Narrative Disorder… in Japan!

The subject of learning Japanese while one is living here can get a little heated. There are those who don’t want to learn the language at all, for various reasons and there are those (many of them in the blogosphere) who think none of those reasons could possibly be legitimate and subscribe to the wtf-of course-you-should-learn-the-language-what-are-you-some-arrogant-jumped-up-tourist-learn-the-language-or-gtf-out-of-the-country opinion.   Though I lean towards the learning the language side, the latter opinion is a touch harsh and, if examined honestly, based more on principle than practicality.  So, I thought I’d explore the question of how much, or little, Japanese one really needs to live here from a practical and perhaps a little more compassionate point of view.

To calm those reading this who are already sitting with tight chests, faces growing red and poised to skip straight to the bottom and flame me in a comment I’ll get this over with: OF COURSE there is no such thing as too much Japanese. And, also of course, utterly refusing to learn any Japanese and expecting everyone to understand your language (even if it is English) in all situations and doing the good ol’ shouting-slowly-as-if-they-are-deaf-or-stupid is plain boorish - there’s no excuse for it. But, as always, I want to pay respect to the people at whom these blog posts are mostly aimed - the expat wives,  people often forgotten by the young buck gaijin blogger crowd (and I say that with affection ) who blithely rant about being here voluntarily and about what “should” be done. 

Expat wives and their families are here for a finite amount of time, the average being three years but that is exaggerated by a small number of people who stay for much longer periods (and somehow remain on the ICT roll instead of being transferred permanently, lucky buggers!) I have only met two ICT’s here (remember 176 of them arrived just in the week we did) who are here for more than two years and many are here for 1 year (some 6 months but you don’t get to bring your family for that small a stint). Fact: you will not become fluent in that period of time even if you put an inordinate amount of time into it - and most expat wives don’t actually have that much time.

Most expat wives are, or suddenly find themselves happily on the brink of being, mothers. They have a husband who is basically absent, thanks to the hours they work here, and children to help settle in to this new country who had, potentially, only just got settled and made friends in the previous one. Spending more time than necessary learning a language which you have no chance at becoming fluent in, is just plain impractical unless you passionately want to do it and no one should be made to feel guilty if they don’t. Better to work out what you need to know to help you live well here and focus on that. 

That being said, let me give one little suggestion which may actually be a bonus for an expat wife with children. If your children are going to learn Japanese at school you have, I think, something that those of us without children don’t have - the best teacher in the world! If you get right in there with them, learn Hiragana with them and follow along with their work you will be likely to pick up a lot and you’ll have a great bonding experience. Every kid uprooted from home would, I’m sure, love the opportunity to teach Mum or Dad a thing or two - so why not Japanese!

So on with the advice! *Note - I originally had a LOT of kana in this post but unfortunately it seems Live Writer could not input it properly to WordPress and I have no idea how to find out why not Sorry.

Doesn’t everyone speak English over there anyway?

The simple answer is: speak English, no. I am told that every Japanese high school graduate will have completed at least five years of English language study - this does not translate into speaking English. Both anecdotal evidence and discussions with Japanese tell me that those five years are spent learning to read and write English with very little, if any, emphasis on speaking or listening to the language which means that most Japanese are quite timid about speaking English, especially if they have given it a try and found you didn’t understand (exactly the same as us in Japanese, ne?)

I noted in Tokyo that many more people were far more fluent in spoken English and were appropriately more confident in speaking it - but these were mostly people who had been hired for their English skill, at the hotel for example.

Nevertheless, it is surprising how little you really need to use Japanese at all if you are just living your life as usual - shopping and keeping the family going. With charades and a basic smattering of phrases and an ear and mouth tuned to “katakana Engrish” you can get along fine for everyday excursions (as long as you know you can call on a translation service in an emergency - most consultant companies which move you over here will give you details on that.)

