BETWEEN FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND JAPANOLOGIST;
BETWEEN FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND JAPANESE
Chapter 5a
LEARNING THE DEVIL’S LANGUAGE
1. From Chinese to Japanese
1. Chinese-Japanese Comparisons
2. Listening Difficulties
3. Other Difficulties
2. Learning Problems
1. Basic Problems
2. Dealing with the Kanji
3. Homophones
4. Compound Words to the Rescue?
5. Romanisation Problems
3. The Power of the Sub-conscious
1. Creating the Language Computer
2. Language as a Song
3. Learn like a Child
4. The ‘Sponge’ Factor
5. The Emotional Impact Factor
4. Deep Listening
1. Listening Materials
2. Listen like a Child
3. Listen to the Written Language
4. Rote Memorisation
5. Multi-Lingualism
5. Reading Japanese
1. Jumbled Print
2. Reading Kanji
3. Agglutinated Script
4. Reading Difficulties
5. Reading by Listening
6. Mastering the Language
1. Getting Started
2. The ‘Plateau’ Phenomenon
3. Using Radio and TV
4. Using the Tape Recorder
5. Conversation Practice
6. Trying to Speak
7. Breaking Through - The Nomiya Experience
That one year in Japan – 1967-68 - was to be even more difficult than the two years in Moscow.
And not just because I had to organize myself into one of the world’s more complex societies, without the help of an embassy, contacts or much in the way of funds.
I had also to break through into a language much more difficult than Russian, and with just one year to do it.
And as with Russian I had to do it myself, without teachers and without the standard 6-12 months of intensive instruction provided most would-be Japanese speakers.
Some lessons from that experience might be of use to others.
1. From Chinese to Japanese
1. Chinese-Japanese Comparisons.
As others have noted, beginning with Francis Xavier in the 16th century, Japanese is not an easy language (“a language invented by the Devil” was his conclusion).
In many ways it is even more difficult than Chinese.
In Chinese, the grammar - word order, sentence structure etc - are not all that distant from most Western languages.
Japanese resembles Korean in these respects, and Korean is not known as one of the easier languages.
2. Listening Difficulties
True, there is the problem of the four tones in standard Mandarin Chinese. But as I mentioned earlier, once the ear becomes attuned they cease to be much of a problem.
Tones can even be a plus. They provide a kind of rhythm or strong intonation to the spoken language, which can make for easier listening and understanding, as with Russian or German for example.
Intonation in Japanese is very subtle, too subtle at times for this human ear at least.
And lacking the need to intone, it can be spoken very quickly – too quickly for this beginner’s ear to handle at first.
Sounds are agglutinated, especially when the speaker begins to blurt out streams of disorganized thought, which can happen often.
You feel as if you are facing a wall of sound with few clues as to where even to start in trying to find out what is going on.
These are some reasons perhaps why so few foreigners, other than those born and raised in Japan, speak the language with complete fluency.
Meanwhile quite a few foreigners not brought up in China get to speak excellent Chinese.
(I am not one of them. But I am told that my accent is good, which proves something.)
3. Other Difficulties
Another reason why Japanese is difficult is need to master the various grades of polite language.
And there is, of course, the obvious fact that the vocabulary has no relationship with English (though there is any number of imported English words to help).
On top of all this is the dreaded homophone problem.
Just as we Anglo-Saxons used to depend on Latin, Greek and French for much of our educated language, the Japanese relied on Chinese, imported either directly or via Korea.
As a result half the language the Japanese speak has Chinese origins.
The rest is indigenous - numerous words and expressions taken from the various languages spoken by the native Japanese before Chinese/Korean influx.
The indigenous words present little problem. Pronunciation is fairly simple.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the Chinese origin words. Many have been reduced to bare-bones homophones which make the listening and understanding of Japanese a lifetime struggle.
2. Learning Problems
Someone once described the difficulty of learning Japanese as similar to that of having to climb Mount Fuji, in winter, without crampons or a stick.
(It is probably is even harder than Korean since you can master Korean without knowing the Chinese ideographs. Certainly it is much harder than Russian, often listed as one of the more difficult languages in common use. Maybe Arabic is more difficult.)
I was lucky in that, knowing Chinese, I could start climbing from the bus station about a third the way up.
Even so I still had a long way to go to get even close to the top. And I lacked the crampons and the walking stick of good learning materials and teachers.
I admire those who start from the bottom, and persevere all the way to the top. The temptation to give up halfway and slide back to the bottom must be strong.
1. Basic Problems
So most foreigners trying to learn to speak and read Japanese face three problems.
One is the homophone problem already mentioned.
Another is the nuts and bolts of the language – the back-to-front grammar, the way people speak, the way people think, and so on.
And then there is the problem of having to learn to recognise at least one thousand or more of the ideographs (kanji) imported from China/Korea and in daily use to represent the many Chinese words embedded in Japanese.
True, you can try to by-pass the kanji and just concentrate on the spoken language. But that will restrict your ability to talk proper Japanese.
And it goes without saying that it prevents any ability to read since not just the Chinese origin words but also the many indigenous-origin words that are written using kanji in part or total.
