Articles On Japanese Linguistics
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J-myths (introduction)
By Matthew Ward | Saturday, Jul 28, 2007
Every society has a lot of myths about it. To give one of my favorite examples: my Japanese wife got her degree in social work in the US. When she was getting her degree, I remember her telling an American friend of mine that she was then planning to go back to Japan and get a job as a social worker. My friend said "But there are no social problems in Japan!" (Of course, a human society without social problems is an oxymoron!)
As an American, I've heard plenty of weird myths about my own society, both from Americans and non-Americans. Some of my favorite examples of the latter come from Asians. For example, I've met people in Taiwan who seemed to firmly believe that when Americans have our family members (brothers and sisters, parents, etc.) over for dinner, we charge them for the food! I wish I could say that just one person repeated this myth to me, but I've heard it from a variety of people, and I've also had people tell me that they've heard the same myth in China.
I've also lived in Thailand, and heard some weird myths about the US there, too. Some of these are flattering: "there are no poor people in the US." I'm originally from Seattle, a city with a large homeless population, and when I told my coworkers in Chiang Mai that I actually saw more homeless people in Seattle than I did in Chiang Mai, they actually refused to believe me. Others are not so flattering--"Americans have 'free sex.'"
OK, so this is true in the sense that Americans are at least somewhat less likely to pay for sex than Thais are, but what they actually seemed to mean is that we are constantly humping like rabbits, with people we just meet. OK, I've known SOME Americans like that, and I could see why someone might get that impression from certain Hollywood movies, but polls of sexual behavior actually show that Americans are "serial monogamists": we tend to change partners more than the people of many other nations do, but we also tend to restrict our sexual activity to our current partner. Safe to say that most of us don't go around randomly jumping into the sack with total strangers.
But, I disgress. What I'd like to write about here is myths about Japan. It would be easy to write about myths that Japanese people have about Japan ("Japan is the only country with 4 distinct seasons") or that other nationalities have about Japan ("Japan has no social problems"), but I'd like to start with myths that foreigners living in Japan have about Japan. Specifically "myths held by English-speaking foreigners who live in Japan." Actually, (speaking of myths), English-speakers are actually a pretty small minority of foreigners living in Japan, so these generally won't be myths held by resident Chinese, Koreans, Brazilians, etc., but rather by myths held by someone who might actually be reading article on on seekjapan. People like YOU. So, I'll start that with my next article.
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J-myth 2: Japan is a small country!
By Matthew Ward | Friday, Aug 3, 2007
The concept that Japan is a “small” (semai) country has to be one of the most cherished ideas that the Japan's people have about their own country. It's right up there with “Japan has 4 seasons” as one of those things that just about all Japanese seem to believe about Japan. It doesn't matter if the person is a politician or a noodle-seller, well-educated or not, a left-wing peacenik, a right-wing nationalist, or part of the vast mushy middle, everyone seems to agree on this particular point. You even hear the phrase “semai Nihon,” as if smallness was one of the defining characteristics of the nation. Granted, some people see this as a point of pride (“we are a small country, but we are so powerful!”) and others take it as a negative thing (“this country is too crowded because it's so small!”) but no-one seems to agree on the basic idea that Japan is rather petite as countries go.
With that in mind, it's not surprising that many people in the English-speaking community here in Japan seem to have absolutely no disagreement with the natives about the smallness of Japan. I can't tell you how many times I've heard conversations in which the foreigner goes on at length about the pathetic tininess of Japan, with the Japanese person solemnly agreeing. Alternately, it's the Nihonjin who go on about how small Japan is, and the non-Japanese who fervently concurring.
To be fair, size is relative, and if you are from Canada, the US, or Australia, Japan is indeed pretty small in comparison. But, that kind of logic works both ways: Japan is actually fairly large if you are from Ireland, New Zealand, or Great Brita...
Wait a moment! Did you just catch me almost declaring that little ole Japan is actually bigger than the mighty Igirisu??? Actually, if you want a handy fact that will reliably blow the minds of both your Japanese and non-Japanese friends, try this one on for size: Honshu alone is bigger than all of Great Britain—England, Scotland, and Wales-combined. I suppose we could help Igirisu out a bit here by including the whole UK here, complete with Northern Ireland and various smaller islands, but to be fair, then we'd have to include Kyushu, Hokkaido, Shikoku, too. That would give Japan the grand total of 377,873 square km, while the poor old UK has only 244,820 square kilometers.
So, Igirisu isn't nearly as big as its reputation would imply then. Surely, Japan is still a pretty small country in comparison to most other countries, right? Well, again, it is considerably smaller than your Chinas, Russias and Brazils. But, such monster countries are relatively rare in this world; there are far more countries that are only somewhat larger than Japan, and more still that are actually smaller.
To give a very abbreviated list of well-known countries that make Japan look relatively large in comparison: Japan is bigger than Germany, Vietnam, Poland, Italy, the Philippines, Nepal, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, and both Koreas combined. In comparison to reliable headline-getters like Cuba, Taiwan and Israel, Japan is positively huge: nearly 3.5 times larger than Cuba, more than 10 times larger than Taiwan, and about 18 times larger than Israel.
It's a little harder to put Japan in a worldwide list of countries by size, since there are some gray areas in terms of what constitutes a country. But, for examples, Wikipedia's list of countries and outlying territories puts Japan at #62 out of 232. In other words, Japan is larger than nearly 75% of the world's countries/territories. Even if we don't count territories, we still have Japan ranking at #62 out of 194 countries—in the top 1/3 of the world's countries in terms of size.
In other words, the idea that Japan is a “small” country is a pretty big misconception. So much forsemai Nihon, huh? “Medium-sized” is a lot more like it.
Sharp-eyed readers may point out, though, that the word semai literally means “narrow,” not “small.” Fair enough, but it is the word that Japanese tend to use while describing a place that is small in area, regardless of whether it is actually narrow or not. Semai does, however, provide some possible clues of why Japan is so often considered “small.” I would personally gloss semai as something like “narrow, small, crowded, cramped,” and Japan is indeed narrow, crowded, and cramped.
As for the “narrow” part, it has a lot to do with the shape of this country. If you were to take an overland trip from one side of Honshu to the other, even at the widest point, it would still seem pretty small. In contrast, an overland trip from the southern tip of Kyushu to the far north of Hokkaido would provide a completely different impression, because Japan, while narrow, is also a very looong country. (traveling from the southern tip of the Ryukyu islands to the far north of Hokkaido would give an even better example of why Japan is NOT a “small” country!)
And as for “crowded,” everyone knows that Japan is crowded, right? I'm not going to disagree with this particular impression at all, and the dense population certainly reinforces the feeling that Japan is small. But, interestingly (or scarily) enough, Japan isn't actually one of the most crowded countries in the world. By most accounts, it ranks about #30 in the world in terms of population density! Sure, about half of the countries that are even more crowded than Japan are city-states like Hong Kong or Singapore, but quite a number are more “normal” countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, Lebanon, South Korea, or Rwanda. (soberingly, some experts actually believe that this population density was a major factor in the recent genocide in Rwanda—existing ethnic tensions were inflated by having too many people trying to survive in too small a space)
Just to give one example of how Japan isn't necessarily THAT crowded compared to other countries: I wrote above that Japan is more than 10 times larger than Taiwan, but it's worth noting that the population of Taiwan is only around 5 times smaller than that of Japan. That means that Taiwan is twice as crowded as Japan! Sure, Japan seems crowded because much of its territory is mountainous and pretty much uninhabitable, but Taiwan is even more so: most of its area consists of mountains. As for Bangladesh, it has nearly 40 million more people than Japan, in only about 38% of the area which means that Bangladesh is even more crowded than Taiwan. So, while Japan's very real crowdedness is surely be a factor in the misperception that it is a small country, it could be a lot MORE crowded.
Speaking of myths, how about the idea that Japan's shrinking population is a bad thing???
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J-myth 3: foreigners speak English!
By Matthew Ward | Tuesday, Aug 21, 2007
Many Japanese intellectually understand that the world is a pretty linguistically diverse place. However, this knowledge often takes the back-seat to the stereotype that Japanese is the language of Japan, and English is the language of Gaikoku. This can produce unpleasant surprises for the Japanese when they visit places like Southern Europe, Latin America, China, Korea, the former Soviet Union, Francophone Africa, even certain neighborhoods of New York or London--suddenly a large proportion of those darned gaijin don't actually seem to be able to speak the language of Gaikoku. I met a young woman recently who told me that she wanted to study English because when she went to Italy, nobody in the hotel understood her English requests, so she assumed that her English must be horrible. I couldn't help thinking that when I went to Italy, a lot of people didn't seem to understand my English requests, either!
Anyway, this myth seems to extend to gaijin living in Japan, too. I've often been told by Japanese people that they want to learn English to communicate with “foreigners living in Japan.” This is quite possibly a noble motivation, but I can't help thinking that there are a lot of foreigners in Japan who you couldn't communicate with in English no matter how fluent you were, simply because the gaijin themselves couldn't have a conversation in English to save their lives.
By now, you, the hapless English-speaking reader, must be getting pretty confused yourself—foreigners can't speak English? Of course we can! Isn't that the reason why a lot of us come here in the first place--to teach English? In fact, I recently heard a newcomer to Japan remark that “most foreigners in Japan are English teachers.” When talking to other English-speaking foreigners here in Japan, I've noticed that, whenever the subject of non-Japanese comes up, there seems to be a constant assumption that “foreigners R us”—(mostly) white people from (mostly) Western countries who are (mostly) native speakers of English.
Like the Japanese who assume that everyone in gaikoku speaks English, we may have some kind of intellectual inkling that there are a LOT of people from countries like China, Korea, Brazil, Peru and Indonesia, here in Japan, the vast majority of them are NOT English teachers, and many of them may not be able to speak English at all. We might notice that a lot of public signs are now in several languages (Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean, plus Russian in Hokkaiko and Portuguese in many Brazilian-dominated areas around the country). We might also notice that, at places like immigration offices and travel agents, the number of services offered in languages like Chinese, Korea, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Hindi, etc. has been growing rapidly lately, so there must be speakers of those languages who can't rely on services in English. But, are there really such a lot of these people? Compared to us, that is?
The interesting thing is, we English-speaking foreigners in Japan actually comprise a TINY minority of the non-Japanese in Japan. The pie chart in the following article illustrates this reality pretty well: http://www.jref.com/society/foreigners_in_japan.shtml
As you can see, the Chinese, Koreans and Brazilians make up the vast majority--about 75% of the total. For countries occupied primarily by native speakers of English, only the US and Canada make the chart at all, and as pretty small slivers of population, utterly dwarfed by the Asians and South Americans. The only other English-speaking country that shows up on the pie chart is the Philippines, but English ability varies very widely in the Philippines: a lot of these Filipinas who are marrying rural Japanese men, for example, are going straight from the rural Philippines to rural Japanese, and as such, may not be able to speak much of the English that's more widely spoken among urban Filipinos.
