokugo ni tsuujiteiru hito - a bilingual person
• 何か国語も話す人 nan ka kokugo mo hanasu hito - a multilingual person; a polyglot

Yumi said to think of it as 「何か国」 plus 「語」. In other words, “several countries’ languages.”

But hovering my mouse over カ国語 and using Rikaichan (If you don’t have this, get this amazing free resource! I will blog about it later) it says, “counter for languages.”

Putting all this together, the original example makes sense.

You might be saying, “Clay, you’ve studied Japanese how long and you didn’t know that?!” Yep, I didn’t know that.