2. Dealing with Kanji
Fortunately the Japanese have not done much to change either the form, or even the meanings, of most of the ideographs they borrowed from China.
So as a former student of Chinese I was able easily to know or guess the probable meaning.
But that does not help you much in understanding those Chinese-origin words when spoken.
Here, more than most I suspect, I was a victim of the dreaded homophone problem.
3. Homophones
For some reason when the Japanese set out to import those Chinese-origin words they seem, like the Koreans before them, to have decided to use the minimum number of monosyllabic sounds to represent the original Chinese pronunciations.
Take the Japanese sound 'ko'. It is the pronunciation given to several dozen Chinese-origin words in common Japanese use (there are another dozen or so more ‘ko’s’ given to Chinese origin words with more arcane meanings).
The original Chinese pronunciations for those several dozen words include: gong, gang, kang, kung, hong, huang, guang kuang, gao, kao, hou, hao, jiao, qiao, and jiang.
But in Japanese they all become ‘ko’.
True, Chinese also has its homophones — words with the same pronunciation but different meaning. But they are much fewer than in Japanese. And in any case, they can usually be distinguished from each other by one or other of the four tones.
So gong with a high tone means one thing (for example “work”), while gong with a falling tone can have a very different meaning – for example ‘ being together,’ or ‘to give.’ Gong with a low tone can be a province in Szechuan. And so on
But in Japanese they, and many other words taken from Chinese, will all end up as ‘ko’, with nothing like the Chinese tones to differentiate them (though the Japanese insist that at times there are subtle differences of emphasis).
To make things worse, if the ‘o’ sound in ‘ko’ is short we find one set of meanings. If it is lengthened, we have another quite different set of meanings.
And since the ‘ko’ with the long ‘o’ (kõ) and with the one with short o are rather similar, once again it is only through close listening that one knows which ‘ko’ they are talking about.
Nor is it just ‘ko’ that gives us the short and long ‘o’ problem. The same is true for ‘sho’, ‘to’, ‘so’, ‘mo’,’yo’ and many other imports from China.
And then there are those that end in ‘u.’
Many of them too demand the privilege of having both the short and the long option.
So they too demand close attention in the spoken language.
---
Even when they are not homophones, many of the various Chinese-origin words sound alike when brought into Japanese.
So you are fighting not just a bunch of homophones but a whole army of their relatives also.
For example, in addition to ‘ko’ we also have ‘ka’, ‘ki’, and ‘ku’. Then in addition to, say, ‘sho’ (which also has its raft of meanings in both the short and long form), we also have ‘shi’, ‘sha’, and ‘shu’ (which also has a short and a long form).
Then in addition to ‘jo’ (both short and long) we also have ‘ji’, ‘ja’, and ‘ju’. And so on.
All, in addition to sounding similar, have their seemingly infinite number of meanings to boot.
4. Compound Words to the Rescue?
To get round these problems, fortunately the Japanese, like the Chinese, rely heavily on compound words — two homophones brought together to create one word.
So instead of having to guess meanings from just one homophonic sound, we have two homophonic sounds joined together to give us a better clue.
But even then there are difficulties, since many of those compounds themselves end up as homophones.
Take the Chinese origin word for ‘success’ which is pronounced ‘sei-kõ’ in Japanese. A Japanese dictionary will give you a dozen or so other meanings for sei-kõ (one is ‘sexual contact’).
In Chinese, the sei-kõ meaning success is cheng-gong . The sei-kõ for sexual contact would be sheng-jiao, and so on.
But in Japanese they all end up as sei-kõ.
High tone ‘gong’ may have several meanings in Chinese. But if it is combined with ‘ye’ (enterprise) to create the compound word gong-ye we know fairly unambiguously that we have a word, which means ‘industry.’
In Japanese gong-ye becomes kõ-gyo, also meaning industry. But kõ-gyo can also have several other different meanings -‘entertainment event’ for example.
And there are no tones to distinguish them apart. All you have is the context to guide you.
Speakers are sometimes reduced to writing out the kanji in the air.
….
Other compounds can also cause problems since they often sound alike, for example ‘sei sho,’ ‘sho sei,’ ‘sei sha,’ ‘sha sei’ or ‘shu sei’ ‘sei shu.’
Thrown together at high speed into a fairly educated discussion (which is where many Chinese origin words find use), and you begin to understand the problems of dealing with spoken Japanese.
Here too your problems can be compounded by the long and short ‘o’ and ‘u’ endings in many of those compound words.
So the ‘sei sho’ above has one meaning (eg the Bible), but ‘sei shõ’ has a completely different meaning (e.g. sing in unison).
Mistake a long ‘u’ for a short ‘u’ and instead of talking about your problems with your husband (shujin) you are talking about the prison convict with whom you are co-habiting (shyujin).
…
Sorting out that mess was yet another my linguistic nightmares, at least to begin with.
If Francis Xavier had the same problem, then he was not exaggerating.
5. The Romanisation Problem
Then there is the problem of poor romanisations.
When learning foreign languages most of us rely on phonetic images – some form of romanisation for most of us Westerners - to remember vocabulary.