But, can't a lot of these foreigners speak English anyway—after all, other countries usually speak English much better than Japan, right? I'll save debunking THAT particular myth for another day, but, for now, suffice to say that sure, a lot of educated urban people around the world can speak English, but most of the migrants who are moving to Japan are not people who have had sufficient resources in their own societies to do things like become fluent in English—if they had, they wouldn't have come to Japan in the first place. Hence all of the multilingual services that have been springing up in recent years.
By the way, the presence of all of these linguistically diverse newcomers is creating some real issues in Japan, especially in the public education system, where large numbers of kids are starting school without being able to communicate in Japanese. The situation is so serious that a few years back the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination warned the Japanese government that that children of migrant workers were not receiving adequate education. Predictably, most of these kids are speakers of Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. Interestingly, the percentage of native speakers of Korean who are entering Japanese schools is rather low (only about 5%), but this may be mostly because many Korean families have already been here for so long that their kids often speak more Japanese than Korean.
Anyway, the issue of kids entering the Japanese public educational system without being able to communicate in Japanese is yet more evidence of the reality that most gaijin do NOT speak English, as for most of these people, sending their kids to international schools is obviously not a viable alternative, as it is for many of us English speakers.
So, why have we English-speakers bought into this obviously false “gaijin = English” myth, anyway? Well, part of it is due to the same issue that enables the “International marriage = J. woman/foreign dude” myth: most of the foreigners here are Asian, and thus a lot harder to distinguish from the Japanese. Sure, you CAN notice the fact that these Asian foreigners speak different languages—for example, here in Kansai, I hear Mandarin Chinese spoken in public a lot more often than I hear English. Still, I've noticed that a lot of Western newcomers, especially those who haven't learned Japanese yet, don't even seem to notice this—I don't know if they think Chinese, Korean, etc. are just weird-sounding varieties of Japanese or what.
As for the Latin Americans, a lot of them have at least partial Japanese ancestry, which makes them less obvious. Then, there is the fact that a lot of them seem to be concentrated in certain areas of smaller industrial cities, places where there aren't many of us English-speakers around to notice them.
Then, there is the issue that, in Japanese, the words gaijin or gaikokujin, which should technically refer to all foreigners, are in actual usage often used to refer primarily to Western foreigners, not to other Asians. Hence, English-speakers in Japan, used to hearing “foreigner” being applied only to people like us, have been influenced by the Japanese stereotype.
Nevertheless, make no mistake about it: the Japanese DEFINITELY see the other Asians (not to mention the Latin Americans, Japanese ancestry or not) as VERY foreign, and they are certainly treated as such. In most ways, we have a considerably easier time of it here in Japan than they do, and not just because there are still considerably more services available in English than in any other foreign language. Whether they speak the stereotypical language of “gaikoku” or not, in many ways, they are even more “gaijin” (“outside people”) than we are.
In my opinion, greater recognition of the existence of these people and their language situation would be a positive step towards dealing with the gradual internationalization of Japanese society, and we English-speakers have an influence on this too, for better or for worse. For example, I've sometimes read articles and letters in the English-language press arguing that “foreigners” ought to be helped with more English services, as if English was a magic bullet that helps all foreigners to communicate. In reality, while more services in English would certainly be welcome, the stereotype that this is ALL that is needed is ultimately a lot more harmful than helpful. I can remember an example of a similar situation in Taiwan: after the '99 earthquake there, there were letters to the editor saying “there should be more information for foreigners in English.” Well, fine, but the reality in Taiwan at the time was similar to Japan: the vast majority of the foreigners there were guest workers from places like Thailand and Indonesia, and in my experience, most of these people spoke no English and little Chinese. In other words, the well-intentioned outcry in the English-language press was actually inadvertently suggesting that only the English-speaking foreigners were deserving of help.
One thing we CAN say about English in Japan: since a lot more Japanese can read English than can read Chinese, Korean and Portuguese, the local English-language press has quite a bit more influence on Japanese policy and attitudes than do local newspapers in other languages (which do exist, by the way!). Hence, if we keep pretending that all foreigners speak English, it's likely to be reflected in the English-language media, as in the Taiwan example above, and that contributes to the invisibility of the non-English speaking majority. I think that most people can at least agree that we don't want to be spreading the message that we are the only foreigners worth recognizing and helping.
At any rate, if the Japanese educational system and immigration offices (neither which are known for quick adaptation to changing realities) are capable of recognizing that foreigners in Japan are far from being synonymous with English and adjusting accordingly, we ought to be able to do it as well. -
J-myth 4: no-one learns from public school English classes
By Matthew Ward | Thursday, Aug 30, 2007
I can still remember my very first English student pretty vividly. His name was “Edwin,” a name given to him by his adoptive parents. He was from a remote Indian tribe in South America, and he somehow got adopted by a couple living on a tiny island in Washington State—my hometown. I was fresh out of college, working as a teacher's aide in the local public school system. They figured that my BA in English and rudimentary Spanish ability made me the best person to give this guy English lessons.
Problem was, poor Edwin had absolutely no background in English whatsoever. He wasn't even very familiar with the Roman alphabet, or even Spanish, which certainly wasn't his native language. I remember him having great difficulty getting any idea of the pronunciation of words by looking at the spelling. He knew no verb conjugations, and very little basic vocabulary like color, family, or food words. My own complete inexperience with teaching didn't help matters at all, of course, but it left a big impression on me as to the challenges of teaching a language to someone with very little previous knowledge of it.
I also remember a student I had in Thailand who was a member of a hill tribe—she had basic literacy in Thai, it seemed, but was, again, pretty much unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet, English grammar basics, etc. Luckily, she had some basic communication skills due to working in the tourist business, but it was difficult balancing her needs against that of the ethnic Thais taking the same class, all who knew the same basic English grammar, vocabulary, spelling, phonics, etc. that Japanese people generally know.
At my first English-teaching job here in Japan, we once had a new teacher who had extensive ESL experience in the US, but who had just arrived in Japan. In his first few classes, he made extensive sentence diagrams on the board—great visual information (which the Japanese, of course, studiously copied in their notebooks!)—but we had to explain to him that Japanese students generally know this stuff already, and the trick was getting them to actually use it.
My own ESL (as opposed to EFL) experience is pretty limited, but during the few times I've found myself teaching ESL back home, it's been pretty interesting to suddenly have to teach stuff like basic phonics, the conjugations of verb-to-be, and the subject and object versions of personal pronouns. Not that Japanese students don't make mistakes with this stuff, but when you correct them, they generally know right away what they got wrong.
My own language-learning experience has given me a lot of food for thought. Luckily, the simple phonetic system of Japanese and logical romaji spellings make it possible to at least exchange some basic greetings from day one when I started studying Japanese, but when I studied languages like Mandarin Chinese and Thai, we had to do literally weeks of pronunciation practice before any real communication at all could start. Luckily, those languages become considerably easier when you get over the pronunciation hurdle, but again it points up the difficulty of teaching and learning a language for people with little or no previous knowledge of it. In contrast, I took a Spanish class again a few years ago, and despite the fact that I never really properly learned the language, it was pretty obvious that I had actually learned something in my very rote US college classes. Despite having mostly lost my ability to put a sentence together, I still had plenty of basic grammar and vocabulary at my disposal that a good teacher could exploit to help me start to communicate in a very short period of time.
Sound familiar? It's exactly this kind of basic knowledge that makes me able to take a Japanese student who literally cannot seem to put 3 English words together, and with just a basic textbook, a writing utensil and some patience, have them engaging in a very basic conversation within minutes. Sure, this “conversation” may be mostly an exchange of basic personal information and likes and dislikes, but it IS communication.
I have a few friends with extensive ESL experience in their home countries who are now teaching EFL here in Japan, and we sometimes comment on the irony of hearing say that the Japanese learn absolutely nothing in their public school English classes. I'd be the last to argue that the Japanese public-school system is a model of efficiency when it comes to teaching foreign language, or that it couldn't be drastically improved, but the fact remains that people do learn, a lot actually, it's just that they don't generally how to actually use the language much.
Of course, it's not always an advantage that Japanese people already have some knowledge of English, as they also come with some ingrained habits that are hard to break. It can be difficult, for example, to convince a Japanese personal that “so-so” is NOT a normal answer to the question “Is it hot outside?” or that a “bug” for something that Louis Vuitton makes, or that “almost” cannot refer to quantity (“Almost the people in Japan eat rice,” yadda, yadda, yadda). But, even these kinds of misunderstandings are largely due to the influence of students' native languages, and believe me, that is an issue whenever anyone learns a new language, anywhere.
I sometimes wonder on how, with my current experience in teaching and learning language, I would do if I had to teach Edwin all over again. I'm sure I'd do a much better job, but one thing for sure—I wouldn't be able to go into the situation assuming that he knew at least a couple thousand basic words, basic syntax, verb conjugations, phonics, etc. From my point of view, the only reason that schools like Nova or Geos can take people whose only qualifications are native-speaking ability and BA's in any random subject, and use them to conduct English classes after very minimal training, is because nearly all Japanese people already DO know the basics, thanks to their public-school system.
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J-myth 5: TOEIC scores prove low Japanese English ability
By Matthew Ward | Wednesday, Sep 26, 2007
One of the most common things cited to “prove” the point of view that there is something wrong with Japan's English ability is TOEIC scores. Simply put, the average TOEIC scores in Japan are among the lowest in the world, lower than many countries that are much poorer. So, this must prove beyond a doubt that Japanese people speak bad English, right? Plenty of Japanese politicians and griping resident foreigners sure seem to think so.
The problem is, it's pretty hard to actually look at the numbers without noticing some glaring facts that pretty much disqualify TOEIC from being any kind of global measure of English ability in Japan. For one thing, it's worth remembering in mind that TOEIC was originally developed specifically for Japan and for a long time it was used only in Japan. With that in mind, it's not surprising that a far greater proportion of the Japanese people take TOEIC than people from most other countries do. In fact, global studies of TOEIC test scores find that, for whatever reason, Japanese and Korean people take TOEIC more than all of the other people in the world combined.
Another pertinent characteristic of Japanese (and Korean) TOEIC test-takers is that they tend to take the exam multiple times—often taking it for the first time just to find out how well they'll do, then taking TOEIC classes and taking it the test again and again to check how much their level has risen.
Compare this to countries like China, Brazil, or Thailand, where the vast majority of people will never take TOEIC at all, and those who do tend to be well-educated people who studied extensively for the tests before even trying it for the first time (no wonder—taking TOEIC is proportionately a lot more expensive in many other countries countries due to the lower value of other currencies compared to the yen).
So, basically, comparing Japanese TOEIC scores to those of other countries proves nothing—it's an invalid comparison because you're not comparing the average Japanese to the average Chinese, Brazilian or Thai. If anything, you're comparing the average Japanese randomly taking the test multiple times to the elite Chinese, Brazilian or Thai taking the test only after they have spent a lot of time preparing for it and are confident that they'll do reasonably well. In other words, apples and oranges.
