Why
I Still Can't Speak Japanese
But
Still Trying ~ by Anna Miller
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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. 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. |
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To make a
long story short, I guess my ability to communicate those times in Japanese
fell short of what was needed. 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. 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. 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.
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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. 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. |
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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. 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.
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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. |
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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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