But the standard Hepburn system used for Japanese for some extraordinary reasons does not distinguish between those short and long vowels.
This can mess up pronunciations considerably.
Even wondered why so many Westerners, Americans especially, pronounce the Japanese ‘o’, whether long or short, as ‘oe’?.
So gomi (rubbish), where the correct pronunciation is a clipped ‘or’ - gormi - ends up as goemi. Why?
Probably because the first Japanese word they meet is ‘Tokyo’ and since in English we pronounce that as Toekyoe, from then on whenever they see a romanised Japanese ‘o,’ it automatically becomes ‘oe.’
As a result of one simple misunderstanding they have become imprinted for life with the wrong pronunciation of a key sound in Japanese.
It is a powerful warning of the dangers that can result when we rely on bad romanisations to learn a language.
(There used to be the same problem in Chinese with the out-of -date Wade-Giles system, and still retained for Chinese names in Taiwan. That do did a lot of damage to students of the language.)
This problem, like many others, only disappears when you can rely on your sub-conscious memory to handle the speaking and hearing of a language.
Then you do not have to rely on romanisations. You do not have to remember grammar. Finally you are able to speak with fluency.
Let me explain.
3. The Power of the Sub-conscious
Perhaps the best analogy of how the sub-conscious works is the way we learn to type.
We begin by consciously looking at the keys we want to hit.
But with practice and repetition one day we find we can type freely without even have to look at the keyboard. The fingers seem to know automatically where to move.
Our typing efforts have allowed us to create a sub-conscious typing ability. (In English we call it ‘touch typing’; the Japanese call it ‘blind typing’.)
Similarly with music.
You start by consciously trying to remember the notes to play.
But with practice you can play an entire tune without notes.
In the same way, if we can push language into the sub-conscious memory, the language should be able to emerge just as naturally as those touch- typing fingers move across the keyboard.
And it can remain there in that memory almost indefinitely (as does typing ability incidentally).
In effect you create a computer in your mind for handling the language.
Relying on the sub-conscious had been my aim when learning Chinese and Russian.
The hope was to do the same with Japanese.
1. Creating the Language Computer
In the case of typing or music, initial instruction plus constant repetition are usually enough to input the sub-conscious memory.
But with language?
Certainly we need our textbooks to begin with.
But the amount to be remembered is enormous. Special techniques are needed if we are to input that volume of vocabulary, sentence patterns etc into the sub-conscious memory.
Our teachers, the linguistic PhD variety especially, seem to believe that textbooks, essay writing , vocabulary lists etc.– what I call the intellectual or cerebral impact – should be the main techniques.
Conversation practice then supplements the cerebral impact.
But as I discovered with Chinese, and Russian to some extent, this cerebral approach is far from adequate (which is why many of those academically-minded teachers themselves seem unable to master the very language they are supposed to be teaching.)
Something more is needed, and for lack of a better word I call it the emotional impact.
A crude example: if I walk down the same street every day for months or even years it is unlikely that I will remember well the details of the street.
Even if I tell myself that it is important to remember I will not remember very well. The entire exercise is too cerebral and forced.
But if I see a bad accident in that street it is almost certain that the memory of the street details will remain with me for a very long time, whether I want it or not.
The sub-conscious memory has been stimulated.
…
How to provide that stimulus?
Here much depends on the kind of language computer we are trying to create.
….
If I try to learn French, not only are many of the words similar but also much of the sentence structure is also similar to English.
So when I read or listen to the language I can, in effect, process it through the ‘computer’ that I use for English, making some fairly simple changes where needed.
Do that often enough and it is not hard to begin to create the language computer I will need to read, speak and process French sounds at speed.
Here textbooks and teachers can help a lot, provided I have some way to correct pronunciations and practice conversation.
….
Even with Russian I found I could use my ‘English computer’ to some extent in handling the grammar and vocabulary.
However that was no help in trying to remember the complex sets of inflexions in Russian – singular and plural, then male, female and neutral, with each having six different case endings - nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locational etc.
Here I had to rely on frequent usage in live conversation to be able eventually to push it all into the sub-conscious memory - in much the same way that frequent typing practice allows the sub-conscious to take over.
And to the extent Japanese is much more difficult than Russia, the need for techniques to input the sub-conscious is even greater.
We cannot rely only on frequent conversation, as I did with Russian. Apart from anything else how can you converse if still do not have a grip on the basic structure of the language?
Catch 22.
Even you do try to converse the more you try the more incorrect structures will enter the sub-conscious, and stay there – a very serious problem for many trying to learn Japanese.
2. Language as a Song
One clue as to how the sub-conscious works in remembering language is the way we remember songs and poems.
True, an entire foreign language is quite a lot more of a memory burden than a mere song or poem.
And it usually lacks the attractiveness of a song or poem (the sub-conscious likes the attractive – we all find it easy to remember a pretty face).
And before you can start to remember you need quite a lot of preparation.
But the principle is the same.
If you can find some way to make the language as attractive to the memory as a song or poem, then there is no reason why the words cannot enter your sub-conscious computer just as easily, and remain just as tightly gripped, as do songs and poems,
(For what it is worth a Hiroshima doctor once got NHK attention for his claim he could detect the different areas of the brain used by fluent and non-fluent foreign English language speakers.)