This is why they make you take those horribly boring statistics classes when you start going to grad school—to hopefully prevent this kind of gross abuse of statistics based on invalid comparisons.
It's also worth considering what much trust you want to put into these standardized tests in the first place. We've all met the student with the 800-plus TOEIC score who could barely have a conversation, and we've also met people with much lower scores that could communicate quite well. There isn't much question that TOEIC measures SOMETHING, it's just that it's another question entirely whether that something actually adds up to usable English ability.
I'm not arguing here that the English level in Japan is actually good (or bad for that matter). But, if we are going to have an intellectually valid discussion about this issue, we're going to have to throw the whole red herring about TOEIC scores in the garbage first. It's not like I'm the first one to point this out—in fact, I've read multiple articles over the years making the exact same argument. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to stop people from regurgitating it ad nauseam. Don't believe tha hype!
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J-myth 6: Japan lacks green space
By Matthew Ward | Monday, Oct 8, 2007
Like a lot of J-myths, this one is pretty understandable: as a heavily urbanized nation with some of the world's biggest cities, the vast majority of people living in Japan are surrounded by concrete that seems to go on forever. There are urban parks in Japan (I personally live next to a huge one), but for the most part, major Japanese cities are indeed rather short in the green space department. So, it's no surprise that many Japanese and foreign residents tend to believe that the country is a vast concrete jungle.
The funny thing is, Japan is actually one of the most densely forested countries in the world, with approximately 68% of the country covered with woods, and FAR more forest area than famously “green” countries like Canada, New Zealand, Norway or Costa Rica (an especially impressive fact when you consider that Japan is also far more densely populated than those countries are). I know, this may sound downright unbelievable to those who spend most of their time in places like Tokyo or Osaka, but it's worth remembering that nearly 80% of Japan is mountainous, and that the vast majority of the population is crammed into the remaining 1/5th of the land.
Here in Osaka, if you are up in a high building in the city center, all you can see is an endless expanse of concrete... except for those green mountains rising in the distance. Those green mountains are actually far more representative of the typical Japanese landscape than are the heavily urbanized lowland areas. The other day, I visited a family graveyard in the mountains north of Osaka, and I was really startled at the sudden change in scenery: one moment, you're in a fairly densely populated suburb, and a few minutes later, you are in dense woods with little sign of human habitation. Once you get up in those mountains, it's the forests that seem to go on forever.
Ironically, while the density of the urban jungles is a big part of what allows the rest of the country to remain forested, it also seems to perpetuate the misconception that the country lacks green space, since most of the people are pretty well segregated from most of the trees. Yet, despite the regrettable practice of building useless bridges and roads as pork-barrel projects in otherwise wooded rural areas, Japan retains more forest cover than any major country in the world. A good way to appreciate this fact is from the air: the next time you fly over Japan on a clear day, take a good look out of the window: there is a LOT of green down there, especially in the mountainous areas that cover most of the archipelago.
This rich forest coverage is not just a result of geography, either. Jared Angel's excellent book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” describes how Japan was becoming seriously deforested by the early 1700's, with most accessible woods having been cut down, bringing the associated problems of soil erosion, flooding, landslides, fires, etc. As a response, the Japanese government developed forest management policies that continue to the present, with the result that the total forest coverage is actually increasing today. It should be noted that few of these woods are pristine old growth, and that Japan also imports a lot of timber and wood products (in other words, Japan is able to remain forested partially because it is rich enough to buy timber from abroad, thus contributing to deforestation in poorer nations). Still, considering the severe environmental problems caused by deforestation that many other densely populated countries have, it's quite an accomplishment that Japan has managed to remain one of the greenest countries in the world:
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J-myth: foreigners = English (redux in light of Nova's fall)
By Matthew Ward | Thursday, Nov 1, 2007
I just got through reading a whole bunch of articles and blogs about the fate of Nova and the hordes of ex-Nova instructors. One thing kinda stuck out: "Nova, with 500,000 students, represented half of theEnglish-teaching market in Japan." This statistic seems to be repeated in half of the newspaper articles I've read about the issue.
The only problem is that Nova, despite its eikaiwa label, wasn't just an English school. For example, I've read recent articles about the popularity of Chinese studies in Japan stating that 125,000 people are ("were"!) studying Mandarin at Nova alone... and there were several other languages being taught as well. But, as usual, the English-language press and blog or message-board entries by countless English-speakers) has managed to completely ignore this fact.
This raises some interesting questions. Such as: who was teaching these 125,000 students? And, what are all those teachers going to do now? There are far more ethnic Chinese in Japan than all of the English speakers put together, and Nova's fall must have had an impact on them too. I'd be willing to bet that there is also an impact on the Spanish-speaking and Korea-speaking communities, as there are a lot of speakers of both those languages in Japan, too, and both languages are popular in Japan. Presumably, plenty of these people are out of work. You can argue that those communities are proportionately less dependent on teaching their languages, so the impact is proportionately smaller, but the fact remains that there must be a lot of Chinese, Korea and Spanish teachers who have lost their jobs.
So where's the news about them? Do they matter? Are they a lower breed of foreigner that doesn't even deserve mention?
My point? We English-speakers continue to manage to remain almost willfully oblivious to the existance of most of the foreign population in Japan. If the Nova implosion indicates that we are in for hard times, as many seem to think, then we aren't exactly doing ourselves a favor by making most of our fellow foreigners invisible.
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J-myth 8: Japanese audiences "just sit there"
By Matthew Ward | Saturday, Mar 8, 2008
One thing I often hear from English-speaking foreigners here in Japan is “at live shows, Japanese people just sit there—they don't do anything!” It's not just about Japan, either—I used to hear the same exact thing in Taiwan a lot too (for an earlier blog entry about this:
http://www.seekjapan.jp/article/180/Asian+music+rules,+actually).
There are dissenters, though: Chemical X wrote in Japanzine a while back, in his now-discontinued “Osaka, Suckers!” column, something like “... the audiences here {in Japan} don't just sit and stare at the bands. They go batshit.”
Now, “they just sit there” and “they go batshit” are two pretty damn incompatible points of view! So which is it?
As a certified music freak, I can verify that Chemical X has the right idea here. For example, when I went to the Rising Sun Rock festival in Hokkaido last summer, the audiences were so interestingly fanatical that I sometimes ended up watching them instead of the bands. Granted, Japanese audiences have a lot of different ways of “going batshit”--the sight of thousands of people pogoing in unison to Tokyo Ska Paradise orchestra was pretty fun, for example. Maximum the Hormone produced a combination of insane moshing and synchronized chants, mostly by teenage girls, that managed to make me feel old (it was really obvious that there was no way I could match the behavior of the audience, despite the fact that I was moshing long before these girls were born!). Orchestra de la Luz produced a mix of blissed-out hippy improvisers and salsa dancers, while The Boredoms got people who were trancing out mixing with people who appeared to want to start a riot. Soul Flower Union just produced a riot of pure joy—people dancing, skanking, and whirling around, while Okinawan roots band Begin got a lot of the Bon-Odori-style hand waving dance going.
Some other memorable bands I've seen: Afrirampo, which create complete mayhem when they play live—the first show I saw by them ended with a lot of the band's equipment in the pit, with the drummer literally buried by moshers, somehow managing to keep playing through it all. and a lot of the audience on the stage, helping out with the vocals. Gagaga SP was another example of huge numbers of punk teens going apeshit... along with a bunch of middle-aged ladies who looked like janitors or something, totally rocking out. That was pretty cool! One of my favorite acts for audience-watching is the Maachan Bando (aka Painukaji Maachan), a sanshin-powered Okinawan-style combo that often incorporates literally dozens of taiko players, many of them children, who play in front of the stage, right in front of the dancing audience. The last time I saw them, they ended up having most of the audience on the stage, swarming around the musicians, the latter who, Afrirampo-style, just kept playing throughout the chaos.
It's not just Japanese bands that get this kind of super-active audiences, either. For example, when I saw The Pogues here a couple of years back, the audience was going almost frighteningly nuts even before the band came on—two-tone style Japanese skinheads chanting and waving Irish flags. During the latest Sonic Youth show, I somehow got more lost in slam dancing than I've done since I was in my early 20's—not feeling tired, not feeling pain, just holding on tight to total strangers and spinning around endlessly, slamming into people who would happily pick you up if you fell. Sigur Ros didn't exactly create a teenage riot, but rather a huge group of people swaying, completely entranced, looking like they were in another world, sometimes visibly crying (I've heard later that Sigur Ros absolutely loves Japanese audiences, because they are obviously totally into the music, not just a bunch of stoned yahoos).
The most mainstream band I've ever seen in Japan was The Police, just last month, and when they came on, they played a tape of Bob Marley's “Get Up, Stand Up.” Obediently, every single one of the 25,000-odd people in the audience stood up and started dancing. What surprised me was that they stayed that way for the entire damn show—when the band finally got around to playing “Every Breath You Take” (IMHO, kind of a boring song compared to most of their other stuff), I finally sat down, but I actually felt embarrassed, like kind of a freak, since as far as I could see, literally no-one else was sitting down.
With these kind of experiences, I'm pretty darn puzzled as to how some people somehow got the idea that Japanese audiences are cold fish. The best I can do is that a lot of people simply aren't seeing many shows at all, and when they do, they are seeing the kind of bland, mainstream shows that no-one ever gets excited about back home, either. I remember, for example, hearing a young British woman complain about how no-one danced at the Destiny's Child show she went to in Osaka: from this, the one and only show she had ever been to in Japan, she deduced that all Japanese audiences “just sit there.”
I gotta admit, I'm a little in the dark here: do people actually dance at Destiny Child shows in Britain or the US??? I mean, sure, I know that they are supposedly “R&B” and thus theoretically danceable, but to me they have about as much to do with R&B as Avril Lavigne has to do with punk rock. Do people actually do ANYTHING at these kind of shows? Besides leer at the dancers or hold their mommies' hands or take pictures with their cellphones or fall asleep or whatever? I mean, when they see “artists” like Nickleback or Celine Dion or Linkin Park or Britney Spears, the music actually inspires them enough to do more than sit there?
Because, I'm suspecting that this is the crux of the issue here: maybe English-speaking people are more likely to respond even when they are seeing cookie-cutter music. And, I'm not really sure if that's a good thing. I mean, obviously, there is plenty of bad music in Japan, but at least people here seem to be able to distinguish between music that is worth getting excited about and music that is not.
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J-myth 9: Japanese is a vague language
By Matthew Ward | Monday, Apr 28, 2008
It's no secret that Japan is a society that, in many situations, values indirect communication. Because of this, it's common to hear Japanese people refusing to directly say no to requests, instead sucking in their teeth and saying things like vague things like “soo desu ne... sore wa... chotto... muzukashii desu ne...” Another common verbal tactic is the unfinished statement: instead of making a request, you state the problem, finishing with the particle “ga...,” leaving the listener to figure out what it is you want them to do.