Where to start? Katakana

As I outlined in a post several months ago there are actually three types of the “Japanese writing”: Katakana; Hiragana and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are the two alphabets which are the straight out phonetic scripts - which means if you learn them you will be able to pronounce anything you see written in them by simply sounding them out. Except for a few extra combinations of symbols in Katakana, the syllables both scripts represent  are the same, the difference between them is purely visual (katakana being somewhat more angular) but only those words considered to be natively, or “purely” Japanese are written in Hiragana.  Katakana is used to write those words which are borrowed from other cultures whether English, French, Chinese or even Swedish.

So, why start with Katakana?

First, katakana is EVERYWHERE. It’s very trendy, or so it seems, to use the non-Japanese word for things, even where there is a legitimate Japanese word - especially in restaurants and cafes and other such tourist frequented places.  Shop and company names, even if they are Japanese, are more often in katakana it seems - the first katakana that I read without thinking was Bic Camera  and I’m sure I’m not alone in that!  So it’s very useful to find shops and such.

Second, if you can read katakana there is a huge chance that you will, after rolling it round your tongue for a bit, realise that it is actually an English word and you know what it means! For example in a restaurant you might see ko-ra  (cola) and  ko-hee, hoto, aisu(coffee, hot, iced) or even ba-ga (burger.)  And this is why I suggest katakana before Hiragana - even if you are lucky enough to see a word spelled completely in Hiragana rather than a combination of Hiragana and kanji, you still need to translate the word - not so with katakana! If you know a little French, you’ll be even better off, in Nagoya at least it seems there is a lot.

Finally, I have a third, more subtle reason for you: you will be training your ear.  No matter how little Japanese you intend to learn, you will want to be able to hear people clearly, at the least to recognise your own name!  There will be phrases repeated at you that you will want to pick up eventually so that you can respond properly - for example being asked if you have your loyalty card or whether you want hashi for your konbini lunch and whether you want it heated for you. If you don’t want to spend your entire stint in Japan in a fog of Charlie Brown’s teacher-style “Wah wah wah”ing, you will want to tune your ear to the syllables being spoken.

In my opinion, the best way to tune your ear is to hear your own language spoken with a heavy accent so that you have a reference point from which to work when you strive to change your mouth shapes to achieve the sounds of the other language - katakana gives you exactly that!  If you spend sometime getting used to the extra vowels the Japanese insert into their spoken English and the changes from ‘v’ to ‘b’ and ‘h’ to ‘f’  etc… you will also be able to make yourself better understood as the Japanese may recognise words they were taught to read rather than pronounce.

For a great site to help you drill your katakana, in various types of font, too, you can go to Real Kana

What about Hiragana and Kanji, then?

Well, if you found learning katakana easy and relatively painless then, by all means, learn Hiragana but it will be fairly useless to you without learning kanji, too. I know Hiragana but I have not yet begun to learn any kanji and so I could spend hours on trains reading “kanji imasu”?”kanji imasen” so the most I know is that there is something that I could do or something that is somehow in the negative but I have no idea what because the rest of the verb is in kanji!  So my advice is that Hiragana and kanji can be put in the “only needed if I’m going to learn the language” column.  You will come across various kanji in your day to day life (like on the stop signs for example) and you will learn them because you will be prompted to ask about them and then you will have the context required to make the memory stick.

There must be some words I really need to know?

Of course there are and here’s a list of things to learn before you arrive (if possible.)

Numbers
The Japanese have a basic set of numbers which you should learn into the thousands and tens of thousands for money. When it comes to counting things, though, the Japanese have different variations on the number words which go with different suffixes depending on what it is you are counting.  Don’t worry too much about it as you will gradually pick up the correct counting suffixes as you go (you learn that the suffix for “floor”, as in second floor, is “kai” very quickly as your lift announces each floor it stops on in your hotel!) To start with, though, learn the basic counting which children are first taught and which will be okay to cover everything until you learn better - the basic starts with “hitotsu, futatsu, mitsu,” that’s one, two, three of something where “ichi, ni, san” is just one, two, three.