(He may well have identified the different areas of the conscious and sub-conscious memories.)
4. Learn Like a Child
So how do we make an entire language as compelling to that sub-conscious memory as a song or a poem?
Perhaps the way young children learn languages can give us a hint.
Many, including some very responsible pedagogues, assume that children have some special quality in their brains that allows them to absorb language, and that this quality disappears with age.
Some even identify age 12 as the cut-off point.
Some involved with the teaching of difficult languages also believe that age 18 is the limit.
(This is more than some dry academic point of dispute. It underlies what I see as the rather mistaken view that the teaching of difficult languages - Chinese and Japanese in the West; English in Japan - should be concentrated at the pre-university level.)
…
But while there is no doubt that ability to absorb language declines with age (I am a living example) is this because of some physical or chemical brain change?
If so, how can we explain the existence of people who even after age 18 have been able to learn difficult foreign languages to almost perfect fluency level?
More relevantly, is there anyone, even amongst the elderly, who cannot remember songs?
According to my principle at least, if you can remember songs you can remember languages.
Maybe some other factor is also at work making it harder for adults to learn languages properly.
1. The ‘Sponge’ Factor
People often talk about children absorbing language like a sponge.
What they really mean is that when children hear something they have the emotional incentive immediately to draw what they hear directly into that sub-conscious language computer.
And they can do that even without the help of textbooks, texts or dictionaries.
Why? Let me suggest that it is because they concentrate, powerfully and deeply. Understanding what they hear has become central to their existence.
Can we adults do the same? .
One has to assume so. After all, we can concentrate a lot when playing chess, doing crossword puzzles etc.
True, our brain cells may not be quite as active and retentive as those of a child.
But if you can create the situation similar to that of the child – a situation where you want instinctively to absorb and retain everything you are listening to – then the result should be the same (at least according to my theory).
So where do we go wrong?
…
Most begin, as I did, trying consciously to remember basic grammar, vocabulary and so on – what I call the intellectual approach.
And there is nothing wrong with that. It gives us an advantage denied small children, provided we do not come to think that this is the main approach.
That is because at some stage you are going to have to shift from the intellectual approach to what I call the emotional approach.
You are going to have to find the techniques that will allow you not only to transfer to the sub-conscious what you have learned consciously but also to input the sub-conscious directly, like a child
And as the example of the child shows only too well, that has to be a technique that allows you to concentrate, and concentrate as deeply as the child does.
You must create the all-important emotional impact.
5. The Emotional Impact
Many assume that live conversation with native speakers is the best way to provide what I call that emotional impact.
Obviously there is nothing wrong with that – if you have both the time and the money, and if you can make the conversation interesting, and if your opposite number will correct mistakes.
To some extent you are forced to concentrate, simply in order to talk.
But as we all know, the results are limited.
We adults usually are unable to concentrate as a child does.
As adults, or even as teen-agers, we cannot avoid, even sub-consciously, feeling that we have other things in life on which to concentrate.
And this is quite separate from the problem of having some instinctive allergy to the foreign language, or to the person who is speaking.
Try as we might, much of the listening tends to be superficial.
Words do not remain firmly enough in the language memory.
There is what I call a sliding effect – we can hear and understand but what we hear does not penetrate firmly.
I know. I once tried using paid conversation practice to learn Spanish.
Today very little remains.
…
Living the language through home stay or work in the foreign country is usually more effective, especially if you are young enough (being under 18 years of age seems to help greatly).
The emotional pressure to remember and use the language is much greater.
But even with the under 18 year olds I would argue that the concentration factor is at least as important as the age factor.
4. Deep Listening
Can we as adults, or even as teen-agers, concentrate on sound as deeply and instinctively, i.e. emotionally, as the child does when listening?
I believe we can, using a technique I call ‘deep listening’ leading to ‘deep memorization.’
1. Listening Materials
First priority is to select the right material to listen to. It must be material that can help create the all-important emotional impact.
For example, I like to listen to recorded material where the speaker seeks sincerely to communicate an idea, desire or feeling.
That lets me emotionally to identify with the speaker and, like the child, feel an instinctive need to understand what the speaker has to say.
The mind then begins to want to suck in what I am hearing, like that proverbial sponge.
As well there can be the intellectual challenge of wanting to understand what is being said.
When all that comes together, a single cassette tape or CD can provide me with many more hours of useful language learning than I can get from any amount of time spent in some classroom.
…
Part of that intellectual challenge is trying to
‘de-cipher’ new words or expressions in the recording.
You listen hard before turning to a dictionary or text to discover the meaning.
Then when the meaning finally emerges the psychological impact will be that much larger.
Writing out what you are listening to and have de-ciphered also helps.
…
The aim in all this is to create active rather than passive involvement with the spoken language.
Most classroom learning is passive. Try as you might, it is hard to retain in the memory.
Or as some Japanese put it, the moment you push a new word into the memory another slips out or disappears.
True, a written text will penetrate the memory if you have the chance to use the words in natural conversation soon after.