Because of these kinds of , the idea that Japanese is a “vague language” has become extremely popular among Japanese and non-Japanese alike. For the Japanese, it is another reason to extol how “unique” their culture is, and for non-Japanese, it's often just another way to feel superior “The Japanese can't even communicate properly because their language is vague!”
Japanese is often contrasted with English in this respect: I recently read an article in the Kansai Scene (a local English-language magazine) that stated categorically that Japanese is vague and English is direct.
The funny thing is, the whole concept that a language can be intrinsically vague (or clear, logical, pragmatic, direct, indirect, whatever) has pretty much been completely rejected by modern linguistics. Human language do vary in a number of interesting ways, but they are all complete systems that can pretty much do what their speakers want them to do.
If you've ever lived with a Japanese family, for example, you are probably aware than Japanese people can be almost brutally direct when the situation permits it. An American friend of mine who is extremely fluent in Japanese commented to me the other day that if you directly translate certain casual Japanese requests into English like “o-shoyu choodai” (soysauce, please ), then they sound like something your mother would get angry at you for back home. Sometimes Japanese can actually sound too direct to speakers of English.
It's also important to remember that English itself can be a famously indirect language. Contrast “Ima nan-ji desu ka?” with “I was wondering if you had the time.” The first is a direct question about the time, while the second literally expresses the speaker's ruminations about whether the listener possesses “the time.” Granted, any native speaker would understand that the speaker was really just asking what time it was, but it's important to remember that similar formulaic indirect statements in Japanese are also instantly understood.
Another problem with stating across the board that certain languages are “vague” or “direct” is that language use varies quite a bit from region to region, regardless of which language is being used. For example, if you compare most typical American communication with most typical Kanto communication, I think that it's safe to say that Americans tend to communicate more indirectly. However, comparing Kansai communication (which tends to be more direct) with British communication (which tends to be less direct), and things get much more complicated.
A Japanese co-worker of mine had a satirical postcard in her office that showed a picture of a man who had fallen into an English river. There were two versions of the picture: the first was labeled “incorrect English” (or something like that) and featured the man just saying “HELP!” The second version was labeled “correct English,” with the man saying “Excuse me! I was wondering if it was possible for you to help me?” Now, of course this is a joke: everyone speaking every language in the world would have a very brief phase at his/her disposal like “Help!” “Tasukete!” or whatever, and no-one would bother with a complicated, polite, indirect sentence. But, it points up a couple of things: the humor of the postcard is possible partially because English (especially British English) can be almost comically indirect at times. Also, it reminds us of the basic fact that all languages can be very direct or indirect depending on the situation. Yes, some cultures value indirect communication more than others, which is why the postcard works better in a British setting than it would in an American setting. But this is a product of how languages are used, not of any intrinsic qualities that they have.
There are plenty of people in this world that believe something rather different, however: rather than “British English or Japanese have a lot of indirect phrases and tend to be used indirectly because those cultures value indirectness,” they actually believe that certain cultures communicate indirectly because their languages are indirect. In other words, the language actually constrains the thinking and behavior of its speakers. This kind of thinking shows an influence of a couple of theories: “linguistic determinism” (people's thoughts are determined by the languages that they speak) or “linguistic relativism” (people's thoughts are influenced by the languages that they speak). In other words “Japanese language is indirect, and so Japanese people think and behave in an indirect manner.”
Although these theories still seem to remain somewhat influential in anthropology and some other social sciences, linguistic determinism has been pretty much completely rejected by modern linguistics, and linguistic relativism survives only in rather modest versions. This does not mean that modern linguistics denies a connection between language, culture and thinking, but rather that the influences proceeds from the culture to the language, not the other way around. Human languages are often used by a variety of cultures and in a variety of situations, and they are flexible enough to do what their speakers need them to do. An indirect culture may have a relatively large number of indirect phrases and verbal tactics at its disposal, but it will also be able to communicate directly when it needs to do so. Conversely, a more direct culture will tend to communicate more directly, but its language will enable its speakers to communicate indirectly when the need arises.
Getting back to Japanese, another reason why Japanese is often said to be vague or indirect relates to certain aspects of its structure, especially the fact that Japanese sentences do not require overtly mentioned subjects and objects. Sometimes, even fairly long Japanese sentences seem to consist only of a verb with the usual assortment of endings, plus an adverbial time or place phrase, and the usual ending particles that show emotion, politeness, whatever.
Take the generic Japanese phrase “o-genki desu ka,” often translated as “how are you?” though it really means something more like “Are (you) well?” Isn't this vague? After all, it has no subject! Well, actually, it just so happens that Japanese is one of many languages that permits subjects and objects to be omitted when what you are talking about obvious from context. The fact that the that particle “ka” clearly makes the sentence a question pretty much removes the ambiguity: obviously, you're asking the other person or people about their health, not making a statement about your own health. The honorific “o” also makes it clear that you are not talking about yourself, because in Japanese honorifics are used only for other people (honorifics and directional verbs like kureru and ageruactually end up doing a lot of the work that pronouns do in English). I suppose you could ask who exactly is this other person that “o-genki desu ka?” is addressing, but it's also worth pointing out that the English equivalent “How are you?” is no different, as the English pronoun “you” can refer to pretty much anyone, singular or plural, within earshot.
Both languages (indeed, all languages) have a lot of potential ambiguity, but since human languages are heavily dependent on context, the listener usually knows exactly what the English “you” or the Japanese empty subject really is referring to. Otherwise, we'd say something like “How are you, John?” or in Japanese “Jon-san, o-genki desuka?” (more casually, “Jon-san, genki?”) thus removing all possible ambiguity by directly referring to the subject by name.
All in all, I think that it's fair to say “Japanese is a language that is often used in a vague way,” or “Japanese has a lot of vague phrases,” and especially “Japanese culture values indirect communication, and this influences how the language is used in many situations.” But, stating across the board “Japanese (or any language for that matter) is vague”--that is an unscientific point of view, and thus can be said to be a myth.
I'll finish here by quoting Jay Rubin, Harvard Professor of Japanese Literature and translator of several Mukakami novels: “The Japanese language can express anything it needs to, but Japanese social norms often require people to express themselves incompletely or indirectly.” That pretty much sums it up.
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J-myth 10: "Japanese English" exists
By Matthew Ward | Tuesday, Jul 21, 2009
We've all heard of terms like “American English,” “British English,” “Australian English,” “Irish English,” and the like. You've probably even heard of things like “Indian English” or “Singlish” (Singaporean English). Here in Japan, conferences about linguistics and/or foreign language teaching might bring up the concept of “Englishes,” plural, the idea that there are a lot of different varieties of English in the world. This isn't actually unique to English: any widely spoken language is bound to have developed a lot of different varieties, and we can also see this kind of thing with Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, etc. But, since English is the world's most international language, it gets lots of press, and people quite understandably find it interesting and relevant that it exists in some pretty far-flung varieties.
So, how about Japan? We've all heard of “Japanese English,” right? Does Japan actually have its own variety of English, like Ireland or Singapore or New Zealand? Could, for example, all of those crazy messages on T-shirts actually represent a consistent variety of English that only Japanese people (or people living in Japan) can easily understand? I've sometimes heard newcomers to Japan say things like “well, I haven't learned much Japanese yet, but I can speak a lot of Japanese English!”
To answer this question, first I'm going to point out that if we call something Japanese English, we are implying that it is the same as, say, Scottish English, Irish English or Australian English, following the standard equation of “national adjective + name of language = a national dialect.”
Second, we need to look at this world “dialect” a little bit. A dialect is a variety of a language, with vocabulary, pronunciation (“accent”) and grammar that have noticeable differences with other dialects, and yet is consistent in and of itself. One of the biggest misunderstandings people have about dialects is the idea that “I don't speak a dialect.” It's true that some dialects (like Tokyo Japanese or my relatively “standard” West Coast American English) tend to be more widespread than others, but they will still sound distinctive to speakers of other dialects. For example, my “baby carriage” is a British person's “pram.” My clearly pronounced “r” sound at the end of words like “car” is not pronounced by people from many parts of Great Britain or the American Northeast. In my dialect of English, the words “cot” and “caught” sound exactly the same, but in many other dialects of English, they are systematically different.
The difference between a dialect and a separate language isn't always completely clear-cut, but the usual linguistic (as opposed to political) criterion is mutual intelligibility. Norwegian and Swedish, for example, have different names but are fairly mutually intelligible, so linguistically they are considered to be dialects of the same language. Monolingual speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese essentially can't understand each other's speech, so it's not really true that both languages are dialects of “Chinese”: they are both members of the same language family, but not examples of varieties of the same language.
Most dialects of any given language are spoken by native speakers, simply because non-native speakers seldom have enough opportunity to use a second or foreign language enough to evolve a systematic community version of it. However, one interesting thing about languages like English or Swahili or Mandarin Chinese that are spoken extensively by non-native speakers is that non-native dialects may develop, usually among second-language (as opposed to foreign-language) speakers. For example, most people in India are not native speakers of English, but English is used enough in India that you can make whole dictionaries of “Indian English.” That's not too surprising, considering that it's one of the official languages of the country and is used by millions of Indians to communicate with each other. It doesn't mean that all Indians speak Indian English (many don't speak English at all) or that Indian English is a monolithic variety, but just that it's used systematically enough for consistent varieties to develop.
To sum this all up, dialects are systematic, rule-board mutually intelligible varieties of a language. To get away from English for a moment, here in Japan we have “standard” Japanese and Kansai-ben—fairly mutually intelligible, but obviously different in systematic ways: tabenai vs. tabehen, da vs. ya, iruvs. oru, etc.
So, now that we are clear on what a dialect is, is Japanese English an example of one? What do people actually mean when they speak of Japanese English, anyway? In my experience, the term “Japanese English” is kind of a blanket term to cover a few quite different things, so let's have a look at these things separately:
1). “Wasei Eigo.” Often translated as “Japanese English,” these are the well-known English-derived (or allegedly English derived!) katakana terms that are extremely common in modern Japanese. We all know many common examples: basu means “bus,” manshon means “condominium,” biiru means “beer,” wan-pisu means “dress,” peepaa doraibaa means “a person who has a driver's license but doesn't actually drive, and so on. These words are certainly distinctive, and they certainly differ from “normal” English, so do they qualify as Japanese English?