Money.  
Leaving the actual exchange rates aside, the Japanese don’t really have the equivalent of the word “dollar” and instead count in “en” (which is where ‘yen’ comes from) and is the equivalent to a cent (meaning it is the base currency). You will need to get used to dealing in hundreds of yen instead of dollars and thousands of yen instead of tens of dollars etc… but it is fairly easy as it is straight numbers with en on the end.  Supermarket shopping will really help you with this - not just in the obvious way when working out your payment at the end but the check out person will say the price of each item they have just scanned as it comes up - even if they scan 6 of the same things in a row  they will say the price six times - so if you listen and watch the price coming up you will get used tot he money really quickly!

The Usual Pleasantries

Such as:  (note - once again apologies for the lack of kana, when it comes to the Romaji, English letters, a twofold warning - first, I haven’t learned my Japanese using romaji and two, there are different ways to write things so it may be different to what you are used to - this is one of the reasons I refuse to learn Japanese in romaji, with kana there is less confusion about pronunciation.)

Good morning = ohaio gozaimasu - used till about 11am 

Good day = konnichi wa - any time is cool

Good Evening =  konban wa  - use after 5ish or sundown

Please (as in please do sthg for me) = onegaishimasu

Please (as in please give sthg to me) =  kudasai

Please (as in please, do come in or feel free to do sthg) =  douzo - as in “please do come inside” or “please do take my seat” if you are offering a seat to an elderly person on a train - in these cases you only need the word douzo and the gesture toward the inside or the seat.

I’m sorry (for doing something wrong)  = komenasai - a bow works well with this one … as with all of these really lol

Excuse me/Thank you (for going to such trouble for me) =  sumimasen - use this when pushing through a crowd as “excuse me” or as a “thank you” if someone picks up something you have dropped or puts themselves out in some courteous way

Thank you = (doumo) arigatou (gozaimasu) - add gozaimasu to be polite, i.e, all the time, and all three to be extra polite (as far as I understand)

Do you speak English?  Eigo ga hanasemasuka? 

I don’t speak Japanese. Nihongo ga hanasemasen.

There will be countless other phrases you will gradually learn during your stay and it will be made easier if you have tuned your ear by learning katakana.

A Last note on addresses

You will note fairly quickly that the Japanese address system is difficult, to say the least. The system is based around blocks rather than street names and numbers and all but the largest of Japanese roads have no name at all. This is why when you manage to ask someone where something is they will give you a long list of directions and buildings it is near. I suggest that you have your address written in Kanji and keep it with you on either business type cards or even in a small notebook which you carry everywhere so that you can just show it to people when you need it.  This still may not help, though, I have found that many people (particularly taxi drivers) don’t know how to find our address even when looking at the kanji and so it is best to just tell them the station nearby and the name of the biggest road and then wave madly saying migi! (right!) or hidari! (left!)  and then Hai! Ima! (Yes! Now!)  So get to know the routes to your house that you might need to guide a taxi along!

I think that will do for yet another ridiculously long post! I hope it is useful and that it has put your mind to rest if you were losing sleep about the language issue. 

If anyone who has been through the move has any other thoughts or phrases to add - please do pop them in the comments - every bit helps!

Any native English speakers living in Japan will have experienced Japanese English speakers/students when lost for either words or courage flip out their electronic dictionaries and deftly tap away with their thumbs till they come up with the English word they need. At this point they will either show you the screen or say the word, depending on their level of confidence, and instil in said native English speaker denshi jisho envy. If only it could be so easy to find the right word from the other direction… to BIC CAMERA POST HASTE!

Unfortunately, browsing of the denshi jisho available in Japan quickly deflates one’s excitement - they are so clearly made for Japanese learning English and not the other way round. If you have an intermediate or above knowledge of Japanese I’m sure they would  be great and I know many translators use the big ones with the extra technical/medical etc… dictionaries but they really are inaccessible for the complete beginner.

