Nihongojouzu

Zakennayo!

Jim Breen's EDICT dictionary returns the following definitions for ざけんなよ (zakennayo):

        "Fuck you!"

        "Don't fuck around"

        "Don't be a screw off"

The full title of this book is Zakennayo!: The Real Japanese You Were Never Taught in School but perhaps it should have been "Zakennayo!: Scoring with J-girls Using Out-of-Date Slang from the Bubble Period". The title and the cover graphic - a guy trying to pick up a girl - give away the theme of the book.

Him: Derumo mitai kanojo ocha shinai?
Her: Ge, gaijin eigo wakannai yo.

Him: You look like a model - fancy a cuppa?
Her: Eh? A foreigner! I don't speak English.

I am no expert on the street slang in Tokyo circa 2006 but I doubt the word "derumo" (an inversion of "moderu") still does the rounds. When I asked one of the guys in my office he suggested it was from 20 years ago. Zakennayo! was written in 1995, and it is showing its age. Unlike Making Out in Japanese, which showcases casual speech but shies away from ephemeral slang, Zakennayo! revels in expressions which were probably dated by the time the book was printed:

hama o "a hammer boy" (as in MC Hammer); a J-boy who dresses and acts "black"

There are many such gems, but let's not dismiss the book so lightly. Zakennayo! has an excellent hook - it follows the adventures of a bunch of 20-somethings in Tokyo, chronicling their adventures linguistic and otherwise.

Kenny - an American English teacher and all-round stud. Very pera pera.
Nigel - a British Newswriter. Speaks like a girl. No game whatsoever.
Sharon - an Australian hostess. Speaks Japanese, fancies Taro.
Taro - a Japanese-American from Hawaii. Never mistaken for a gaijin.
Keiko - a Japanese girl. One of the targets of Kenny's affections.

The book covers the events of one evening in Tokyo - think Melrose Place in Japan - and from the get-go the questions loom:  Will Kenny get lucky? Will Nigel learn to stop speaking like a girl? Will Taro notice Sharon? Will Sharon make the first move? Who will Keiko sleep with? Overlook the dodgy, outdated slang and there is a lot of vocab to be gleaned from the pages as the characters make their way around the city. A lot of the words are vulgar to the point that you probably will never need to use them, but just as everyone looks up the word "fuck" in the dictionary as a child (at least those of us born before the Internet), it is always nice to satisfy one's curiosity and more importantly, to understand what is being said by those around you. After all, knowledge is power.

A quick look at the chapter headings reveal the nature of the beast:

1. Alien Invaders

Gaijin da! (It's  a foreigner!)
Talking about Gaijin
Facts of Life for English Teachers

2. The ABC's (sic) of Japanese

Girl Talk
Teen Talk for the Joys of Sex

3. Street Jive

Shibuya
Kiddy City (NB Nothing to do with paedophilia!)
Tea Time
Picking Up
Putting Down
Regrets

4. Waiting at Hachiko

Hachiko Statue
Getting Picked Up
Who's That?
Being Admired

V. Talking About People

Omotesando Cafe
Waitress Watching
Like a Peach
Shut Up!

V. The Gay Life

Ni-Chome
Homosexual Slang
Homosexual Heaven
Lesbians Only

VII Hookers and Gangsters

Kabuki-Cho
Red Light
Mama-san
Time to Run

VIII Disco City

Roppongi
Beauties, Sluts and Bimbos
Bodicon Dancers
Sugar Daddy
Bottoms Up!

IX Foreign Drinking Holes

Gaijin Bar
Bimbo Heaven
Curfew Time

X After Hours

Donut Shop
Chance Encounter

XI Romance and Lowlife

A Walk in the Park
Getting Frisky

XII Talking About Sex (considering the whole book is about sex, kind of redundant)

Tryst at Maruyama-cho
Getting Ready for Bed
Sleepless in Tokyo
Coming Soon!

So is it worthwhile purchasing? I confess I received my copy from a friend who was leaving Japan, but I did read it cover to cover.