But it is much better first to listen to a CD or cassette recording of that text, and then seek out that natural conversation practice.
And to increase the concentration factor I recommend using cassettes/CDs rather than videos.
Video screen activity can be distracting.
The same problem exists, for me at least, when you depend primarily on conversation practice. You are distracted by the presence of the other person, and the artificially of the situation.
(Needless to say, I am not impressed by the current fad in Japan for something called ‘speed learning’ – listening passively to simple recorded conversations (kiki nagashi) – while going about other things.)
2. Listening Like a Child
When you ‘deep listen’ you feel as if you have closed your eyes and your mind is focused entirely on the sound coming out of the machine.
You feel as the child does - that you are hearing someone who is trying to communicate something important to you.
Once in this situation and you will begin to feel the sound going deep into that sub-conscious memory.
It is then that your teachers or conversation partners can finally begin to play the role they should have been playing from the start
- going out to their way to use and encourage you to use the key words or phrases in the recording you have been listening to.
(In Japanese, what I call ‘deep listening’ some describe as ‘shadowing,’ relying on earphones to push the sound loud and clear into the memory and then repeating the same words.)
3. ‘Listening’ to the Written Language
Many advocate reading as a help to remembering a language.
And obviously there is nothing wrong with that too.
In my case the challenge of finding new words and expressions and checking dictionaries to de-cipher their meaning the memory is stimulated.
But often what is stimulated is the more superficial, conscious memory.
Which means that the words I am reading can disappear from that memory almost as quickly as the time taken to open and close the dictionary.
I need also to hear and use those words in some meaningful context, as quickly as possible afterwards.
..
Much better is being forced to de-cipher new words and expressions I come across when listening to recorded material.
In the process of playing them back repeatedly they stick much more firmly in the memory.
…
Listening with a text beside you will obviously be a help to quick understanding of what you are listening to.
But it removes some of the psychological pressure to absorb the sound.
Best to try to listen first and repeatedly while trying to de-cipher the meaning, and then use the text to check afterwards.
(Note. When we say something sticks in the memory we are talking about that sub-conscious memory.)
(We are talking about what I call ‘deep memorization.’)
4. Rote Memorisation
Another way to make words and phrases stick in the sub-conscious memory is rote listening. That is not as childish and puerile as some seem to think.
Repeated listening to phrases or sentence patterns forces them into the sub-conscious memory whether you like it or not (though it is much better if you like it).
You remember in much the same way as you memorise a poem or a song.
When driving I like to listen to the same sentence pattern or vocabulary use CDs over and over again till the expressions burn themselves into the memory and I can ‘parrot’ them out freely in conversation.
Sadly, many teachers - those linguistic PhD types especially - look down on rote learning.
To maintain status they try to insist that language learning is an intellectual process deserving of their advanced skills.
They cannot accept that they are often less useful even than a mere recording machine, not to mention a parrot.
Hence their emphasis on the translations, writing courses and readings which allow them to show off their ability.
That may be good for their egos, but not for the students.
….
Ever wondered why Japanese singers can recite their songs in good English even when their grasp of English is poor?
Songs are especially effective in opening the deep memory – even more so than rote learning.
Would that an entire language could be reduced to a song!
5. Multi-Lingualism
People sometimes ask whether knowing Chinese interferes with Japanese.
The short answer is, no. And I am sure it is the same for many others in my situation.
It is like asking whether you have a problem singing My Fair Lady after you have been singing Doing it my Way.
And just as there is no limit to the number of songs we can remember there seems to be almost no limit to the amount of information the language computer can handle – provided we are relying on that sub-conscious computer
…
The brain is a house with many rooms. When you move from one language to another it is like moving from one room to another, taking care to close the door behind you.
I sometimes have a problem when I switch from Chinese to Japanese.
The fact of learning Chinese when I was younger (22) – and maybe because grammatically it is closer to English - has embedded it more deeply in my sub-conscious than Japanese, even though I have been speaking Japanese for 30 years.
For a few seconds at least the mind can go into semi-seizure as I try to sort out what language I am speaking when I have to return to Japanese.
But that is all.
Interestingly I have much less problem going from Japanese to Chinese even though in Japan I have much less chance to speak Chinese than Japanese.
My two children who were raised from birth to be totally bi-lingual (using techniques I will explain later) do not even have these kinds of minor problems.
…
The other surprise for me when speaking Chinese is the ease with which words and expressions learned as long as 40 years ago, together with correct pronunciations, jump out of my sub-conscious naturally, as if I had been using them just yesterday.
True, the same happens sometimes with French words, which I learned haphazardly in conversation fifty years ago.
So I assume there is nothing especially unusual about that ability, other than the fact that Chinese is much more removed from my normal language, English, than is French.
What it all proves is the power of that sub-conscious memory.
How much of our schoolboy French would we remember if we relied solely on our textbooks? .
5. Reading Japanese
At some stage in any language learning, serious progress is blocked if you cannot read books, newspapers etc. in the language.
And my stage came much earlier than I expected.
As already mentioned, when I set out to do my post-graduate research on Japan both I and my mentors assumed my knowledge of Chinese would make it fairly easy for me to read research materials in Japanese.
