Lessons From Our Japanese Language, um, Lessons

Nana and I returned to Japan a week before the official start of work. Those with a little more sanity than we might have spent this time recovering from jet lag, lounging on the beach, or maybe even getting a head start on their school work.

But not us! Within about 12 hours of our arrival in Fukuoka last Sunday night, Nana and I had embarked on a week of intensive Japanese language lessons at Genki JACS ("Japanese Language and Culture School" - the same place where we took our evening lessons last spring). The course consists of four hour-long lessons daily, plus three two-hour cultural excursions spread out over the course of the week. (More on those excursions later.)

Now, I won't try to teach you Japanese in the space of one blog post--and you should thank me for that, because I have a habit of nattering on about obscure points of linguistics that bore all but a chosen very few. Instead, I will try to teach you some of the big, non-Japanese lessons we've learned so far this week.

1. We can totally hear European accents in Japanese. Within the first few minutes of our first class, Nana and I had some pretty solid guesses about who spoke what language at home.

• German speakers, as in English, have a hard time sorting out the "w" and the "v," so that watashi ("I") becomes vatashi. 
• French speakers leave out a lot of consonant sounds, such as any "h" at the beginning of a syllable, so that hon ("book") becomes on. 
• Both have a really hard time with the "r/l" sound, which is in the back of the throat in French and German, but is actually a kind of a flutter in Japanese.
• British English speakers have those long, dark (?) vowels, so that watashi becomes more like wataaa(r)shi or even wawtawrshi.
• American English speakers make every darn vowel sound exactly the same.
• Spanish and Italian speakers have no freakin' difficulties whatsoever because the grew up speaking pretty much every sound that was ever uttered in Japanese. They maybe speak a bit too evenly--you know that rapid-fire Latinate monotone I'm talking about--and miss some of the intonation.

I wonder if these accents seem so pronounced to us because the course book is written in English. In other words, the European students are getting their pronunciation clues through the English alphabet, so naturally they'd pronounce Japanese like they'd pronounce English.

2. Fukuoka is being overrun by the Swiss. Now, I have nothing against the Swiss, but it must be said that they make up a disproportionate percentage of the population at Genki JACS. Even more so, probably, because a lot of Swiss sound German or French, so we don't really know if a German or a French speaker is Swiss unless we ask them directly.

Nana wonders whether it's a function of the exchange rate: the Swiss are among the few in the world for whom buying yen is a bargain. I wonder whether there's a large Swiss business presence in Japan, as the Japanese are suckers for small, well-designed, well-made, and well-engineered gadgets. Plus, of course, strong currencies and extreme fiscal conservatism.

3. Nana and I learn languages differently. Nana learns through muscle memory: she repeats words, phrases, and patterns until they're ingrained and can be recalled at a moment's notice.

I, on the other hand, learn through pattern recognition. I actually can't seem to remember anything beyond the basics unless I know why it means what it means.

Let me give you an example. When we had to learn the question dokokarakimashita (a stock question for meeting and greeting that appeared in our very first lesson), I was completely lost, but Nana immediately came up with a handy little song, which she repeated over and over until she could conjure the word at will.

I didn't actually get dokokarakimashitaka until I learned all the pieces: doko (where) kara (from) ki (come) mashita (polite past tense ending) ka (question particle). Add 'em up, you get "Where do you come from?"

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make the thing stick through brute force. It only stuck when I understood the structure.

Conversely, I seem to be a lot better at learning and applying patterns than Nana is. With conjugations, for instance, she typically needs to repeat the different forms of new verbs, whereas I can pretty quickly figure them out using a few basic rules. I also seem to be quicker with learning kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese), as these symbols have multiple readings--that is, you say them differently in different contexts--but the same basic meaning. I think I just have an easier time connecting kanji to different readings.

Nana, ever gracious, claims that our skill sets are equal, just different. She says I'm better at understanding (and especially at reading), while she's better at speaking and especially at responding to questions. Still, I'd rather be able to do it Nana's way: speaking is a lot more useful than reading, and it certainly makes you look a lot smarter than squinting at a poster for a minute, turning your head to one side, and proclaiming that shoving elderly people down the escalator isn't proper subway etiquette.