The real problem with equating wasei Eigo “Japanese English” is that these words are not examples of English at all, but rather of perfectly ordinary Japanese words. Sure, many of them come from English (some of them, like biiru, actually come from other European language), and others (peepaa doraibaa) are derived from English words), but that doesn't make them examples of English. There are actually a lot more Chinese or Chinese-derived words in Japanese (even very “Japanese” words like kampai, banzai, genki, kawaii, or gohan are essentially Chinese loanwords!), but we don't speak of a dialect of Chinese called “Japanese-Chinese.” If I am having a conversation in English back home, and I happen to use Japanese-derived English words like “honcho,” “tycoon,” “karaoke” and “soy sauce,” I'm not speaking “English Japanese” either, I'm just speaking ordinary English that happens to feature some loan words from Japanese.
Actually, the funny thing about the term wasei Eigo is that, arguably, it doesn't mean “Japanese English” at all. First, wasei means “Japanese made,” not “Japanese,” and while Eigo certainly can be translated as “English,” the character used to write go can also mean “words,” (as in tango, “vocabulary,” which literally means “single words” or perhaps “single units of language”). So, we could also translate wasei Eigo as “Japanese-made English words,” which would mean that they were English words coined by Japanese people. This is at least somewhat more accurate than calling them “Japanese English,” but it's still clear that, no matter what their origins are, katakana words are still Japanese words, not English words. At any rate, even if we insist on thinking of them as “English” words, a collection of vocabulary alone cannot comprise a variety of a language.
2). “Crazy English on T-shirts, advertisements, etc.” I can still remember when some of my parents' friends went to Japan back in the 80's, and all they could talk about on their return was “the crazy English messages on T-shirts.” I've actually read a linguist (who, granted, obviously didn't know much about Japan or how English is used here) cite these messages as an example of a unique Japanese dialect of English. The idea seems to be that Japanese people, being fluent in Japanese English, know what these mysterious messages mean, but the hapless non-Japanese are left scratching their heads.
Most readers of this article probably know better: Japanese people can't read these messages any better than we can. In fact, most of them don't even try. Next time you see a bizarre English message on a T-shirt or advertisement, ask your Japanese friends what the message means. The most usual response is puzzlement: why would anybody try to read those messages anyway? After that, you'll occasionally get some kind of perception that a native speaker would not have, but even more often, you'll get complete befuddlement, or something to the effect of “It's your language, why can't you read it?”
The thing that's important to understand about these messages is that, for the most part, they are not meant to communicate meaning at all. They are meant to communicate a certain image. In fact, messages in French, Italian or even languages like Hindi or Thai are used in the same way: making something seem high-class or modern or exotic or quaint. Occasionally, well-placed words that are familiar to Japanese (usually because they have been borrowed into Japanese) like “enjoy” or “get!” help add a little meaning to the image, but for the most part, the image itself is the message. It's also helpful to remember that Japan is not the only culture that uses foreign languages in this way: other Asian cultures like Thailand or Taiwan are fond of using messages in mangled Japanese as well as English to adorn products, and Western people have been showing an increasing fondness for using mangled kanji on tatoos.
Basically, these messages don't reflect an exotic Japanese dialect of English, they simply reflect the English abilities of the individual writer. If you get an advertising writer who has been asking to create an English message to adorn a product, depending on the writer's knowledge of English, you might get anything from a “normal” or virtually normal English message on one extreme, to complete word salad on another extreme. When you think about it, the same exact thing would happen if most of the English-speaking readers of this article were asked to construct messages in Japanese: Depending on our ability, the message might vary enormously, and while some of them might look fairly normal, many others might look pretty downright weird. (granted, some of us might ask a native speaker of Japanese whether the message actually made any sense, but then again, judging from the kanji tattoos I see when I go back home, we might not!). Crucially, they would probably have some features in common because they would all be influenced by English, but they would otherwise not be classifiable as some kind of exotic gaijin dialect of “English-Japanese.” And that point leads me to the 3rd example of “Japanese English”:
3). “How Japanese people speak English:” Really, to be fair, the two examples above, although they are often described as “Japanese English,” would be poor places to look for examples of a dialect anyway. Dialects are primarily represented by spoken language, not by written language, and certainly not by a collection of loanwords. And, it is indeed true that Japanese people tend to speak English in a similar way, with distinctive grammar patterns, pronunciation and vocabulary. So, wouldn't something like “the distinctive way that Japanese people speak English” be better evidence of a Japanese dialect of English?
Here's the simple answer to this question: Whenever people learn a new language, they are influenced by their native languages, and that makes their speech both distinctive and similar to others sharing the same mother tongue. However, just being influenced by ones native language is not enough to comprise a dialect.
For example, I'm sure that Russian universities have classes in Swahili, and you can be sure that the students speak with a Russian accent and with a noticeable influence of Russian grammar and vocabulary, but does that mean that there is a “Russian Swahili”? Plenty of Thai people study Mandarin Chinese, but can we say that there is a dialect of Mandarin called “Thai Chinese?” Not really. The influence of the mother tongue on second and foreign languages is a fascinating subject, but it shouldn't be confused with the creation of new dialects.
I remember reading an article in one of the English-language newspapers here in Japan in which the author called for recognition of Japanese English as a legitimate dialect. One example he used to bolster his claim was something to the effect that “in Japanese English, 'staff' can be pluralized.” The author admitted to not knowing much Japanese, but if he did know Japanese, he might have realized that in Japanese, staffu usually refers to an individual employee (a staff MEMBER), rather than a group of employees as the English “staff” does. So, when Japanese people speak English and they say things like “I had a meeting with my staffs yesterday,” they are simply using the word in its Japanese sense because they aren't aware that the word is a group noun in English. In these kinds of situations, we can certainly say that wasei eigo influences how Japanese people speak English and can create the impression of a Japanese variety of English. However, ultimately it is just the same kind of thing as when people say things like “Almost the people in Japanese eat rice” or “I went to shopping”; they are just showing the influence of Japanese. It's all quite revealing and interesting, but it's also a very normal and unremarkable aspect of language learning.
When English-speaking foreigners claim to speak “Japanese English,” as far as I can tell, they are using a lot of wasei eigo words in their Japanese sense, plus dropping articles and plurals (so-called “Tarzan English”), plus a few other basic strategies like using present tense for the future and perhaps using some so-called “katakana pronunciation.” Depending on one's perspective, it's either amusing or annoying, but it's pretty important to note that if Japanese English were a real dialect, it wouldn't be something one could learn by trying to sound like Tarzan with a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, we all do find our English influenced to some degree by either Japanese or by how Japanese people use English, but this shouldn't be confused with learning a new dialect.
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the concept of Japanese English is that there is no real basis for it existing at all. Japan has never been colonized by an English-speaking country and already has an extremely dominant and well-developed lingua franca. Most newcomers to Japan are coming from non-English speaking countries like China, Korea and Brazil, and they and the Japanese quite logically use Japanese as their common language. English is mostly used as it is in other countries where it is a foreign (rather than second or native) language: for international communication, business and tourism, plus for communicating with the small minority of foreign residents who speak more English than Japanese. Barring some kind of unforeseen catastrophe like invasion and colonization by an English-speaking power, Japanese English seems destined to remain a myth.
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Kazuhide's Linguistic Myths
By Matthew Ward | Sunday, Jul 13, 2008
In college, I majored in TESOL. As such, I ended up taking a fair number of linguistics classes. I ended up really loving studying linguistics, and so I've kept on studying on my own throughout my life. I'm the kind of person who will actually buy linguistics textbooks to read for entertainment—a little weird, I know, but different strokes for different folks, no? Despite all of this, I'm very far from being any kind of expert on language, but I have picked up a fair amount of information about over the years.
Anyway, if you are anything like me, you'll probably know the experience of regularly hearing very widely held beliefs about language that are actually quite wrong. These myths vary a bit from society to society, but many of them are surprisingly similar from culture to culture. There's actually a great little book called “Linguistic Myths,” featuring a collection of essays by prominent linguists, that manages to, in a humorous, readable and unpretentious way, explore a number of these myths. I really recommend it to anyone interested in linguistic issues.
One thing pointed out in the foreword to “Linguistic Myths” is that the amount of information about language has expanded exponentially in the last half-century, and linguists have done an unusually poor job of communicating this information to the general public, resulting in many people having deeply-held ideas about language that have little relation to fact.
Anyway, you're probably wondering what the heck all of this has to do with Kazuhide. For those who don't know, “Ask Kazuhide” is a funny column in Japanzine that basically features a crotchety, bigoted old Japanese guy who gives funny and very un-PC answers to questions by clueless gaijin. Of course, actually, Kazuhide's answers are presumably written by smartass foreigners, but they do a pretty good job of being funny and parodying certain aspects of both Japanese culture and reactions to it by non-Japanese. In last month's “Ask Kazuhide,” the old guy discussed language a bit. Of course, it's the usual ridiculous stuff, but, intentionally or otherwise, it did a pretty good job of bringing up several linguistic myths in a very short space. As follows:
Japanese Language
Sam
by Sam on Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:25 pm
Hello Kazu,
With so many Japanese teens using phones and emails to write Japanese it seems (after talking to many) that they are losing the ability to write Kanji and with so many foreign words now intrenched into the Japanese language, how long will the language last?Re: Japanese Language
by Kazuhide on Tue Jun 10, 2008 5:39 am
Dear Sam,
Not longer much now. Even I, great Japanese traditions man, am writing English in magazine right now. This is future the world: International Bloken Engrish.OK, I can count at least 5 linguistic myths here, one of them specific to Japan, the others quite common in many cultures. As follows:
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Technology is making people unable to write kanji:
Actually, the truth is a lot more complicated than this. One thing that is clear: technology is reducing people's ability to handwrite Chinese characters, for the same reason that spellcheck programs affect spelling skills in English: you don't have to remember how to handwrite them so much anymore, because machines to it for you. With word-processors (and cellphones, etc.), all you need to do is know the sound of the word and recognize is what the character looks like (which is much easier than writing it by hand), and voila, you can write it. In other words, technology is actually making it easier to write kanji as long as you're using some kind of electronic device. Parodoxically, this also makes them more difficult to remember how to write when you don't have a writing device around, but since most people are writing with machines these days, there are some who believe that the use of kanji is actually increasing in written Japanese.
To give a good example of why this is so: I love to eat crab, but if I was handwriting Japanese, I'd have to write it in kana as ��, because the kanji character happens to be tricky to remember and write. No such problem with a wapuro (word-processor): all I have to do is write kani in romaji or �� in kanaand the character 蟹 comes up on the screen. In other words, word-processors make me more able to write kanji.
The same process works for Japanese teens: look over their shoulders when they are furiously tapping away at their cellphones on the train, and you'll see a lot of Chinese characters coming up on the screen. This is because a lot of difficult characters that might otherwise be written in kana if they were passing each other notes in class can be easily written in kanji via phonetic input on a cellphone. It can even save money: some services charge more for longer messages, and using more kanjimeans that you can write shorter messages with the same amount of content. I can remember, when cellphone e-mail first started getting common, my wife's mother wrote her an all-hiragana message, and my wife and her 20-something friends laughed at it “Look, your poor old mom doesn't know how to convert to hiragana to kanji!” In other words, not using kanji in electronic communication can actually have a fuddy-duddy connotation. Of course, some of these teens end up choosing the wrong characters when they are phonetically inputing them, with humorous results (kind of like English-speaking teens spelling “loser” as “looser”), but then again, even adults have long have been prone to these kinds of mistakes.