We were both wrong. Even more than the spoken language, the written language has the Devil’s fingerprints all over it.
For beginners at least it is an impossible hurdle to cross.
Indeed, I suspect that a survey of even good Japanese speakers today would reveal more than a few who can only read with difficulty.
(That, at least, is my conclusion every time I hear Western journalists here complaining about lack of access to closed Japanese press conferences.)
(Few seem to realize that the content of those conferences, together with good commentary, will usually appear in the newspapers the next day.)
(If they could read Japan’s information filled newspapers and magazines with any fluency, they will often find out more about Japan than any amount of rushing around looking for interviews and press conferences.)
1. Jumbled Print
Problem number one is the jumble of print.
In addition to the Chinese-origin ideographs (kanji), Japanese has two phonetic scripts – katakana and hiragana.
Katakana is used mainly for imported words, mainly from English. Hiragana is for Japanese origin words or parts of speech.
Either form of kana can be memorised quite easily, in a few days if you concentrate.
The problem though is the way they are mixed in together.
Katakana is sometimes compared to the way we use capitals in English; hiragana is lower case.
So when you read Japanese you are constantly jumping from one word in capitals to another in lower case.
And mixed in with all this are the Chinese ideographs (the kanji).
..
The kanji are not quite so easy to master.
There you will have to learn to recognize about 1500 or more if you want to read serious material.
That will take a good year or so.
2. Reading Kanji
But the good news is that you do not need to learn to write them.
Nor are they quite as hard to read as they seem to be on first impression.
They are made up usually of two or three standard components and if you know those components – the fifty or so in common use – you should in theory be able to recognize any kanji that is thrown at you, after which you can search its meaning in a dictionary.
If I can make some exaggeration, they are like the alphabetic letters that we use to compose written words in most Western languages.
Besides, you do not have to analyse each component to recognize each kanji.
The overall picture given you by the combination of those components is enough.
It is the same as in reading English, where you often get the meaning from a ‘picture’ of the shape and size of the written word without having to spell out all the letters.
The ‘picture’ emerges even more clearly in Japanese because the ‘letters’ – the components - are compacted into a boxy square.
It is rather as if I see a Picasso on a wall I will know immediately it is a Picasso. I am not likely to confuse it with a Da Vinci.
Nor do I need to be able to paint the picture to recognise it.
(Some language schools mess people up by making them spend too much time learning to write kanji – though a surprising number of students seem to enjoy dabbling with the calligraphy.)
3. Agglutinated Script
But while the kanji can make for fast reading (once you get to know them) this leads to the other main problem in reading Japanese, namely the way the kanji and the phonetic kana are all run together without breaks.
An exaggerated version of the result is something that looks like this:
ItisalmostasifIwastowritethissentencelikethisandthenaskyoutoreadit.
Only a fluent English speaker could intuit where the breaks should occur, namely:
It is almost as if I was to write this sentence like this and then ask you to read it.
So if you want to be able to read Japanese easily then, even more than with most other languages, you need to have good speaking and listening ability.
That language is primarily sound, and that the script is secondary, is something many language teachers around the world still need to understand.
Many still seem to think that language is the written words on a page, rather than sounds in the air.
One result is that their students end up like me many years ago – pouring over scripts trying to de-cipher what the language is saying.
4. Reading Difficulties
By now the reader should understand my difficulties when I set out blithely, back in 1965, to rely on texts for my research into Japanese investments, as part of my thesis work at the Australian National University in Canberra.
I could pick out the kanji in the texts, but not much more.
Imagine you are looking at a typically long Japanese sentence on some academic topic (the more academic they are the longer are the sentences).
You begin by trying to separate out the individual words and particles in the jumble of script that makes up the sentence.
Then with the help of a Japanese dictionary, you try to discover the meaning of each of those separated-out words and particles.
(And it is not as if those Japanese dictionaries are easy to use.)
But even after you have checked the meaning of all the words, you still have to battle the back-to-front grammar and try to string those words together into some kind of meaning.
And while you are doing that you have to keep remembering the meanings of the many unfamiliar words you have just checked in the dictionary.
They too can slide out of the memory in the time it takes to close the dictionary.
It is like having to juggle a dozen or so balls in the air and hope they all fall down in the right places to give proper meaning.
For me, at the beginning, just reading one page of text would take the best part of an hour.
5. Reading by Listening
But if you know the spoken language, everything changes.
When you look at the collection of words in front of you (both kanji and kana), and the particles between them, then in your mind you automatically turn them into sound.
The meaning of the sentence emerges as quickly and as naturally as if you were listening to someone saying the same thing to you.
That is why I realised that my first priority on arriving in Japan would be to master the spoken language.
Which I did eventually, but only after the best part to two years of concentrated study, mainly by listening.
0nly then could I start the still painful business of reading the Japanese documents I needed for my study and research.
…
One useful technique was to have someone record for me the text of something that I had to read and understand.
So literally and automatically I was ‘listening’ to the text of what I had to de-cipher.
Later I was to use the same technique for helping mid-level students at Sophia University to break through to advanced reading levels.
The success was impressive and convinced that many others could be helped using the same technique (more details later).