Why it's bad:
1. Romaji - your reading won't improve.
2. Woeful as a phrasebook unless you spend most nights trying to pick up - even then, if you can't come up with better lines that those from Zakennayo! you're in trouble.
3. Out of date slang
4. Everyone is a stereotype

Why it's good:
1. Romaji means that absolute beginners can read Zakennayo! straight away
2. There are a lot of words and phrases that you might not find anywhere else. For example, if you plug  ネコ　(neko) into  EDICT or Eijiro they will tell you it means "cat". Zakennayo! will tell you that it also means, in gay parlance, the receiver, or "bottom". (タチ　(tachi) is the "top")  .
3. Kenny occasionally gives good advice. Nigel does speak like a girl, and would be wise to learn more casual speech patterns.
4. The cultural references, though over the top, are often spot on - people do meet at Hachiko, there are gaijin bars filled with people aiming to bridge the Japan/Gaikoku gap and it is not uncommon for people to wind up in love hotels after a night of drinking (how else do so many rabu ho stay in business?)
5. It covers the gay and lesbian scene, something a lot of books avoid.
6. Some of the situations are scarily accurate.
7. It is funny. It is soooo bad it is good.

Some people dismiss Zakennayo! at face value, but it has an irresistible charm, like a lecherous but amusing uncle at a party who gets away with saying nearly anything because of his unabashed straightforwardness and rakish wit. As one Amazon reviewer puts it:

Zakennayo! is a refreshing romp through Tokyo in the disguise of a book about slang. It's delightfully politically uncorrect and pokes fun at nearly everyone, from gaijin adventurers to the gatekeepers of Japan's insular culture. A fun read for a rainy day or any day in Japan.

This hits the nail on the head. Zakennayo! isn't a textbook, but it is amusing and occasionally useful. My advice - at your next party wait until everyone has had a few wines then break out Zakennayo! and ask your Japanese friends what phrases they would and wouldn't use. Cross out all the dodgy ones and keep the rest. And have a good laugh in the process.

• Publication Date: 1995-11-01
• ISBN: 0452275067
• Author: Philip J Cunningham, Kim Wilson Eversz
• Illustrator: Kim Wilson Brandt

Tags learning japanese | Japanese slang | study Japanese

kanjiPod

Listened to Japanese until your ears are bleeding? Want to study kanji but you left all your  flashcards at home? Help is at hand because your iPod is not only musical but literate too.

kanjiPod is a program for generating sets of files for studying kanji on the iPod via the Notes feature. Programming maetros can download the Python based source code here and get cracking putting together personalised files, while code allergic mere mortals can simply download one of three pre-compiled dictionary files:

-Shimbun + Radicals set: of 844 kanji found in newspapers
-Jōyō Kanji 1-6 set: but note that 6 kanji were cut because of filesize restrictions
-JLPT 3/4 Kanji set: (not authoritative)

The Notes function displaying the Jōyō Kanji Level 5.

Select one kanji and open a file with readings, definitions and compounds containing that kanji.

A closer view. A kanji textbook in your pocket, wherever you go.

Download kanjiPod for free  and enjoy!

Tags learning japanese | iPod | kanji

Japanese listening practice for people living outside Japan

Think that you have to live in Japan to get good at Japanese? Crap! Didn't you read the Tae Kim interview? Here's a quick example of the kinds of things those of you learning Japanese outside Japan can do to increase the amount of Japanese you are exposed to every day:

• Fire up your computer and listen to the NHK News as you eat breakfast: 10 minutes

• Grab your iPod. Jump in the car/on your bike/on the train/on the bus and listen to 2 or 3 episodes of the Learn Japanese podcast as you head to work/school: 30 minutes

• Lunchtime. Go to the Yomiuri Shimbun website and read the Japanese news online using rikaichan: 30 minutes. Then go outside - you need the exercise. Go for a walk for half an hour, listening as you go to the Yomiuri News podcast.

• Go home. You are probably tired after work/school but try not to fall asleep on the bus. Keep yourself awake by listening to Japanese music, say Orange Range: 30 minutes.

