Nihongojouzu

Japan Times Job Fair 2007

The Japan Times is holding a job fair in Tokyo on Friday October 12, at the Izumi Garden Gallery in Roppongi. A whole bunch of organisations will be in attendance, from IBM and Bloomberg to Oxford University Press and the World Bank. The fair is targeted at people proficient in English, but given there are a number of Japanese firms I'm guessing the skillset is actually proficiency in both English and Japanese. For readers looking for a job where they can use their Japanese skills this sounds like a great chance to see what kind of opportunities exist.

Japanize

Hats off to those gung ho folks who have decided to go for complete Japanese immersion in their online computer environment. Setting your computer's language preference to Japanese or running a Japanese OS and doing your online tasks on Japanese sites will make reading Japanese an integral part of your day, you will learn contextually and the repetition is just what the language acquisition doctor ordered. If you get stuck you can always use rikaichan, LiveDictionary or Moji.

It is simple enough to find news, tech support, search and bloggy musings in Japanese, but what do you do about sites like flickr, Alexa or YouTube which you use regularly but are yet to provide Japanese localisation?  Try Japanize, a Firefox plugin which does on the fly Japanese localisations for a whole bunch of popular English websites. Japanize is designed for J-folks who want to use English language sites but it is perfect for Japanese learning keen beans who masochistically want to force themselves to deal with as much Japanese text as possible. (via from the inside, looking in, the blog of a returnee venture capitalist called Shinichiro Fukushige and a great read, often with bilingual postings)

JLPT Level 4 Vocabulary Quiz

Charles Kelly, hot on the heels of his adjective quiz, has just put out a new  vocabulary  quiz for Level 4 of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test). The quiz is based on 727 words of vocab from the JLPT Level 4 Vocabulary List put together by  Peter van der Woude, who scored a guernsey in my post about his JLPT study page. Charles Kelly points out that a chap from the The Japan Foundation (which publishes the Test Content Specifications) suggested he put a disclaimer on the site stating:

"...that it does not offer any official information on the JLPT. In fact there are no official lists of vocabulary to choose from. Your lists should be viewed as useful tools, not a comprehensive guide."

I mentioned a similar caveat in my post on the test specs- the vocab lists can be a great start but don't be surprised when words NOT on the list appear on the test. You have been warned.

Nagoya University Japanese WebCMJ Grammar Online

Nagoya University WebCJM Japanese Grammar Online has a 20 Lesson selection of quizzes covering basic Japanese grammar. Based on the book A Course in Modern Japanese (CMJ) [Revised Edition] they look like this:

Lesson 12 Exercise 1

Change the form of the verb into potential forms:

食べる　

imperfective affirmative
imperfective negative
perfective affirmative
perfective negative

Very dry and jargon-heavy but if you ever want to teach Japanese or win arguments over the difference between perfect and perfective then highly useful. Seriously, though not by any means exciting this is good solid stuff.

The Importance of Reading Comprehension

Adamu at MutantFrog Travelogue has written an excellent piece on the importance of developing good Japanese reading comprehension skills. Adamu points out a number of great resources for practicing reading and the discussions carried on in the comments sections make some good points too. While I am of the "learn the sounds of the language first" camp I have to concede that for anyone seeking to use Japanese for work, simply being fluent will not cut it - you have to be literate as well, and this means lots of reading. One comment accused Adamu of being harsh in his assessment of the skills of many Japanese language graduates, but I think he is being realistic - if you put the hours in you can achieve literacy in Japanese, but most people just don't put the hours in.

Nihongoresources.com

Nihongoresources is an excellent collection of....well, I think the name gives it away. Amongst other things the author (Michiel Kamermans, AI researcher and poet) has created a 285 page grammar guide downloadable as a PDF, a Kansai-ben dictionary, a giongo/mimesis dictionary and an extensive coverage of the Joyo kanji. I enjoyed the description of verb conjugations because of the way Michiel explained the relationship with classical Japanese, making it much easier to see how the language works - so much better than just saying "this is a Group 1 verb and this is Group 2". Great stuff. Hours, nay, days of learning joy. Highly recommended for all levels. Go, read, learn, enjoy.

261 Commonly-Used Japanese Adjectives

Online resource guru Charles Kelly has just uploaded a Flash-based quiz on the ii-adjectives marked as commonly used in EDICT as of 2006-07-14. Straightforward stuff - you are given an adjective in kanji/kana and you have to pick the correct meaning from 4 or 5 options (depends on which quiz you pick). I gave it a whirl, did 100 questions and got paddled - only 82% correct. A lot of sneaky bastard never-heard-in-conversation chaps like ねばりづよい　and いちじるしい, which makes it perfect for people studying for JLPT 1kyu. English-日本語 quizzes too.