…
Explaining all that to my mentors back in Canberra was not easy.
In fact I think they still do not understand, judging from the way they still send people without Japanese to Japan for serious research, and then assume that the mere fact these people have spent a year or so in Japan means they are able easily to handle readings in academic Japanese.
6. Mastering the Language
As mentioned earlier I had begun trying to learn Japanese back in Canberra before going to Japan.
Arriving in Japan I soon discovered how inadequate that had been - that the Japanese language teachers foisted on me at the ANU had left me with almost zero ability with the spoken language.
Virtually the only Japanese I had was that picked up in my few conversation classes with that Japanese housewife n Canberra.
So right from the start that I had to set out almost anew to make the listening and speaking breakthrough needed if I was to begin to be able to read my research materials.
And as I knew from my experience with Chinese this would not be easy.
1. Getting Started
At the beginning all I had was the one set of Japanese language conversation tapes then available (Jorden).
I would supplement this by trying to listen to TV/radio broadcasts of interest.
Trying to meet and talk to as many people as possible people was another objective. But you cannot talk to people unless you can talk – a dilemma many other language learners face.
Even so, we all try.
…
The process is cumulative.
Get started on a language, and soon everything you do in your daily life, from buying fish to sorting out visa problems, all adds to that learning experience.
Fail to do that and you spend the rest of your Japan career confined to a box of dark incomprehension, jealous of those who have broken through.
True, most realize this and begin learning Japanese with good intentions. But progress can be excruciatingly slow, and many give up.
Fortunately I knew from previous languages that if one perseveres eventually there will be breakthroughs.
2. The ‘Plateau’ Phenomenon
There is what I call the ‘plateau phenomenon.’
Often you will reach a certain stage when you feel all progress has stopped. You are stuck at the level of language ability you have achieved to date.
You feel you have ‘plateaued’.
But if you persevere, then suddenly one day you feel your fluency has improved a few degrees.
You have moved up to the next ‘plateau’, so to speak.
From there you can move on to the next stage and so on.
Eventually you achieve fluency.
3. Using Radio and TV
True, the route I liked – listening to radio and TV programs – was not the easiest.
Children’s programs helped. But otherwise I would often feel as if I had been hit by that wall of sound, with almost no clue as to what it was going on.
Sounds ran into each other to create a blur of accumulated noise.
The best I could was record the sounds and try to work out their meanings later.
Fortunately today there is much more use of sub-titles on television broadcasts, which in my case are quick and easy to read thanks to the prolific use of kanji.
If I had had that aid from the beginning I could have cut greatly the time needed to master Japanese.
…
Even so I still had the homophone problem to overcome.
One day someone would be talking about sei shu. Then shu sei, or shu sai and then sai shu, sei sai, sai sei or even sei sei (to refine products).
They were hard enough to differentiate.
They were even harder to remember.
4. Using the Tape Recorder
What to do?
In those days there was almost nothing like the flood of CDs, tapes and other helpful, graded listening materials available today.
For concentrated listening practice the best I could do at first was little more than taping the weather forecasts.
If I could not understand certain terms I would listen repeatedly and then check with a dictionary or the newspaper of the day.
Later I graduated to an early morning NHK radio program called Watashi-tachi no Kotoba. Announcers would read out letters from conscientious, mostly elderly, Japanese listeners giving their views on the social problems of the day.
The reading was slow and clear. The contents included many educated words and expressions, which I could use.
There was also the feeling of being drawn into world of the letter-writer and wanting to understand the message that he or she wanted to pass on to the world.
(NHK has since replaced the program with brief, superficial and highly forgettable comments by listeners.)
Words I picked up from de-ciphering those early morning broadcasts still stay with me as if they were yesterday.
(Years later, I was invited by a publisher to put my ideas into book form. It was called “The Code-Deciphering Technique” - Ango Kaidoku Hoshiki. Together with the concept of ‘deep listening’ it seemed to influence a surprisingly large number of readers.)
…
From those morning broadcasts I moved to news broadcasts, relying on the newspapers of the day to help me de-cipher what I could not understand.
Yasuko also helped me a lot in the 'de-ciphering' process. I will always be grateful.
…
Today, of course most of these difficulties have gone. There is now so much good listening material is available that one’s main problem is choosing.
First priority should be material spoken slowly and clearly. Also spoken firmly, so you feel drawn into the ambit of the speaker.
That way the emotional factor crucial to drawing material into the sub-conscious memory begins to function.
For some strange reason the recording people seem to think they have to produce materials spoken at full conversational speed, or even faster, and filled with jargon and background noises.
(One NHK Spanish language broadcast I used to listen to had a steam train roaring through a tunnel - to provide the sense of reality. All it did was black the reality of the dialogue.)
Students already have enough problems without having all that thrown at them.
Later, when you have mastered the language, you will get all the fast conversational practice you need.
…
Also, I discovered, it helps a lot if you can choose materials which run on a question and answer basis, ideally with changes of tense, person etc – e.g. ‘Do you like sushi; I used to like sushi in the past but not now.’
It is even better if you can make the questions and answers continuous, and interesting.