• Get home. Listen to the afternoon version of the NHK News: 10 minutes.

• Rent a Japanese DVD. Turn the subtitles off. Watch it. 120 minutes.

Total listening time: 230 minutes (give or take a few minutes because the Learn Japanese podcast has English commentary)

Total reading time: 30 minutes (I am focusing on listening, but reading the news will reinforce your comprehension of the news you listen to)

Notes:
1. This is by no means exhaustive - please add lots of suggestions to the comments section.
2. I am assuming you have an iPod and an internet connection. Then again if you don't have an internet connection I doubt you'll be reading this......If you don't have an iPod.....Christmas is only 8 months away.
3. I am assuming you don't have a significant other who is Japanese. If you do, you could easily add a couple more hours to your tally.

Tag learning Japanese | self learning | study Japanese

Learner Stories: Tae Kim of nihongo.3yen.com

I want to expand on the idea of Learner Stories and provide a series of articles, or rather case studies, of people who have reached a high level of proficiency in Japanese. Why?  To make people depressed over how much better those high achievers are? No - the exact opposite. I want to highlight language learning role-models so that people reading this blog, anyone from Japanese learning neophytes to veterans, can learn and benefit from other peoples' experiences. While it is trite to say "The only way to get better at Japanese is by using Japanese" it is also very true. True but oh-so-very dry. Bone dry. I think that reading about exactly how people achieved high levels of proficiency puts meat on the bones of this truism.

Reading the accounts of people with high proficiency in Japanese will:

1. Show you what levels of achievement are possible. (Adults can achieve near-native fluency!)
2. Expose you to new techniques, or ways of thinking about Japanese. Anyone who reads Tae Kim's account below has no excuse for saying (cue whiney voice) "but you have to live in Japan to get good at Japanese!" 
3. Give you a motivational kick in the arse - "Wow - compared to A-san I am a lazy bastard - maybe I should get up 30 minutes earlier each day and study."
4. Inspire you. There will always be people better than you - so don't let it get you down - let it pick you up.

Today's subject is the author of the intuitive and richly informative A Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, and the man behind Nihongo.3yen.com, Tae Kim.

Let's start the ball rolling - name, rank and serial number:
Tae Kim. Tae is my first name. Kim is my last.

Where do you hail from?
I was born in Korea and moved to the States when I was six. After that I moved around a bunch, mostly around the East Coast.

How long have you been studying Japanese?
I started at the beginning of my sophomore year in college, which was the Fall of 2000. My goodness, over 5 years have passed already!

Why did you start learning Japanese (and not say, French)?
Strangely enough, it was to fulfill my second language graduation requirement. Spanish totally killed me in High School (all those irregular verb conjugations!) so I was more interested in Asian Languages. It was either Chinese or Japanese and I thought I liked how Japanese sounded better.

Tell us about any classes/formal schooling you have had.
3 years in college including a term of study at Waseda.

What books - textbooks or otherwise have you found useful?
I started out with the Nakama textbook for my class. I also read "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" during my summer vacation. It was better than Nakama but the grammar explanations were not very good. The textbooks were better than nothing but I have yet to find a really good textbook that I can truly recommend. I haven't really looked at teaching materials since then.

What resources other than books have you found useful?
Jim Breen's EDICT dictionary was indispensible for my studies for a long time. I probably looked up over thousands of words on it. Nowadays there are all sorts of cool online resources, which is kind of unfair to us old folk. In any case, a good dictionary is essential (and also totally unavailable in US bookstores). I now use a Casio EX-word electronic dictionary. Other than that, finding material that is interesting and not unreasonably difficult for your level is important.

Where do you work/what do you do?
I am working in HR at Hitachi developing HR web applications.

How much Japanese do you use at work?
Everybody I work with is Japanese so I do all the development work in Japanese such as writing/reading specs, writing bug reports, etc. Unfortunately, any task that involves English usually comes to me because I'm the only native English speaker in our department.

