Nihongojouzu

How not to sound like a textbook

One common affliction of the beginner student of Japanese is that she speaks like a textbook, reproducing written Japanese phrases verbatim in conversation, eg:

私は昨日松山に行きました。　

This is grammatically correct. Say it and you will be understood. But you sound like a textbook. The speaker probably meant to say "I went to Matsuyama yesterday".  If that was the case, then:

昨日松山に行きました。

would do the job. Assuming a conversation between two people there is no need to throw in the 私は　- the person you are talking to knows from context that you are talking about yourself. If it was your cat who went to Matsuyama yesterday then feel free to throw in うちの猫は　because unless you are holding the cat and pointing to it as you speak context does NOT tell the the other person who went.

So at one level the distinction is between the written and spoken word.

But there is also the factor of register. Say you are talking with a peer, a friend, a buddy. 昨日松山に行きました  is way more formal than necessary, and may have the effect of making you sound like you want to maintain some distance from the person you are talking to. At the least you will sound unnatural because your friends will be using the dictionary form/casual form.

昨日松山に行った

or even just：

昨日松山行った

The problem is compounded when answering questions:

Aさん：　　昨日どこに行きましたか？
Bさん：　　私は昨日松山に行きました。

Walking textbook syndrome. Cut the 私は　for a start (see above). And 昨日　- it can go too - you don't need it because it was in the question. You can even lose the に行きました　because that is understood from the question too - all you really need to say is: 松山.

Aさん：　　昨日どこに行きましたか？
Bさん：　　松山。

(Sticklers might want to stick a です　or a でした　on the end as a nod to formality)

I mention this because I am currently enrolled in a course on teaching Japanese and the instructor, a witty and droll woman by the name of Uno Sensei, broached this issue during class the other week. The point arose as Uno Sensei explained one of her fundamental precepts - that teachers should teach from the textbook, and NOT teach the textbook. She gave the example of the verb to give (to another): あげる。　In many textbooks you will find examples like 友達に本をあげます。　Uno Sensei explained that while this was wonderfully correct Japanese it simply was not what people say when they hand a book to a friend. What would people actually say when handing over a gift? A simple どうぞ.

Uno Sensei's point was that a teacher has the responsibility for ensuring that not only do the students learn good, grammatical Japanese but that they also learn how to speak the way Japanese people speak in the real world. She was very clear on the point, telling everyone in the seminar room that it was their responsibility to point out where textbook Japanese and real life Japanese diverge.

We were covering  the topic of time, and how to ask what time someone gets up:
何時に起きますか？

Uno Sensei picked people at random and asked them: 何時に起きますか？
She then had people answer in full sentences like:  ７時に起きます。

Now there is a reason for having students answer in full sentences - it gives them experience in using new phrases and helps them internalise forms through use. But I had to ask - how do you get students to both remember new forms but also speak the way a Japanese person would - the two goals seem mutually exclusive.

Uno Sensei's answer was simple. When addressing the teacher you answer in full sentences, but when talking amongst classmates/friends you should just answer naturally:

先生: 何時に起きますか？
Aさん:  ７時に起きます。

Eさん：　何時に起きますか？
Fさん：　７時。

In this way you associate the teacher with formal answers and class mates with casual Japanese speech, in effect creating separate memory pegs for each kind of Japanese. When it comes to writing something down you should be able to access the more formal speech you used with Sensei, but on a beer-fueled karaoke night of debauchery the casual forms should flow.

Making Love in Japanese

Continuing one of the themes from my presentation at the JET Recontracting Conference in Kobe (I'll post my revised notes when I have a spare moment longer than this one....) - that of language learning in the context of close personal relationships - I offer this article entitled "making love in japanese" from Everything2.com. There's a good explanation of why saying 好き　is probably a better bet than 愛している　and a great lowdown on what Japanese people actually say when talking about matters of the flesh. The follow-up, "Having sex in Japanese" offers a more earthy array of expressions and body-part descriptors.

Tags learning Japanese | speaking Japanese

Sakura nabe

Sakura is the Japanese for cherry blossom, but if I offered you sakura nabe and you expected a big bowl of petals you might be a tad surprised to find chunks of horse meat in your bowl. In the world of nabe 鍋 - the Japanese hot pot - sakura  is the term for horseflesh. Many people will attempt to explain that this is because horse meat is the same colour as cherry blossoms, or that horse is tastiest in cherry blossom season, but the reason for the horse-sakura connection is much simpler. It stems from the prohibition on the eating of meat, decreed and enforced to various degrees from the 6th century. As the Yamasa Institute explains:

During the 6th century, Buddhism became the official religion of the country and the eating of meat and fish were prohibited. The first recorded decree prohibiting the eating of cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens was issued by Emperor Temmu in A.D. 675. Similar decrees, based on the Buddhist prohibition of killing, were issued repeatedly by emperors during the eighth and ninth centuries. The number of regulated meats increased to the point that all mammals were included except whales, which were categorized as fish.