First, only the Canon Wordtank series has an OS available in English so even working out how to use them is less than transparent and the second main restriction is that they simply contain the wrong dictionaries for us. Say you want to know what a particular kanji means - now assuming you have bought one of the new ones which allow you to draw the kanji on the device and therefor you don’t need to know the furigana to type in order to look it up at all, the dictionary meaning you first get will be in Japanese and you then have to translate that by “jumping” to the Japanese to English dictionary to translate whichever word you highlighted in the first definition - assuming your model has that “jump” function. What’s more, you have to keep re-entering the kanji to get back to the definition to “jump” again if the first word you translated wasn’t enough for you to understand the meaning.  And still you are unlikely to find the translation you need unless you know for sure you have the starting kanji of the compound (as most will only let you search for kanji in the first place of a compound) and further still, only the very expensive models have extensive Japanese to English dictionaries 50,000yen upwards. SO, the upshot is - there is no cheap and cheerful denshi jisho that will work for a beginner AND there isn’t really an expensive one which will do the job either until you are far more advance in your language.

What about that DS lite kanji dictionary? I hear you ask. Well I have to say that Superman bought this one before we left for Japan and he has had good success with it. It doesn’t require that you know keystroke order and he says he uses it at work quite a bit. It is, however, only for kanji and again the application itself is all Japanese so it takes a bit of working out.

But all is not lost for those who want a true denshi jisho for English (or German or some other languages for that matter) speakers!! A lovely guy named Peter who lives in Japan has taken it upon himself to meet the need of this rather large niche of people by providing a product which is actually far beyond a denshi jisho. It’s not his day job but his commitment to improving his systems and his customer service wouldn’t give that away!

All the information you could possibly need is on his site: Japanese Language Tools Site the site itself is mostly text and screenshots doesn’t look that swish but he doesn’t need it - the system speaks for itself. In brief, he offers a fully reconditioned, recent model ( I chose the Dell Axim x51v, though there is another option) PDA with a dictionary application called Edict and a several dictionaries including Eijiro/Waeijiro installed as well as a range of more advanced dictionaries which you opt to either have installed on your original  system or can later download or buy on memory card if and when you feel your language needs more. He also offers the whole system on card or for download IF you already have a PDA which is setup to read Japanese text as well as English. If you are in Japan, though, the full system is the only thing which is worth getting as PDAs are not available here and the whole system costs about as much as buying a brand new PDA which you would still have to set up to be compatible in the first place but of course it would be up to you.

Why I love it!

Drawing Kanji: Obviously, being a PDA and a touch screen, you can write your kanji directly on the screen - it does not seem to require a stroke order at all but if you are at all interested in learning it, the kanji dictionary (”kanjidic” hehe) will give you not only the meaning but also a stroke order diagram for next time! This is what I have used it for most of all - checking the kanji on food in the supermarket or to work out what mysterious pieces of paper with my name and address on them in the mail are lol!

Cross Searching: This doesn’t just mean being able to search in all dictionaries (which you can do) but searching for more than one word at a time so that you can actually find phrases in both languages for example you can put in “reside” “for” and you will get example sentences for how to tell someone how long you have lived in a place (very useful). Three days after I received my PDA I got a failure to deliver notice for a package I was expecting. Using Kanjidic and Daijirin I worked out that they were keeping the package for me at a post office but I couldn’t quite get the kanji for what was clearly the place but definitely wasn’t Kakuouzan (place name kanji is notoriously difficult, working on different rules and so I wasn’t surprised it didn’t find a local place name though it was probably user error anyway!) So I mosied up to my very very local post office tapping away at my dictionary and by the time I got there I was able to ask at which post office the package was being held and which train station and exit it was near. That seems pretty basic, I know, and I had many of the words I need already from the study I’ve done but there were some key words I needed to actually make my communication work and the PDA made it easy because it allows for cross searches (unlike most denshi jisho) so I was able to search for the phrase “pick up” and get an example sentence I didn’t quickly get by putting in “collect”.

Clipboard facility: Like any windows PDA, you can highlight any word or words and put them on a clipboard for pasting into any other application and is sooo useful if you are using the dictionary to decipher more than one word or kanji at a time.