‘Why don’t you like sushi? Because I once ate sushi made from poisonous fugu fish and almost died.’
You can feel being involved in what you are listening to, which helps to activate the memory cells.
A sentence that simply says ‘Do you like sushi’ is not likely to draw you in.
…
And talking of involvement, choose material where the voice is attractive, so your mind and memory cells feel attracted.
That is much more important than most makers of listening materials seem to realize.
Once again we need to trigger that all-important emotional factor if we are to remember what we hear.
5. Conversation Practice
Listening was one thing. But obviously I needed speaking practice too.
The current fad is for something called 'communicative English.’
In theory that should be fine. The effort to communicate an idea or feeling to a native speaker can do much to consolidate the language in the sub-conscious memory.
Hopefully the teacher will help by correcting mistakes in pronunciation and grammar.
But for reasons already mentioned these conditions are often not present. Much of the conversation is stilted and forced.
You can come away with little retained in the memory
And it goes without saying that you will not remember much unless you have prepared the topic in advance, ideally through the kind of listening practice I have recommended.
Teachers have yet to realize that you do not learn languages through your mouth.
You learn through the ear, and then consolidate through the mouth, by speaking.
….
Another point is the need to have the conversations with people who speak clearly and deliberately.
Conversation with most Japanese is often muted. That concern for the human relation often means that they will not try to communicate forcefully or directly.
(With Chinese it is different. Words hit you like small bullets. They penetrate the memory strongly and directly.)
The ideal is being able to talk to someone keen to explain and even convince you of something he or she believes in.
(Maybe that is why Mormon missionaries in Japan often end up speaking good Japanese.)
6. Trying to Speak
And so, eventually and painfully, I reached the stage where I could communicate in Japanese.
Years of presentations on the lecture and TV circuit obviously did no harm to further progress.
Today I enjoy greatly watching an interesting TV program on the topic of the day, armed with my dictionary to help me de-cipher subtitled words new to me.
But the key element, naturally, has been plucking up the courage to go out and talk to Japanese, as many as possible.
…
Most of us have a natural reluctance to just walk up to people and try to speak to them in a foreign language, especially when we do not know that language well ourselves.
Getting rid of that phobia is crucial; I have often noted that naturally talkative, extrovert people often end up being the best linguists.
Fortunately my experience with other languages before Japanese had made me aware of the need to get rid of that phobia if I was to make any progress.
…
That, at least, was my resolution when I arrived in Japan as a would-be research student, back in 1967-8.
But it was hard to get started.
In those postwar days the psychological and other gaps between Western and Japanese society were still wide; for the women at least, foreigners still carried some of the stigma of the Occupation days.
Today, when mixed foreigner-Japanese bars can be found on almost ever Tokyo street corner, it is hard to believe that for most of my early years in Japan these places hardly existed.
Fortunately, a British Embassy contact introduced me to a professor of English at some mid-level university.
He was said to be an expert on Shakespeare but could hardly speak the language – a typical victim of the text rather than the listening approach to language learning.
But he introduced me to his deshi and they tried to look after me. That gave me my first break-though into Japanese society.
I was not so fortunate with the Australian Embassy. They had me firmly black-listed as a dangerous anti-Vietnam War protestor.
Fortunately my one contact at the Embassy - a third secretary, Richard Broinowski, and his wife Alison – kindly invited me to the occasional party and gave me some useful introductions.
7. Breaking Through - The Nomiya Experience
But my eventual speaking break-through came by accident - at a small nomiya (eating and drinking place) at the bottom of the Toritsu-dai hill where I was renting my room.
As I passed it on my way home from a day's work at the Ajiken library I could smell the sweet smell of grilled yakitori chicken seeping out from the sliding doors and hear the buzz of conversation inside.
One day I decided to take a look inside. As I opened the sliding doors someone called out for the gaijin-san to come inside. Someone else moved up for me to sit down at a counter lined by the half dozen or so regulars - a plumber, a school-teacher and so on - with a mama-san facing us on the other side.
My neighbor turned out to be a nomiya regular - a very ordinary salary-man and as I discovered later a good friend of the mama-san. He helped me order, and then went out of his way to talk to me, slowly so I could understand.
For the first time in my Tokyo career I was able to have a proper conversation, albeit very limited, with an ordinary Japanese.
I kept coming back. They kept on looking after me. Gradually I came to realise that this little group had begun to see me as one of their regular members.
Early in the spring they invited me to join them and the mama-san for a hanami (flower viewing) on the cherry tree lined banks of the nearby Tama River.
Soon after they were to organise a farewell party for me when I was due to leave Japan.
All this despite the fact I was still struggling to speak their language properly.
…
It was a lesson in Japan's group relations, and not just in how to learn a language.
When you are outside the group in Japan you are on your own.
But if for some reason you can get inside, you can do so totally, even if you are a foreigner still struggling with the language.
The sense of group – the longing for belonging as someone once put it - can be over-powering.
Insider/outsider, or soto/uchi as it is also called. It is one of the clues to understanding Japan.
That experience, plus other happy memories of that year in Japan, would do much to bring me back a year or so later as a news correspondent.
And this time I really did have to get stuck into the language.
Next