Being a practical people, the country folk simply developed their own nomenclature to disguise their consumption of meat. (see JapaneseJapanese for a related discussion on eating rabbits). The classification of whale as fish is masterful - wild boars were called yamakujira ('mountain whales') 山鯨 which means you have:

wild boar----->  whale--------->fish

(If only the Japanese whaling industry had thought of this.....)

Just in case,  boar meat was referred to as botan (peony) 牡丹 and venison became momiji (maple leaves) 紅葉

These days there is no need for such subterfuge and 牡丹鍋　is more likely to be called inoshishi nabe 猪鍋　- inoshishi means wild boar. Horse is still called sakura - I guess people still shy away from acknowledging that they may have once placed a bet on their dinner.

Tags learn Japanese nabe

Romaji has no "n"

A small but annoying bugbear - the romanisation of Japanese, ie the use of the Latin alphabet to represent Japanese words, is called ROMAJI. Let me spell it out R-O-M-A-J-I.

There is no "n" in it. The deformity "romanji" - is simply an error perpetuated by people too lazy to open up/turn on their dictionary and look up the original Japanese: ローマ字.

ローマ　    =    Roma     - what Italians call their capital city.
字              =    ji           - a letter

roma + ji    = romaji   

Not an "n" in sight. (And yes, strictly there should be a macron above the "o" to signify the long sound....)

The only way you can come up with "romanji" is by sticking "Roman" - an English word, onto "ji" a Japanese word, which makes no sense at all. This illogic used to piss me off until I took my own advice and flipped through the dictionary. It turns out that Japanese has absorbed the word "roman" and spawned words such as:

ロマン                             roman.
ロマンス                         romance.
ロマンスカー                     romance car, deluxe train
ロマンスグレー                 silver-gray hair (lit: romance gray)
ロマンスシート                 romance seat, love seat
ロマンス語 [ロマンスご]     Romance languages
ロマンチシスト                 romanticist
ロマンチシズム                 romanticism

So, OK, I see how some people may have become confused. Some people. People who took the time to look up the word "Roman" and then extrapolated to the nth degree. But most people who inserted the phantom "n" simply didn't bother to check. To them I say:

1. Don't assume - look it up.
2. Stop relying on romaji - it will retard your reading and confuse your understanding of how Japanese words are put together. Romaji exists to help tourists get around Japan, not as a crutch for students of Japanese too lazy to learn the kana.
3. There is no "n" in R-O-M-A-J-I!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tags learning Japanese　| romaji | kana |

Japanese onomatopoeia in action

For most people onomatopoeia is simply a long word which has something to do with sounds and is really tricky to spell - especially at the end. Here's a simple working definition: a type of word that sounds like the thing it is describing. Choice English examples include slither, splash and baa baa. Japanese has a lot of onomatopoeia, but it also has an enormous number of sound symbolic words which describe non-auditory senses, actions and psychological states. These words aren't strictly onomatopoeia, though they are often grouped together. Leaving aside for a moment the chance to engage in a semantic pissing contest (something I will do in a later article) I want to focus on the practical use of these words. All you really need to know about Japanese sound symbolic words is this:

When to drop "-san"

In Japanese the polite way to address or refer to someone is to attach the suffix -san to that person's name. The rider is that you never add -san to your own name. If you do make this simple gaffe don't worry - you won't be the first. I have seen people introduce themselves to a large group by saying "Hi, I'm Smith-san" to which the Japanese audience will simply respond with a nervous laugh and think to themselves "Fresh off the boat."

In English the appellations Mr, Mrs, Ms etc don't have the same connotations of deference but there are parallels. Imagine someone at a conference saying "Hi, I'm Mr Kenji Tanaka". The "Mr" sounds superfluous. "I'm Kenji Tanaka" sounds more natural. Adding -san to your own name when speaking Japanese sounds even more unnatural. It would be like saying "I'm Mr Kenji Tanaka (and I'm cool)".

Problem Japanese

My Japanese teachers smiled as they passed me a copy of a book called 問題な日本語 (Problem Japanese). Published by Taishukan and edited by a bunch of university lecturers the books is a simple treatise on the "incorrect" Japanese which older Japanese people have been complaining about lately. I was amused to see my pet hate "何何になります” featured on the cover. It was about 4 years ago at a dinner put on by Oxford University Press at an Osaka restaurant that EFL author Setsuko Toyama railed about this point to me and everyone else within earshot.

"になります”　means "will become" but it is often erroneously  used by waitstaff as a polite construction, so  instead of the simpler and more intuitive "ビールです”or"ビールでございます”(this is beer) I am used to being told  "ビールになります” (lit. "this will become beer")

I always want to say "when?" but bite my tongue in deference to social harmony. Given that language is by default what people say this is one everyone is just going to have to get used to.