There have actually been concerns expressed by educators in recent years that the ease of using Chinese characters in e-mail and word-processors have increased the number of kanji used in Japanese. Despite the official policy of trying to keep the written language relatively simple at 2000-odd characters, the fear is that the simplification of the written Japanese language that was carried out by the 20th century script reform movement may be undone by technology. So, what we're really seeing is an increase in kanji use, coupled with a decrease in ability to handwrite the ideographs. All in all, these two trends combined may well be something to be concerned about, but it's not exactly as simple as “they are losing their ability to write kanji.”
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People can't read and write as well as they used to:
Contrary to popular perception, in most modern societies, overall literacy levels are actually higher than they have ever been. Most complaints about a decline in literacy assume that there was some kind of golden age of literacy in the past. Actually, the golden age never existed. Before the advent of universal education, most people in most societies were illiterate, but overall literacy rates have been climbing ever since. Western people traveling to Japan in past centuries reported surprisingly high levels of literacy, especially considering that Japanese was even more difficult to read and write back then, but it is important to remember that these people were generally comparing Japan to their own societies, which were almost overwhelmingly illiterate. Japanese teens today may have little interest or ability to read ancient Japanese literature, and they may find it harder to handwrite kanji than their parents did, but they almost certainly have higher overall literacy rates than teenagers did 100, 200 years or even 50 years ago.
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Changes in people's ability to read or write reflect on the overall health of a language:
Obviously, literacy is very important in modern society, and people have good reasons to be concerned about it. However, there is a common misconception that problems with literacy indicate some kind of state of ill health with the language in general. We can see this above when “Sam” connects the ability of teens to write kanji with the future of the Japanese language. Actually, even if teenagers do have a problem with writing Chinese characters, it wouldn't have much bearing on the overall health of the Japanese language.
Let's say that Japanese teenagers did lose their ability to read and write in kanji, and Japanese had to be written all in kana or romaji in the future Would that spell doom for the Japanese language? Abandoning kanji certainly didn't seem to hurt Vietnamese, and greatly reducing its use doesn't seem to have hurt Korean. When Turkey modernized in the early 20th century, the script was changed from Arabic to Latin, so in essence the old Turkish writing system was replaced and no longer exists, but the spoken Turkish language, of course, is alive and well today.
Basically, the Japanese writing system really isn't the same thing as the Japanese language: it (and all other writing systems) is a highly artificial cultural invention that is is loosely based on the spoken language. Changing or replacing the writing system would thus have little effect on the status of the spoken language.
4). Foreign loanwords are damaging to a language:
“Sam” obviously thinks that the continuing incursion of foreign loanwords into Japanese somehow comprises another threat to the language. The idea that foreign loanwords damage or corrupt a language is one of the most popular and widely held linguistic myths of all, but it is also one of the easiest to disprove. On one hand, people often become understandably disturbed when large numbers of foreign words are imported into their language, and it makes them feel threatened that the language is somehow diluted and perhaps will somehow be overwhelmed by alien words. However, the fact remains that all languages change and all languages import foreign words. If foreign words were damaging to a language, English should by all rights be on its last legs. I've heard examples of what English would sound like using only its original Germanic vocabulary, and it sounds downright bizarre: check this out for an example:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/msg/69250bac6c7cbaff
As for Japanese has been importing enormous numbers of words from Chinese (a language as different from Japanese as English is) for most of the last 1500 years, so it's very difficult to see how borrowing words from English or other European languages is damaging Japanese now.
5). Japanese and other major languages are threatened by English:
A lot of people have heard that about half the world's languages are slated to disappear in the next century, and the media (especially the English-language media) is extremely fond of constantly reminding us of how dominant English has become worldwide. In the minds of the public, these two issues have become closely connected: English is the most dominant international language the world has ever known, and languages are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, so this must be all because of English, right?
Well, actually, not really. Certainly, there are a number of languages in danger of being replaced by English: these are languages like Hopi, Irish Gaelic and Australian Aboriginal languages, all of which are spoken in countries where English is the dominant native language. But, most endangered languages in the world are not being threatened by English, but rather by other dominant languages. For example, the threatened languages in Japan are Ainu and various Okinawan dialects. They are being threatened by standard Japanese, not English.
What is really happening to the world's languages is that a relatively small number of powerful languages are becoming even more dominant at the expense of most other languages. As this happens, those dominant languages gain even more native speakers and become even more powerful (and even less likely to disappear in the foreseeable future). This process has little to do with English, which continues to grow as a second and foreign language, but is fairly stagnant as a native language.
In fact, the proportion of native English speakers in the world's population has actually been falling for decades, and is projected to keep falling at least through the middle of this century. In the 1950's, native English speakers accounted for around 9% of the world's population. These days, high estimates of the number of native English speakers put the total at around 400 million people, which, in a world where there are currently around 6.7 billion people, puts the percentage of native English speakers at around 6%. That's right, all this time you've been hearing about how English is just crushing all other languages, it's actually been shrinking, in relative terms, as a native language. Yes, the total number of native speakers of English is growing, but not nearly as fast as the total world population is. This is mostly because native English speakers tend to have small families as compared speakers of languages like Spanish, Arabic and Hindi; most of the still-explosive growth in the world's population has not occurred among native English speakers. Given this trend, it's hard to imagine how large, dominant languages like Japanese could be threatened by English in the near future.
Given that most new English speakers are non-native speakers (a trend that looks certain to continue), and given that non-native speakers of any given language do have a tendency to speak in what could be called in a “broken” way, Kazuhide's “International Bloken English” is very likely to be a major factor in the world's linguistic future. It doesn't mean, however, that that's all everybody will be speaking.
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Japanese Pronunciation pt. I: introduction
By Matthew Ward | Monday, May 26, 2008
One of the biggest surprises I got when I first started studying Japanese was that my teachers spent very little time teaching pronunciation. Before Japanese, I had studied Thai and Mandarin Chinese, two tonal languages that both contain a number of sounds that are not found in English or many other languages. Basically, with Thai and Mandarin, if you don't get the pronunciation down, your whole speaking ability will be seriously crippled, because no-one will know what you're talking about. As such, beginning classes spend the few few weeks working mostly on pronunciation. This can be pretty boring, but it's quite necessary.
I also remember, when I first started studying Thai, I had some classmates who had lived in Japan, and they told me “This language is way harder than Japanese.” As such, I was actually kind of surprised that Japanese turned out to be a fairly difficult language for me, in some ways definitely more difficult than Thai. Thinking about it though, I'm sure that what these people were comparing was just the initial pronunciation hurdle. With Japanese, if you have a decent ear for sounds, you can learn and use a number of basic set phrases fairly quickly, even if you can't use the grammar well enough to make original sentences for yourself. Chinese and Thai are pretty much the opposite of Japanese in that respect: it takes weeks until you can pronounce well enough to make simple phrases intelligible, but once you get over the hurdle, the grammar is simple enough that you can start making your own sentences fairly quickly.
However, with all that in mind, another thing that I've found surprising about learning Japanese is how many non-Japanese, especially English speakers, who have fairly bad Japanese pronunciation. Not saying that mine is so great, but when I can't make myself understood, it's almost always because of things like grammar or vocabulary usage, not pronunciation. With the Japanese phonetic system being far more basic than many other Asian languages, you'd expect that people would have less trouble with pronouncing Japanese words. However, I haven't really found that to be the case.
I have a theory as to why this is so: when you study certain Asian languages (Thai, Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese being prime examples), you quickly become aware that you are in a very different phonetic universe, and you really understand that you have to work on pronunciation a lot if people are going to understand you at all (and your teachers hopefully have the same mindset!). With Japanese, however, most of the sounds have near equivalents in English, so I think a lot of English speakers figure that they can pretty much get away with pronouncing everything like English, leaving more time to focus on more difficult aspects of Japanese, like the grammar and vocabulary. This seems logical enough, but it's also too bad, because Japanese shouldn't be a difficult language to pronounce correctly if you are aware of the how the language works phonetically and take some time to get it right.
So, in that spirit, I've writing this article to explore Japanese pronunciation, in the hopes that it can give other learners some useful perspective about what to pay attention to. This will probably be most useful to beginners, but I'm also hoping that it will be useful to people who have been studying Japanese for a while.
Next installment: Japanese vowels!
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Japanese Pronunciation pt. II: deceptively simple vowels
By Matthew Ward | Monday, May 26, 2008
Today, I'll focus on vowel sounds—I'll deal with other aspects of Japanese pronunciation in another installment. I should note that I'm using standard North American English as the basis for comparison of the vowel sounds here in this article.
The good news is that Japanese is an extremely simple language in terms of vowels: there are literally only 5 vowels in Japanese. If you're confused by the “only 5” statement—English has five vowel letters, but most dialects of English have more than 20 actual vowel sounds. Ironically, though, the bad news is that I personally find that it is the vowels that English speakers have the most problem with, and I think that the simplicity is actually part of the problem. This is because with a large number of vowels and a phonetic system in which vowel sounds systematically change all the time (more on that below), English speakers are used to not having to being very precise with vowels. In Japanese, however, you have to be precise with vowels, because with so few to deal with, slight variations in pronunciation can easily result in incomprehensibility, or completely different words.
At any rate, the five Japanese sounds are as follows: a, i, u, e, o, or ã�‚ã€�ã�„ã€�ã�†ã€�ã�ˆã€�ã�Šã€€in hiragana. It's not a good idea, by the way, to use the English vowel letter names (a = aye, e = ee, etc.) for the Japanese romaji letters, because they are pronounced quite differently in Japanese. If you know a Romance language, however, it can be very helpful, because the sounds of the Japanese romajiletters have more or less the same sound in languages like Spanish or Italian as they have in Japanese: a is always “ah,” i is always “ee,” u is always “ooh,” e is always “aye,” and o is always “oh.” In other words, the name of the vowel letter is the same as the sound of the letter—what a concept!
Furthermore, the beauty of Japanese romaji (and the kana systems) is that the vowel letters are always spelled exactly like they sound—there are no silent letters or letters with multiple sounds, the way we have in English. For example, although the pronunciation of “a” in father, apple, bake, andAmerican is different in each word, somehow English speakers seem to think that all of these sounds are just variations of “the A sound.” In contrast, Japanese a/ã�‚ is always pronounced “ah,” quite similar to the pronunciation of “a” in “father.”