Do you have a personal routine for studying?
Not so much nowadays. When I was really gung ho studying Japanese, I made Japanese as much a part of my life as possible. Fortunately, a lot of students from Japan were studying at my school so I made a lot of Japanese friends, got involved in the Japanese club activities and asked a lot of questions. Eventually, it came to the point where I just naturally spent at least an hour speaking Japanese every day due to the environment I managed to create for myself. I also tinkered with Japanese on the computer a lot such as installing the Japanese version of IE. I also tried to read as much Japanese as I could. I probably used the EDICT dictionary almost every day. In short, I tried to surround myself in a Japanese environment even though I wasn't in Japan.

Major achievement in Japanese?
Well, I passed into the highest Japanese level for my off-campus study at Waseda after only two years of study. The class was hardcore and I was the only one who had never been to Japan before. I mean some of these kids were practically Japanese! I was like, "Hello? Why are you in this program?"

I also passed 1-kyu for the JLPT last year (first try) but I don't think that's that big of a deal.

Most embarrassing Japanese faux pax?
Nothing that sticks in my mind but I've certainly made tons of mistakes along the way.

Oh,  I recall one partically embarrassing moment when I introduced myself by saying, キムさんです。A classic error.

What advice to people starting out learning Japanese?
Finding a good teacher is probably the most important for people just starting out. Doesn't have to be a professional teacher, just somebody who knows his stuff, can explains things easily, and is geniunly interested in helping you learn.

Also, make learning Japanese as fun as possible. The best way to do this is to find Japanese people you truly enjoy spending time with. If this isn't possible, find material that really interests you whether it's novels, comics,games, art, technology, whatever. Anyway, you should find something that will motivate you to truly enjoy learning Japanese. Also, ask lots of questions and DON'T ARGUE. Just absorb as much information as possible, keep an open mind, and use your own judgement in deciding what is correct. And be HAPPY when somebody corrects you since he or she is giving you an opportunity to improve yourself. I don't care if they correct you every other word or even syllable. Ask for more details, study up, and try again.

Finally, don't think in English. Some English thoughts can never be expressed in Japanese and vice versa. Learn the Japanese way of thinking and forget how you would say it in English. For example, you can't say, "I miss you" in Japanese. You just can't. Get over it and learn to say something else.

What advice to people who want to move from intermediate to advanced proficiency?
I think the first few steps into Japanese are the most difficult. Once you reach intermediate level, it's only a matter of grinding your way through vocab (an endless battle). Find interesting material, read, read, and read some more. And speak with Japanese people as much as possible. And always remember to enjoy yourself!

Top 5 tips for studying Japanese.
1. Meet Japanese people who will speak to you in Japanese or at least to the extent of your abilities.
2. Don't argue, just listen, ask questions, and enjoy being corrected.
3. Read as much as possible with a good dictionary and don't waste time flipping through a paper dictionary if possible.
4. Study kanji on your own along with the vocabulary. Don't wait for your teacher to spoon feed them to you. It will take far too long.
5. Enjoy yourself and include Japanese into your daily life as much as possible.

What other languages do you speak?
Korean (very badly)

Why did you write the Grammar Guide and how long did it take?
I used to hang around the about.com Japanese forum during college. I think I have a little over a thousand posts there. I started the guide because I was tired of answering the same questions over and over. I have been working on the guide on and off for over 4 years now but the bulk of it was written in the first three years I think. You can see a very old and broken version of it here:
http://www.angelfire.com/alt/japaneseguide/

Obviously, it has been greatly improved over the years.

Is language a skill, in other words is Chomsky full of crap?
Language is definitely a skill like riding a bicycle. Think about it, do you speak languages like you do math problems? It's not a cognitive process at all. I don't care how smart you are, without practice, you'll never become good at a language.

Hope that answers your questions.

Cheers
Tae Kim

Thanks Tae!

Tags | learning Japanese | study Japanese | proficiency | language learning

Onomatopoeia in Action Part 2

Following on from my earlier post about remembering sound symbolic words, here's another story with 10 more examples in context and yes, I used onomatopoeia in the title because that is what everyone uses as a search term!