Yokohama Dialect - a textbook from 1879

Want to see what a Japanese textbook looked like in the late 1800s?

Take a gander at Yokohama Dialect, a pamphlet published in 1879 and find examples like these:

Have you any tea?                    Oh char arimas?

Difficult                                     Moods cashey.

The author's use of the roman alphabet to represent Japanese is non-standard and amusing but if you say, for example, "moods cashey" and run the words together it isn't a bad approximation of むつかしい／mutsukashii. My favourite has to be this gem:

It is twenty dollars.               Knee jew dora

Look a bit further and the translations get stranger.  The verb "to hasten" is given as "jiggy jig". And the sentence "Unfortunately they were purchased by a party of tourists from San Francisco" becomes simple "Arimasen".

Have you caught on yet?

The book is a joke, a parody. Just look to the "Notices by the native press to the second edition":

"Since Hepburn's Dictionary in which the continuity of the narrative is dislocated by Chinese characters - we have seen nothing so well calculated to show foreigners how little Japanese we speak to them" - Shisshin Kibun

Even the name of the reference is dodgy - Shisshin Kibun not only  is a play on  "something-or-other Shinbun (newspaper)" but kibun （気分） means feeling, and shisshin can be translated as either 失神 (a dead faint) or 湿疹 (eczema).

The book takes pot shots at ignorant ex-pats and I wouldn't be surprised if it was used in all seriousness by a few dupes, much to the delight of the linguists who published it. And I can't claim credit for recognising the joke behind the pamphlet - though I thought it somewhat unusual and mocking it was the brains trust on the Honyaku list who confirmed the pamplet's true nature.

Now go and read the rest of Yokohama Dialect and have yourself a good chuckle.

(You can also download zip files of the scans via this page.)

Tags

learning Japanese

Why people learn languages

For a detailed look at exactly why people learn languages check out this longish article from zompist.com. To the point, jargon free and not afraid to poke at sacred cows, for example the  myth that children learn languages easily:

This is a popular commonplace, and one asserted by linguists as well, mostly due to Noam Chomsky's belief in an innate 'language organ'. (Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct popularizes Chomsky's ideas.) Unfortunately, the evidence is against it.

Children begin learning languages at birth (infants pay attention to their parents' voices, as opposed to random noises or even other languages), and haven't really mastered its subtleties before the age of ten years. Indeed, we never really stop learning our language. (See David Singleton, Language Acquisition: The Age Factor, p. 56.) This isn't exactly the sort of behavior (like foals walking an hour after birth) that we call 'instinct' in animals.

But at least it's effortless, isn't it? Well, no, as we can see when children have a choice of languages to learn. What's found is that, to be frank, children don't learn a language if they can get away with not learning it.

When you realise how long it takes Japanese kids to learn their own language it puts your own language learning into perspective.

Albis

Via Japanese for Life: Albis is a website designed to help you increase your vocabulary in a whole swag of languages, including Japanese. The site covers 1500 words divided into levels - each level comprises a number of modules containing 20 words each. The interface is a little counterintuitive - the first page I was directed to displayed both the English word and the Japanese equivalent, underneath which was a button marked "OK". When I  clicked on "OK" I expected the quiz to start, but instead another English/Japanese word pair appeared. Some fumbling about later I had worked out the deal - clicking the "OK" button takes you through all 20 words for that level. Once you have reviewed these words the button becomes a "Start" button, which when clicked begins the quiz.

When doing the quiz you are presented with an English word, and you have to write the Japanese equivalent in the space provided. You can write in anything from kanji to romaji (both Hepburn and Kunren are OK). Do sufficiently well and you finish the module and move to the next. Screw up too many times and the test halts and sends you back to the review exercises. I did a couple of modules and whilst they were straightforward I did learn the word for petal (はなびら). The number of levels you have completed  is displayed on the site, making it easy to track your progress.

The FAQs are found under 'News" - again, counterintuitive. The 1500 words are selected on the basis of how common they were and whether they covered concepts familiar to everyone, eg snow is NOT INCLUDED because people in some tropical countries don't have a word for it.

My favourite part of the site -  this explanation:

"We did not include the word "beer" even though this is a wonderful substance, because it sounds very similar  in the majority of languages"

In short - a fun way to boost your vocab, 20 words at a time, whether beginner or pro.

Tag  study Japanese