However, I should point out that the phonetic English spellings like “oh” or “ooh” that I have used above to approximate the Japanese vowel sounds are potentially a bit misleading, because English vowel sounds like “oh,” “ooh,” and “ee” are all “diphthongs,” which means that they are all actually blends of two sounds: a longer sound with a short sound at the end, often called a “glide.” Japanese doesn't have glides or diphthongs at all. Say the English word “you” and feel how your lips purse slightly in the end. In contrast, in the Japanese word yu (as in o-yu, etc.), the lips don't move or purse at all. Try to say “ooh” without moving your lips at all and with your mouth held rigid (lips slightly drawn back, not rounded as in English), and you'll probably come out with more or less the Japanese “u” sound. The same goes for e, i and o; if you say the words “bay” “bee” and “bow” with your mouth held rigid when pronouncing the vowel sound in the same way as “you” above, and you'll pretty much get it. Pronouncing the glide sound as in English will probably still result in an intelligible Japanese word, but you'll certainly sound better if you can learn to ditch the diphthongs
But, what about words like ai (love) or kau (buy). Aren't those vowels (ai and au) diphthongs? Actually, in Japanese, they are considered to be two separate sounds, divided into two separate syllables of equal length. Ai is a-i and kau is ka-u. The kana spellings (��, for example) are helpful here in that they reinforce the reality that these are separate vowels pronounced separately, not diphthongs. In the beginning, you don't have to worry too much about this concept, but it will help your pronunciation a lot later on if you can keep it in mind.
One common problem that we English speakers have when pronouncing Japanese is the habit of reading Japanese words like they were English words. Yes, Japanese vowels are simple, but no, they are not spelled the same way as English vowels in romanized Japanese, and you can't expect them to have the same sounds. For example, I can't tell you how many times I've heard English speakers pronounce the word onsen as if it were “on center” without the “ter.” This is OK if you are speaking English, but it will seriously confuse people if you speak that way in Japanese. The problem is, the English vowel spelled with “o” in words like “on” or “boss” doesn't exist in Japanese, and for some speakers of American English, it will sound more like the Japanese a. The on in onsen sounds closer to “own” (again, minus glide) than the English “on,” (and, no, sorry, mosu baagaa (“Mos Burger”) sounds nothing like “Moss Burger!”)
Similarly, a u beginning a word always sounds like ooh-minus-glide, never “you” as in English “university” or “union.” There is a popular business district in Osaka called “Umeda,” (“Plum Field”), and I've actually heard English-speaking people call it “Yumeda,” sometimes sounding like “You may duh”!. (Whenever I hear “Yumeda,” I always think of the scene in Spirited Away where the little girl tries to run away from the enchanted town, only to find that the hilly field has suddenly become a sea, and she screams “Yume da! Yume da!” (It's a dream! It's a dream!”) Yes, living in Umeda may be like living in a dream (or perhaps a nightmare from some points of view), but it's not pronounced “Yumeda.”
The e at the end of Japanese words is another common problem for English speakers. Yes, I know that we say “carry okie” “sahkee” and “kuhrahdee” in American English,” but that's English, not Japanese. In Japanese, it's always e/ã�ˆ (again, kind of like “aye” minus the glide), not “ee.” So, it's more like “kah-rah-oh-kay” in Japanese. And, for all I know, there may be a city pronounced something like “koh-bee” in Japan, but it's not the city that lies half an hour west of Osaka by train—that sounds more like “Koh-bay.”
Another potentially damaging problem that English speakers have with Japanese vowels is using the English habit of changing the vowel sounds depending whether the sound is stressed or not. English has something called “stress accent,” in which certain syllables of words are longer, louder, and higher-pitched that others. When we change the stress accent, the other vowel sounds change with it. Contrast “CANada with “CaNAdian,” and you'll see what I mean. The sounds spelled with “a” changes depending the stress or lack of it, and many of the unstressed vowels become “schwa,” (É™) the colorless “uh” sound that English vowels tend to revert to when they aren't emphasized.
Now, in Japanese, there is no “stress accent” at all. What Japanese does have is a “pitch accent” system, where some syllables are pronounced higher than others, but not longer: contrast SA-ke(salmon) with sa-KE (booze). I'll get more into this admittedly confusing concept in the next installment of this article, but here's the important point for now: Japanese pitch accent often sounds similar to English stress accent to the ears of native English speakers, so we have a tendency to make the vowels in the lower-pitched syllables into schwa, as in English. The problem is, Japanese has no schwa, and Japanese vowel sounds do not change depending on whether they have a high or low accent. Compare English “Canada” (CAN-uh-duh) with Japanese kanada (KAH-nah-dah), for example: in the English, the two unstressed “a” sounds are very different from the first, stressed sound, while in Japanese, all three sounds are exactly the same.
Basically, using the English stress accented system along with the associated vowel sound changes and schwa when you're speaking Japanese will wreak major havoc with your pronunciation. Fully understanding the Japanese pitch accent system takes a while and you don't have to be too worried about it in the beginning, but it's still a good idea to get really conscious about completely banishing schwa from your Japanese, because it just doesn't belong there at all and will definitely make your pronunciation less intelligible.
While Japanese does not turn its unaccented syllables into schwa, it does have something slightly similar: i and especially u often become devoiced (whispered) when they don't have the high pitch accent. Familiar examples include the u in desu and the i in ashita. The vowels are still there, but they are very quiet, and it sounds as though the preceding consonants are lengthened. This is another confusing concept, but it's not something that you have to get too worried about in the beginning. This is because if you don't devoice vowels, people will still understand you, just as English learners are still understandable when they ignore schwa. It's good to pay attention to these whispered vowels though, because using them will make you sound more natural, but it's not a crucial issue for beginners. Keep your ears open and listen to how Japanese people speak, and you'll gradually catch on to these devoiced sounds.
A more urgent problem is vowel length. In English, we call our vowels “long” and “short” (like the “a” sounds in “back” and “bake”), but this is really a total misnomer: they are two totally different vowel sounds that happen to be spelled with the same vowel letter. Japanese, in contrast, really does have long and short versions of the same vowels: try biiru (beer) vs. biru (building). These can impede comprehension at times, so they are worth working on. Here, again, the English stress system can cause a lot of problems, because when we stress syllables in English, we make the vowels longer, but in Japanese making the vowel longer can result in a whole different word. The trick is learning to hold out the vowel sound twice as long. Technically, the long vowels actually represent an extra syllable. You can practice long vs. short vowels by tapping a beat out and pronouncing words along—for example, it would be BI-RU (two beats) vs. BI-I-RU (three beats). As you can see, it's like you're repeating the sound twice with the long vowels, except for the two sounds blend into each other instead of being pronounced distinctly. By the way, the technique of pronouncing words to a beat can also work well with the false diphthongs like a-i and a-u that I mentioned above: both of the sounds should have the same length, so each should get its own separate beat.
One final thing about Japanese vowels: they change slightly depending on which consonant proceeds them. For example, the u sound in the verbs suu (smoke) and kuu (eat) are slightly different from each other. This is the case in all languages, however, and as such I've chosen not to focus on it. Since Japanese has a rather limited number of possible syllables, it's worth paying attention to the individual syllables when you are practicing reading the kana system aloud (a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc) and to listen carefully to how the Japanese pronounce these syllables—this will help give you an idea of the slight changes in the vowel sounds.
In summation, Japanese vowels are very basic, but the simplicity actually makes them more problematic for English speakers, since there is no room for the systematic variation that we have in English. Also, some of the other differences between the two languages that affect vowels (pitch accent instead of syllable accent, lack of schwa, lack of glide vowels, the difference between romajispelling and English spelling, and long vs. short vowels) can all cause pronunciation problems for English speakers if we aren't aware of them.
In the next installment, I'll get into some other issues: namely consonants, including the tricky issues posed by ã‚“ (the final nasal sound usually written with “n” in romaji) and ã�£ (doubled consonants), along with other sundry things like more about how pitch-accent works and the concept of a syllable-timed language.
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Japanese pronunciation pt. III: initial consonants
By Matthew Ward | Monday, Jun 2, 2008
Today, I'm going to look at Japanese initial consonants. There are a lot more of these than there are vowels, but the good news is that English speakers tend to have fewer overall problems with them. Some of these sounds differ from their closest English equivalents, but unlike the vowels, you don't have to be too precise to be understood. Still, like the vowels, it's definitely worth taking some time to get them right—you'll sound a lot better and more natural, and you won't have to spend too much working getting there, compared to many other languages. I'll start with the sounds that are closest to their English equivalents, and then go on to the more unusual ones.
First, a few sounds that are pretty much exactly the same as in English, and can safely be ignored when practicing pronunciation: s, m, b, ch, j and g.This may seem obvious, but it's worth noting that gis so-called “hard g” sound as in “give” or “get,” never the “soft g” as in George, Gina, etc.
Japanese t, d and n (the n used at the beginning of words, that is) are all very similar to their English equivalents, and the English sound can be used without impeding comprehension. The difference is that the Japanese sounds are all “dental” sounds, with the tip of the tongue touching the upper back teeth, whereas the English t and d sounds have the tongue touching the gum ridge (called “alveolar” sounds). As a result, t and d have less aspiration (air coming out of the mouth) than the English sounds. Practicing making these sounds with your tongue against your teeth will make you sound more natural, but it's not something you have to pay too much attention to in the beginning. Pand k also have less aspiration than their English equivalents On the other hand, the Japanese h is stronger and produced with more friction in the month than the English h sound, kind of like the German ch sound as in Ich, etc.
Like English, Japanese has “semivowels” used as initial, consonant-like sounds, namely y and w. Y, as in words like yabai and yoku, is basically just like English: a very short [i] sound. W is a very short [u] sound, like English, too, but with a bit of a difference: the lips are spread, not rounded as in English. Again, this is the kind of small difference that will help make you sound more natural, but it won't impede comprehension. Y can be more problematic for English speakers when it is used together with another consonant, as in words like “Kyoto” and “Tokyo.” I'll address this issue in the next installment.
Z is a step up on the difficulty scale: in the middle of a word, it's the same as the English z sound, but in the beginning of a word, it's actually pronounced [dz]. So, for example, the word “Zen” in Japanese is actually pronounced more like “Dzen.” This [dz] sound exists in English, but never as an initial sound. Try saying a word ending in a d with an s ending (“gods” “dad's,” etc.), and you'll get the sound. To practice making this sound as an initial sound, try an English word ending in ds and add another word starting with a vowel afterwards: for example, say “Dad's eye,” repeatedly, with the two words run together, and then drop the “da” in Dad. Luckily, if you haven't learned to make this sound yet, substituting the English “z” will not cause comprehension problems.
A similar but much more problematic sound is ts, which is the unvoiced equivalent of the [dz] sound described above. Like [dz], [ts] does not exist as an initial sound in English, so English speakers will usually substitute an s sound for it. For example, the Japanese loanword “tsunami” is usually pronounced [sunami] in English. This is totally fine in English, of course, but substituting [s] for [ts] in Japanese will often result in incomprehensibility or a totally different word: compare tsuna (“net” or “tuna”) with suna (“sand”). Because of this problem, ts is one Japanese consonant that it's worth trying to master from the beginning. The same technique that I described for the initial z sound above is effective for learning ts: try, for example repeating “cat's eye” and then leave out the “ca” sounds.