Saturday morning. Hungover again. My head throbbed (ガンガン　していた）and my mouth was dry. I rolled off my futon, stood up, and immediately felt dizzy(フラフラ　した）. I shuffled to the kitchen, took a 2 litre bottle of Pocari Sweat out of the fridge and gulped down (ゴクゴク　のんだ) about half of it. It was raining outside (ザーザー　あめ　が　ふっていた）and I couldn't be bothered doing anything constructive so I spent the morning just lounging around (ゴロゴロ　していた) the TV room.

Towards the late afternoon I was feeling a bit better so I decided to clean up. I collected all of the empty beer cans 、picked up fragments of uneaten potato chips off the kotatsu and and wiped it down until it shone (ピカピカ　に　なった）. The doorbell rang. It was Mayumi, a friend of mine from the gym.  She was holding a couple of videos. I kind of fancy Mayumi so I came over all nervous (ドキドキ　していた） "C..c..come in!"　I said.

I hadn't finished cleaning. There were clothes, books and bits of party debris everywhere. Mayumi took one look and said "What a mess!" (グチャグチャ　だね！）before helping me to tidy up.

We watched one video and then Mayumi said "I'm a bit peckish" (ペコペコ　だよ) so I made a curry, opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the sofa watching the second video. Towards the end of the movie we had finished the wine and I worked up enough courage to say "Mayumi, would you like to go out to dinner next week?"

There was no response.

"Mayumi?"

But she was fast asleep, snoring gently. (グーグーねていた）

Notes
1. ガンガン: gan gan refers to a throbbing pain.　
2. フラフラ: fura fura is an unstable movement, swaying, reeling etc
3. ゴクゴク: goku goku is the sound of drinking big gulps of a cold beverage - think  water, juice or softdrink. You can use goku goku for beer but iki iki is more common in cases where the English would be "chug" or "skull".
4. ザーザー: rain goes zaa zaa. It just does. Normal, non-torrential rain that is.
5. ゴロゴロ: when you want to say you were just hanging out at home doing nothing in particular that's when you use goro goro. A cat purring is also goro goro.
6. グチャグチャ: your house, handwriting and even your feelings can all be gucha gucha
7. ピカピカ: pika pika is the shiny clean you see on TV ads for cleaning products.
8. ドキドキ: when you have nerves before giving a speech, or get excited over seeing someone your heart goes doki doki.
9. ペコペコ: peko peko actually means you are really hungry - Mayumi was being polite.　
10. グーグー: if you make a noise, no matter how slight, when sleeping, you use guu guu.

Tags learning japanese | onomatopoeia | sound symbolic words | giongo | gitaigo　| 日本語　| 擬音語 | 擬態語

More Japanese Study Blogs: nihongo.3yen.com

When I put mentioned a few blogs in my post Japanese Study Blogs I left out Tae Kim's nihongo.3yen, as anyone who read the comments section will know. I planned to do a separate review of his site and post it the same day but I was operating on a sleep deficit and crashed before getting to it.

Reasons to read Tae Kim's blog:

1. He knows his stuff (as demonstrated by his excellent online grammar.)
2. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. If I make a mistake in a post Tae Kim will point it out, and he doesn't hesitate to correct people who post comments on his blog. Of course it is a lovely feeling when someone makes a nice comment on your blog, but when someone points out a mistake they are doing you a favour because you learn something.
3. He writes good articles on how Japanese actually works, with practical examples which readers can immediately put into use.
4. His writing is both arch and wry and always entertaining.

Tags learn Japanese | blog

Japanese Study Blogs

Why read blogs about studying Japanese? Shouldn't you be studying instead? If you are spending more time reading blogs than studying then perhaps you should cut back on the blogosphere and ramp up your time in the nihongosphere, but 5 minutes a day won't kill you. Indeed, I can think of a few reasons to check out what other people are saying about studying Japanese:

Improving pronunciation

I spoke at a welcome today for a group of Chinese nationals who had come to Japan as trainees. The Japanese-to-Chinese interpreter was a woman I have worked with before, Ms Yo.