Customer Service

I sent my first query email on a weekend, had a response from Peter on Monday and had my system in my hand the Sunday after (mail 7days a week in Japan)! The PDA looks absolutely new - came in all the Dell packaging including a sync and charge cradle and all the cables you would expect in a new PDA. It also comes with CDs and license keys etc… for all the software - there is nothing dodgy going on here! So how much was it? Well the full system on the Axim starts at 55,000yen - which is where any denshi jisho with even a basic set of Japanese to English dictionaries and a kanji drawing facility would cost - and you can add options/dictionaries from there. I added one extra dictionary to the standard set and you can see to the left all the choices I have on mine. Yes, you can get the Kenkyusha intermediate and the big one (he would have to get you a price for the big one though) BUT you may not even need them as it has dictionaries not available to the Japanese denshi jisho which will likely do you just as well.  Of course you also have a fully functional PDA as well - it’s my calendar and alarm clock and everything but my phone now!

Peter is absolutely lovely (from the emails, I haven’t actually met him) and will happily answer any questions you have before buying - just fill in the contact form with just the minimum required details and type your query in the space, he won’t be mad it’s not an immediate order and he will answer!

Last week, after our Monday Japanese lesson, I finally decided to take the plunge and learn Katakana before the next lesson. I had been weirdly worried that if I learned Katakana too quickly I would forget my Hiragana but that was of course just silly and I can now read both, if slowly. Nevertheless I did kind of overdo it (who, me? hehe)  On the morning of the third day I woke up to find a wash cloth on my bedside table. it took me a couple of minutes to remember waking at about 2 am convinced there was katakana written all over the bedroom walls and actually getting up to get the cloth to wipe them off. I remember returning to the bedroom and actually wiping at the walls and thinking “oh it’s gone” and climbing back into bed!

For those wondering, Katakana is one of the two Japanese alphabets (the other being Hiragana) both alphabets are phonetic, each character representing a syllable which ends in a vowel (except ‘n’) which is why many English words which have been adopted by the Japanese are given extra vowels within the spelling and at the end (for example “aisukuri-mu” is ice cream!) All the sounds in the Hiragana Alphabet are the same as in Katakana but because Katakana is used for foreign words there are a few extra combinations made with Katakana to make unusual sounds.  Unlike most European languages, the Japanese have no issue with adopting words from other languages but spelling them with Katakana is how that is distinguished and it does make it much easier - you know you should be reading the word with a different mindset. Some words are hybrids which are half foreign word and half Japanese so will be written with both kana! If you see katakana it is very likely to be an English or European word which you would be able to work out even if it’s not immediately recognizable!

You can see here how, at least when not hand written, the Katakana is much more angular than the Hiragana so they stand out next to each other. You will also see that some characters (in both kana but mostly in Katakana) are incredibly similar. I found the best thing to do was to get some little flash cards and sort out the ones that are similar and spend some time working out their differences (the difference between shi and tsu, for example, is the angle of the two small strokes and the starting point of the larger line - though the pen weight is not always obvious in some typefaces.)  I also found that seeing the handwritten scripts also can highlight differences because the hand written script will show the pen weight and is a more flowing, connected version and you can get a better feel for it.

The Real Kana site is a wonderful tool to drill your kana - you can even select different scripts to drill to really test yourself!

Of course the Japanese also use approximately 2000 Kanji which are actually Chinese characters. Most Japanese will only know about half that unless they are particularly educated in language and many people do exactly what we will do which is carry around an electronic dictionary to help them translate those with which they are not familiar.

To anyone learning Japanese, I highly recommend learning at least Hiragana to start and even getting your text book in the kana version if it is possible. I really believe it helps enormously with pronunciation but also on a more subtle level it seems to put you into a frame of mind which simply sees the kana and learns the meaning with less temptation to translate (usually slightly imprecisely) in between. I may be totally wrong about what’s happening in my head but that’s what it feels like to me!

