| Why I Still
Can't Speak Japanese |
| But Still
Trying |
| By Anna Miller |
| Every time
I think about it, I cringe. The anger is trapped inside, compounded be
the anger and embarassment of countless other incidents. Often my friends
back home marvel at my ability to live in Japan and it is at times like
this, when I feel so worn out and with nowhere to turn, that I feel about
ready to pack it in. Of course, ten minutes later, there`s always something
new and interesting to catch my interest and revive me. But for those ten
minutes, I am completely lost. This time it was a package that didn`t arrive
when I thought it would arrive. I had received word from the post office
that a package had come for me from the US. It was my camera which
had been sent 6 months ago and had failed to arrive. It had finally been
found about two weeks ago and, against my better judgement, sent again
to Japan. |
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| Not being
a housewife, I am rarely home for two hours in the daytime and so I cleared
my schedule and gave the post office my choice of times for them to deliver
the package.
To make a long
story short, I guess my ability to communicate those times in Japanese
fell short of what was needed.
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I ended up waiting
two hours, calling
the post office and finding out that they were in fact
coming in a two-hour window later in the day. At a time when I would
not be home. I fumed, tryed to express my anger in Japanese,
and set up another date for my two-hour wait. |
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| And yes, despite
having been in Japan for almost two years now, I still cannot functionally
speak the language. And yes, I have expended considerable time and effort
studying it. And just in case my intelligence thus comes into question,
I can think of many, many foreigners in the same position. We`re all living
in a society where we will always be foreigners. We`re all living
on the outside of a society, everyday grasping at words, signs, information,
anything that will help us survive.
The beginning
student of the Japanese language often feels a sense of despair, of being
overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the task. Scholars do not
know the exact origin of Japanese. Before the 6th century, it only existed
as a spoken language. Today, Japanese consists of three written and three
spoken forms. The most difficult of the written forms, by, far is kanji. |
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Offshore
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| Kanji
(characters which are mini-representations of the words they stand for)
was brought over from China and adapted to the Japanese language. In order
to read a newspaper, it is necessary to know at least 2,000 kanji. Each
of these characters has, on average, 7 to 8 strokes each. Not only must
you memorize the shape and stroke number of each characer, there are also
at least two, and often more, pronunciations of each. Take a look at, for
example, the Chinese character for money, gold and metal, ?. The kanji
has 8 strokes in all and two different common pronunciations, kane and
kin. Imagine trying to memorize pictures that, after, centuries of evolution,
have no clear correlation to their actual meanings. Then multiply that
by 2,000. Do that and you have got 1/6 of the language down.
The other two
forms of writing are quite easy by comparison. Hiragana and Katakana
have 45 characters each. The first five letters in both languages are the
vowel sounds and the rest are a combination of a consonant and a vowel
sound (except for the `n` sound). Hiragana and katakana are similar
to the Englsh alphabet in that each character represents a sound and it
is the combination of those sounds which form words. For foreigners, Hiragana
seems to be the most straight forward of the written languages. |
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| Words written
in Hiragana are Japanese words which can be subsequently translated into
English or any other foreign language. Katakana, on the other hand,
is at turns extremely easy and extremely hard to comprehend. What the Japanese
have done is taken words from several different languages and included
them in their own. The vast majority of Katakana words are technical words
and words borrowed from the English language, but there also many words
borrowed from German, French, and other Western languages.
At this
point, an English-speaking student of Japanese would probably breathe
a sigh of relief and think `finally, words that I can relate to. Well,
he or she would be right, but only to a certain extent. I have spent
sometimes as much as two full minutes trying to figure out just exactly
which English word has been borrowed. English cannot be exactly written
or spoken in the Japanese language. The same sounds do not exist.
For example, when I first came to Japan I made plans to meet a friend at
a McDonald`s near a train station. |
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| I got to the
station but had no idea where the McDonald`s was. Easy, right?
All I had to do was go up to someone and say “McDonald`s” with the
end of the word raised in a questioning tone. I found a policeman.
Even better, I thought, policemen in Japan are often asked directions and
so have large maps for this very purpose. So, I went up to him and with
a quizzical look said “McDonald`s?” No reply. It was
then that I remembered. Although McDonald`s is an American company
with an English name, here they pronounce it differently. I tried
“MacDonald`s?” Nothing. I tried again, “Macudonald`s?”
Still nothing. Finally, after three or four tries, he finally understood
I was looking for `Macudonaludo` I was quite late for my friend.
Except for the `n` sound, all consonant sounds in Japanese are followed
by a vowel sound. This often forces me to try pronouncing a word
a number of different ways before I can pronounce it in the Japanese way.
The other
side to mastering the Japanese language is, of course, spoken communication.
There are three levels of speaking, informal, semi-formal, and formal.
The saving grace for foreigners in terms of the spoken language is that
very little is expected of us and much is forgiven. Japanese themselves
experience difficulty when having to chose which level of the language
to use for each situation. Luckily, I have not had to meet the royal
family and I have generally found everyone else willing to ignore my social
inadequacies. Of course, often the opposite will happen, where so
little is expected of me that when I do attempt to speak in Japanese, people
think that I am speaking in English. They are so positive because
of what I look like that I have no Japanese ability and they are so afraid
of having to understand and communicate in English that they literally
freeze up. Sometimes, with quite a lot of exasperation, I have tried
to calm the other person down (I have never seen people get so worked
up about the prospect of having to speak English!) so that I could
show them I was in fact speaking their own language.
So, it is at
times possible to convice the person I am speaking to that I do know some
Japanese and, if they are patient, to make myself understood. But
to speak well is another matter. Japanese sentence structure is fundamentally
different from that of English. Take, for example, the sentence `I
am playing outside.` In Japanese, the equivalent is `watashi
wa soto ni asobimase.` `Watashi` means `I`, `wa`
means `am`, `soto` means `outside`, `ni` means
`to` and `asobimasu` means `playing`. In Japanese,
the verb comes at the end of a sentence. This structure by itself
causes the native English speaker to completely change his/her way of thinking
in order to speak in Japanese. I teach English in Japan. When
I see my students translating a sentence directly from Japanese in their
heads before trying to say the English sentence out loud, I know that they
will invariably mix-up word placement. I no longer get frustrated
at them, though, I just try to steer them away from direct translation
and try to get them to approach English as a language completely different
from their own. That task might be easy when you`re just learning
languages at a young age, but by the time you get out of school, changing
your way of thinking becomes a daunting task.
With all
of these difficulties, I find that after almost two years here, I still
cannot speak Japanese with the first graders that I teach. I
have learned to live in a country where basic communication eludes me.
When I go to the supermarket, I find the clerk and ask him/her to read
out the ingredients of packages. When I go to a hair salon, I bring
in a picture of the style I would like to get. When I get electricity
bills, I have my Japanese friends translate them for me.
This summer
I will be immersing myself in the Japanese language for two weeks at a
language school. To be honest, as bad a student as I am, I love
studying Japanese. As hard as it is and as much as it makes everyday
life so difficult, it is a beautiful language with history and culture
embedded in it. So I keep at it and hope that one day, I just might
be able to pay that water bill without help.
To contact
Anna Click Here |
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