There is a third sound in Japanese that exists in English as a final sound, but not as an initial sound: [Å‹]. This is the same sound that is usually written in English as ng. I wrote above that the Japanese g is the same as the English “hard g,” but actually, traditionally this sound changed to [Å‹] in in the particlega and in the middle of a word (such as ageru 'give'). However, most Japanese either can't or don't pronounce this sound anymore, and it seems to be used mostly in formal speech and by people like television announcers who speak in a hyper-standard way. As such, foreign learners of English can get away with completely ignoring this sound. However, if you want to show off (or enhance your formal Japanese) by mastering it, here's how: use exactly the same technique that I described above: pronounce an English word ending in “ng,” add a word with a vowel after it, and then drop the sounds before the “ng.” Phrases like “bring on,” “sing out,” and “bang up” should work fine. By the way, since [Å‹] is used as an initial sound in many Asian languages, learning this sound will give you a head-start on Thai, Vietnamese and Cantonese, to name a few.
Finally, there are a couple of initial consonants in Japanese with no real English equivalents at all. These are f and r. These both bear some similarity to the English sounds that are represented by the same letters, but they aren't really the same sounds.
F is similar to the English f sound, but not the same. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it's written as [Φ] instead of [f]. In the Japanese syllabary, the syllable fu is part of the group otherwise beginning in h (ha, hi, fu, he, ho), and the sound is also similar to the h sounds that it it's lumped together with. Like the English f sound, f is produced by blowing air out of the mouth, but with the English sound, the top teeth touch the bottom lip, while with the Japanese sound, the upper and lower lips are held close together. Try making an f sound with your lips held close together and without your top teeth being involved, and you should be able to approximate it. It's a very breathy sound! Traditionally, f was used only in fu, but certain katakana loanwords like firumu (“film”) have combined it with other vowels. Still, many Japanese find these new combinations difficult, which is why some people will say fuirumu while others will say firumu.
And then, there is the infamous r sound, the source of endless corny jokes. Yes, it really is somewhere between the English r and l sounds, although it's always sounded a bit closer to the English l to me, and it often sounds like d to English speakers as well, which is why the name Eri can sound similar to the English name “Eddy.”
The biggest difference between r and the English r sound is that while with the English sound, your tongue doesn't touch the inside of your mouth at all, while with the Japanese sound, the tip of your tongue quickly flicks against your gums behind your front top teeth. This aspect of r is quite similar to the English l sound, but with the latter, the front part of your tongue lays flat against your front teeth and the gums behind them, without the flick that accompanies the Japanese sound. This tongue flick is also similar to what your tongue does for the English d, except it's a stronger flick. Try making an l sound but with your tongue flicking as with d, and you should be able to approximate it.
Japanese r is nearly the same as the single (untrilled) r as in Spanish words like pero (“but”) and caro(“expensive”), so if you can speak Español, the Spanish r sound will work fine. If not, the English l works much better as a substitute than the English r. The good news is that the Japanese r is really not all that difficult if you work on it—far easier for English speakers to learn than the English r is for Japanese speakers (and for speakers of many other languages too; the English r really is a rather unusual sound).
Japanese has also kind of/sort of borrowed the English v sound, written as ヴ in katakana. You can find this sound used some of the time in certain words like the Japanese version of “violin,” which is alternately written as baiorin (ãƒ�イオリン) and vaiorin (ヴァイオリン). Some people pronounce these with the traditional Japanese b sound, others with the English v, and still others produce a kind of mutant, French-sounding combination. Personally, I find that, in context of Japanese phonology, it's easier just using b, and it seems to be slightly easier for Japanese to understand as well.
To sum this all up, Japanese initial consonants are, for the most part, really quite easy for English speakers, but there are a few things you'll need to work on. There are a number of sounds that are the same as their English equivalents, several that are slightly different, a few that are used in English only as final sounds, and then a couple that don't exist in English at all. You'll mostly need to pay attention to the latter two groups, but the sounds that are slightly different are also worth working on, in the interest of sounding more natural. In many cases, if you haven't figured out how to make Japanese consonants sounds, you can get away with substituting the closest English equivalent, but this doesn't always work, as in the tsuna/suna example I give above.
In the next installment, I'll address non-initial Japanese consonants (or semi-vowels, as the case may be): the syllabic final n (which is very different from the initial n), the use of y after consonants as in words like gyuunyuu (“milk”), and also the doubled consonants used in the middle of words.
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Japanese Pronunciation Pt. 4: non-initial "consonant" sounds
By Matthew Ward | Wednesday, Jul 23, 2008
In this installment I'm going to look at 3 more features of Japanese pronunciation that all involve non-initial “consonants.” I'm putting the word “consonant” in quotes here because these sounds are actually quite difficult to simply categorize.
First, we have the semi-vowel spelled as y in romanized Japanese, and found in the hiraganacharacters ã‚„ã€�ゆ and よ. I discussed this sound used as an initial “consonant” in the last installment—in that case, it is pretty much exactly the same as the English y sound as in “yes” or “yellow”--a very short [i] sound. No difficulties there.
This sound does become problematic, however, when it follows an initial consonant sound, as in words like “Tokyo” or “Kyoto,” as well in many other words like kyoka (permission) or gyuunyuu (milk). When English borrows words from Japanese, we tend to render this y sound found in the middle of a word as a pure vowel sound “toh-key-oh” or “Key-oh-toh.” This is fine in English, but it can be a problem if carried over to Japanese. In Japanese the sound is exactly the same as it is when it begins a word: it's a consonant (or more properly, a semi-vowel) that does not add an extra syllable to the word. So, it's not “Key-oh-tow,” it's more like “Kyoh-toh.”
This use of the “y” sound as a non-initial consonant rarely occurs in English, but you can find it in several common words like “curious” and “cute.” For example, it's not “key-ewt,” it's “kyewt” [kyut]. So, when you say words like gyuunyuu, just keep the word “cute” in mind, and you should do fine.
The second non-initial consonant issue involves doubled consonants, written in the kana systems as ã�£ or ッ (the small versions of the symbols pronounced tsu when written full-size). This is not a sound at all, but rather an indication of a doubled consonant sound. It usually occurs in the middle of a word with more than one syllable: it can be found twice in the phrase chotto matte. The romaji practice of using a doubled consonant letter is quite useful here, because the consonant really does get repeated twice. This is quite different from English spelling, though, because in English doubled consonant letters usually indicate a change in the vowel sound—compare the a sound in “lady” vs. “laddy” and you'll get the idea.
Actually, in Japanese, it does change the vowel sound too, but in a different way. The vowel sound is shortened, although “cut-off” would be a better way of describing it. In the word matte, first you get a very short mat-, followed by an instant of silence (considered a separate syllable in Japanese!), followed by te. This distinction is important because there are a number of pairs that are distinguished only by whether the consonant is doubled or not: kite vs. kitte (“coming” vs. “cutting”) or mitsu vs.mittsu (“honey” vs. “three”)
Finally, there is the n used as a non-initial nasal sound—either in the middle or the end of a word, written in katakana as ã‚“. This sound is particularly confusing, partially because it's usually written with the letter n but it's not the same sound as the initial n sound, and partially because there's nothing quite like it in English.
First, to get the idea of ã‚“as a final sound, put your tongue up flat against the roof of your month and say “nnnnn.” It's kind of a humming sound, a lot like the English “mmmm” used to show agreement, except for it's definitely a more n-like sound. One crucial distinction is that in Japanese, it's much longer than the English final n, to the point where it's actually considered to be a separate syllable. So, for example, the word zen actually has two syllables: ze-n. If you listen to Japanese people speaking slowly and carefully, you'll notice that the n used as a final sound is actually pronounced quite separately from the sounds that precede it. Singing is another area where it is easy to hear ã‚“ pronounced distinctly by itself. In faster speech, the sound doesn't sound as separate, but you should still be able to notice that it is much longer than the English n sound.
When used in the middle of a word, when preceding the consonants ch, d, j, n, r, t and z, the sound made by the non-initial n sound is quite similar to the English n sound, except longer. Beware, though, because it can precede the normal initial n in words like onna (female), it's quite important to make the sound quite long in order to distinguish the two sounds. A good example is konnichiwa: the other day, I saw an album by an English-language rock band entitled “konichiwa,” which is pretty much how many English-speakers pronounce it: “koh neechy wah” with no ã‚“ sound at all. Actually, it's ko-n-ni-chi-wa,with the first n being ã‚“, and the second one being the normal initial n.
By the way, the technique of tapping out a beat while practicing Japanese pronunciation that I described in earlier installments of this series works quite well here—try saying konnichiwa as above with a separate beat for every syllable, and you'll start to get it right.
ん also changes before b, f, m and p, or, more properly, becomes a different sound entirely. There is a district in Osaka usually written in hiragana as �ん�, but spelled as both Namba and Nanba in the Roman alphabet. What's going on here? Actually, in these cases, んjust becomes an m sound, albeit considerably longer than the English m. This really isn't so weird: even if you pronounce Nanba as in English, the second n sound will still come out sounding like an m, unless you speak very slowly and carefully.
Likewise, before k and g, ã‚“ becomes something like a long version of the English ng sound. Again, this should seem too odd from an English-speaking perspective: compare the n sound in “ban” vs. “bank” or “sin” vs. “sink,” and you'll see that English does exactly the same thing. In Japanese, a good comparison would be ken vs. kenka or bun vs. bunka. As always, just remember to make the nasal sound stretch out for a whole syllable.
What is fairly odd from an English-speaking point of view is that ã‚“ actually becomes a vowel sound before several sounds, namely s, sh, y, w, h and other vowels. For example, in the word densha(train), ã‚“ becomes something like an incredibly nasalized i sound, sounding something like “dayshah,” with the y sound stretched out very long and coming through the nose. This is one area where I really recommend just listening to how Japanese people pronounce words and imitating them as much as possible.
In the meantime, the full-syllable n sound that ã‚“ makes when it is the last sound of a word is a reasonable substitute until you figure out the nasal vowel sounds. Just don't use the short English nsound, because it will often be impossible for Japanese people to understand. Taking the example ofdensha again, if you say it as in English as “denshah” with a normal short n sound, it will sound to Japanese people more like like dencha (this is because nch as in “bench” is a possible combination of sounds in English, but nsh is not!).
Really, as you can see, ã‚“ is not a single sound at all, but rather a generic representation for a group of syllable-length nasal sounds that can all either end a word or come in the middle of a word. Confusing, yes, but ultimately not that hard as long as you are aware that it is quite different from the English final n sound and spend some time carefully listening to how Japanese people pronounce it in various words.
The next and final installation of this series will look at two more aspects of Japanese pronunciation: syllable-timing and the “pitch accent” system, both which provide quite a contrast to their English equivalents.