I found today's interviewee via his blog, JapanNewbie, which I discovered way back in 2004 and have read on and off since then. Amusing, informative and something many blogs are not - enthusiastic. Late last year I noticed Harvey had another blog - this one geared to learning Japanese. I was intrigued. I emailed, found out that Harvey was currently enrolled at the IUC in Yokohama and knew that I had to interview him, if only to get the inside story on that esteemed establishment of Japanese learning legend. But enough of me rambling - let's hear the pearls of wisdom from today's guest (who amazingly is NOT an ex-JET!)
Let's start the ball rolling - name, rank and serial number:
What's your background? (How long have you been studying Japanese?）
I have been studying Japanese since my first year in high school in the US. That makes a total of more than 10 years with the Japanese language... Time flies.
Anyway...
I continued studying throughout university, and spent one year abroad at Nanzan University in Nagoya before graduating. After graduating, I came to Japan to work. I did the suit thing for four years in an environment where I had to use Japanese daily. I am now studying at an intensive Japanese program in Yokohama called IUC (Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies).
Why did you start learning Japanese (and not say, French)?
I received an alert email from Youtube today telling me that someone had posted a comment to the Good Learner, Bad Learner video, and when I visited the site to check it out I took a look at the related videos and found the subject of this post. I thought the video was taking the piss, because it is exaggerated to the point where I was chuckling as I watched it, but based on the comments by the author it appears to be the real deal. Now have a look at the video and we'll continue this conversation below.
This will sound harsh, but James doesn't have a good accent. He is speaking overly slowly, he pronounces "もちろん" as if it has an English "r" instead of the actual Japanese ろ, and some of his phrases are unusual.
But that's not the point. I love this video. Why?
First up, it is funny - and funny=memorable=learn. I don't think I will ever forget the translation of "げんき？” as "Spirited?" (it really equates to "How are you going?" or "What's up?".
Kojima's Japanese phrases are just the kind you will hear when you speak to Japanese friends on the phone - listen and remember them.
James is having a go - he isn't perfect, but he had the balls to put his Nihongo on display, got his message across, and he made a video from which thousands of people can learn. For this he deserves a round of applause.
Having said that, I have some constructive criticism.
Instead of James saying "あなたは” he should have said ”小島さんは”：always try to use the other person's name and avoid using anata - it is textbook Japanese, not colloquial Japanese.
When asked "こんや なに を してる？”, James says "どうして？”。I guess he is aiming for "Why, what's up?" or something similar, but the effect is kind of harsh - Kojima's questions is implicitly asking whether James has plans or not, so James should either say that he is busy or proclaim that he is indeed ready to go out for a night on the town.
Saying "もちろん” to Kojima's invitation sounds like another forced translation - more natural would have been "いいな！” or "いいんじゃない”。Rather than ”どこにいく？”、”どこにいこう？” - it has more of the feel of "Where shall we go?"
”もちろん。いいね。いこう。” Just drop the ”もちろん” and James is good to go here.
"うん、ぜひ” is fine, but "うん” should not be so forcefully enunciated that it sounds like first syllable of a Yorkshireman's pronunciation of "underwater" - "うん” is more like a nasal "hmm" (listen to how Kojima says it later on).
”マクドナルドはどう？” The hiragana are correct but James sounds like he is saying the English word for the Golden Arches. Japan can be very unforgiving about even the smallest glitches in katakana pronunciation - remember, it doesn't matter what the correct, original pronunciation is, when a word becomes katakana-ized it is Japanese, and non-receptive to non-Japanese sounds. James also pronounces ”どう” like "だお".
After that it's pretty good. James should listen to and copy more Japanese speech, but he has the basic patterns down well. At the end he says "わたしも”、which struck me as too formal - after all the video is supposed to be a casual phone conversation. "わたし” isn't wrong, just polite, and if James and Kojima are mates then ぼくor おれ would be more in order. Finally, when James says ”じゃまたね”, he should have separated the じゃ and the またね instead of running them together: ”じゃ、またね”
Ok, grumpy Japanese language curmudgeon time is over - I hope if James reads this he takes it in the spirit with which it was intended, and I wish him luck in his future videos - I will be watching out for them.
Many moons ago, in the pre-Google era, I listened to audio cassettes in my car. Specifically the cassettes which accompanied each month's Nihongo Journal. Twice weekly I had a two-hour drive from the small town where I lived to my karate dojo in Matsuyama - prime listening time. I listened, shadowed the conversations and shuffled the tapes for variety. Low-tech but effective - two trips a week was 8 solid hours of listening practice, and repeating phrases helps stave off driver sleepiness.
These days I use an iPod in the car - it takes up less room than a bunch of tapes and digital files are conveniently broken into individual tracks. Very occasionally I will throw a tape in the care and listen to it (yes - my car still has a cassette player).
But I am moving to Tokyo in a couple of weeks and selling my car. I'll be swapping the expressway for the subway. So I decided to digitize the tapes.
This was a simple process. I already own a copy of CD Spin Doctor - it came with my copy of Roxio Toast - so all I had to do was buy a stereo cable to connect the line-in input of my PowerBook to my stereo headphone jack, press play on the stereo and then hit record on the software. CD Spin Doctor gives you the option of listening to the audio as you record it so I have begun the nostalgic process of listening to the contents of tapes from 1998-2000 as I transfer them onto my hard drive.
For example, the tape in the photo contained the following:
食品添加物 Food Additives (6 min) 問い合わせる Keigo for Every Occasion: Making an Enquiry (6 min) 模擬テスト JLPT Practice Test for Level 1 (16 min) １２月 Japanese Through the Seasons:December (4 min) 最近の若者は Young People These Days (8 min) 「ことしの別れ」幸田文 "This Year's Farewell" by Aya Koda (13 min)
The resultant files are in AIFF format and about 250MB a side but it is a simple matter to squeeze them down to AAC or MP3 using iTunes or similar application. CD Spin Doctor automatically breaks the audio into tracks, but listening to and labelling individual tracks is a fiddly task best left for a rainy day - for the time being I just want a file I can stick on my iPod Shuffle.
And you don't even have to buy software - Audacity is a free, cross platform recording and editing application (Mac, Windows, Linux).
At 50-60 minutes per tape I now have an additional 22 hours of Japanese audio to keep me busy. How many hours of audio do you have hidden away in tape format?
I found today's interviewee via his blog, JapanNewbie, which I discovered way back in 2004 and have read on and off since then. Amusing, informative and something many blogs are not - enthusiastic. Late last year I noticed Harvey had another blog - this one geared to learning Japanese. I was intrigued. I emailed, found out that Harvey was currently enrolled at the IUC in Yokohama and knew that I had to interview him, if only to get the inside story on that esteemed establishment of Japanese learning legend. But enough of me rambling - let's hear the pearls of wisdom from today's guest (who amazingly is NOT an ex-JET!)
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