Ms Yo is a Chinese national who has been in Japan for 8 years, and her Japanese is superb. I don't just mean grammar, vocabulary and register - her pronunciation is breathtaking. As a non-native speaker of Japanese I could tell she was good but then I overheard my colleagues talking about her during the lunch which followed the welcome, with comments like "Until she said her name was Yo I thought she was Japanese!" I know that Japanese people sometimes heap effusive praise upon the simplest of utterances in Japanese by non-Japanese nationals - after all, the title of this website derives from this practice - but the remarks I heard were unguarded and genuine.

High level proficiency in Japanese is not rare amongst Chinese nationals who are long term residents of Japan - there are several Chinese nationals in my city who have lived here for 20 years and reached interpreter level in their Japanese. However, they all have noticeable Mandarin accents. It was Ms Yo's  lack of accent and her natural speaking  rhythm which made her stand out.

Ms Yo explained that living and working in Japan she is surrounded by Japanese language all the time - newpapers, workplace communications, conversations etc to the point that when she visits China her Chinese takes a few days to get back up to speed. However beyond the everyday exposure to the language there is a special technique she employs. Ms Yo said that she watches TV and copies what announcers are saying, and how they say it, shadowing them word for word.

Two lessons can be drawn from this:

1. Simply watching Japanese TV is not enough - you have to be engaged.
2. Practising speaking will help develop your fluency, but to improve your pronunciation simply practising speaking is not enough - you have to practice speaking with good pronunciation. I'm not saying an accent is a bad thing - it hasn't hindered Arnold Schwarzenegger's career - but if your goal is native or near-native pronunciation you better start talking to the TV.

Tags learning Japanese | speak Japanese | pronunciation | Japanese television | fluency

Displaying macrons in Windows XP

I confess - I was a lazy bastard and didn't use macrons when I wrote the word "romaji" in the eponymous post yesterday. Macrons are those lines above vowels which signify that the vowel sound is long, e.g. ō. They are a feature of the Hepburn system of romanisation and are very handy because doubling up vowels to show elongation results in things like "roomaji" which will screw up your pronunciation up even more than rōmaji already does. So, with a big slice of humble pie I apologise for pointing out the mote in my neighbour's eye when I should have dealt with the plank in my own and I offer my not-so-quick and dirty guide to adding macrons in XP (I am using the office computer).

1. Click the Start menu.

2. Navigate through to the Character Map palette:
    Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Character Map

    （すべてのプログラム＞アクセサリ＞システムツール＞文字コード表 for Japanese keyboards)

3. Open the Character Map, select the font  you are using, or the closest match  (this blog uses Lucida Grande but the Character Palette  had Lucida Console - close enough!)

4. Select and Copy the character you need.

5. Write a spiffy article, complete with macron enabled　rōmaji!

Tags learning Japanese | romaji | romanisation

      

Moji Firefox Extension

Another excellent innovation from the chaps at mozdev.org - the Moji extension for Firefox and Thunderbird. Moji is an integrated sidebar-dictionary aimed at helping people read Japanese (and Chinese) on the web. Simply select a single kanji or a whole word from whatever Japanese text you are reading and click on the respective button in the Moji sidebar to display the kanji reading and English meaning. The killer aspect of Moji is that any terms you look up stay in the sidebar until you erase them, so you can use Moji to read an article in Japanese, accumulate a list of all the kanji/words you couldn't read and then export that list as text or html. This is what differentiates it from say, rikaichan, which gives you the appropriate reading on the fly without letting you make a list. I'd use Moji for those times when you want to intensively study a particular article and have a record of it and use rikaichan for troublesome kanji encountered when scanning the news or reading for pleasure (so as to avoid disrupting the flow of your reading).

Moji is based on EDICT and only works from Japanese/Chinese and has a whole bunch of dictionaries available for download including  French, German and Russian. You can download Moji from the mozdev.org website.

Tags learning Japanese | kanji | Firefox