I also found this chart which shows the evolution of Hiragana from their original chinese characters - warning: if you are learning Japanese from anything other than a Chinese mother tongue you may not want to confuse yourself!

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Every Monday at 6pm and Thurs at 5:30 pm for the last few weeks, a 6ft, willowy Japanese woman named Akiko (written with the kanji meaning “bright”or “shining” & “girl”) comes to our humble flat to teach us Japanese. She will do this for the next few months in preparation for our move to Nagoya in the last weeks of June so that Superman can begin work at the home office of the large car manufacturer he works for (who transferred us from Melbourne to Sydney just over a year ago.) As a lover of japanese design and animation since a small child, this trip will be a dream come true - to actually LIVE there for 18months or so rather than to just be a tourist is how I have always hoped to see the world. The language requirement of such an adventure is of course paramount and is, or so I’m told, a major consideration which stops many Australians (and probably English-speakers in general) from accepting transfers to countries in which English is not spoken at least as a second language by the majority of citizens. That Australians particularly, who grow up in this cornucopia of cultures, surrounded by other languages and English spoken with accents thereof, are afraid or even slightly reticent about language seems both sad and absurd to me - especially when the company is providing the cost of the language study.

We are not complete new-comers to Japanese, as fans of anime we are certainly used to it’s sounds and rythms and we even studied it for a few months in 2004 - just before we decided to take the plunge and allow me to give up work to write and had to tighten our belts - so we knew what to expect. Being presented with hiragana was not an issue as we had already learned that it is actually far easier to learn in kana than in romaji/roman characters because it is phonetic. What I didn’t expect, though, was that learning Japanese would effect my rusty school-girl French and my approach to language in general.

I have long heard the theory that it is easier to learn a third language after learning a second and easier still a fourth and so on… I have always assumed that this referred to having learned a second language to fluency but my French is far from fluent (even given that Superman is right that I have always underestimated how good it is) and yet I am finding a profound effect. Of course there is the obvious issue of being familiar with the general concepts of language learning but something more fundamental seems to be happening to my brain. As I learn new words I’m finding that the French for the same word or phrase will come to mind totally unbidden and that my entire world is becoming more abstract. Objects and actions are less tied to the words which name them - in a fundamental way. It’s difficult to describe, and when I do it sounds silly and basic but I’ll try anyway.

When we are children and we are told what something is called we are not literally told “that is named ‘a book’,” we are told “that IS a book.” Perhaps we take on a metaphysical belief about the essence of ‘book’ so that when we are taught other languages we simply learn by rote that “un livre” is another name for what is actually, fundamentally ‘a book.’ I wonder if the words of the mother tongue continue to be the fundamental basis not just of all language but of reality itself unless something is done to breakdown that metaphysical conditioning.

Those who become fluent in a language know the importance of the moment when you start to ‘think in

‘ When you are no longer translating, even at extreme speed, then you are genuinely fluent but this is not what I am referring to. When I was still studying French and even now when I am watching a French movie or le Journal in the mornings I have those moments (not for terribly long when it comes to le Journal I’m afraid). I know exactly what is going on, I laugh at the jokes when it’s appropriate for the French rather than the English subtitles and it will take me a jarring moment to switch back to thinking in English if someone speaks to me or asks me to translate precisely for them. But this new thing isn’t just ‘thinking’ in another language - I certainly don’t know enough Japanese to come close to doing that - it’s thinking outside language, observing beyond language to the core of things without need to impose a name or even a description until there is a requirement to communicate … everything simply IS.Hmm sounds fairly zen, really, doesn’t it?

I wonder if children raised with multiple languages from birth have a completely different metaphysical outlook?

After we arrive in Japan, we will continue to be given language lessons for the duration of our stay so there is a real possibility of achieving more than a survival level of fluency. Perhaps I will even be able to make a rudimentary translation of Shadowkeeper for pitching to the Japanese anime production houses which have inspired and influenced my writing since I was a child. At the very least I should be able to collaborate intelligently with a translator. Standby for posts in kana!