Monday, November 30, 2009

Nihongo

I have now been in Japan for over 3 months. Since my goal in coming here was primarily to learn a foreign language, I will try and give my superficial assessment of the language so far as an outsider and examine what exactly makes Japanese such a difficult language to learn.

For those who have no experience with the Japanese language other than the words konnichiwa, sushi, and karate, I will give a brief layout of its structure. The spoken language is relatively easy to speak phonetically as it has only about 28 distinct sounds (whereas english has around 56). Grammatically, however, the language is backwards from a native English speaker's perspective. The verb invariably comes at the end so that you know location, time, and people before you find out whats happening.

i.e. Instead of Tom ate a hamburger with friends at McDonalds, the direct equivalent would be more like As for Tom, at Mcdonalds, with friends, hamburger was eaten. Not necessarily bad, but its hard to transition to speaking like that smoothly after 21 years of just speaking english.

The written script is considerably more complicated than the spoken language. It consists of 3 (possibly 4 if you count romanji) alphabets/syllabaries; hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana, my favorite of the 3, is the alphabet used for original japanese words. Katakana, which has different symbols for the exact same sounds, is used for foreign words in order to distinguish them from Japanese. i.e. my name is written in katakana, whereas Takeshi's name would be written in hiragana, silly right.. The third writing system is kanji, which was adopted from China a loong time ago. It consists of thousands of different ideographs or symbols, the catch being as there is no phonetic guide you can only read kanji through rote memorization. This jumble of hiragana, katakana, kanji, and sometimes romanji (romanized japanese words) makes reading a Japanese newspaper no easy task.

There are several other barriers that makes learning Japanese challenging. As a deeply hierarchal society, there are entirely different ways of speaking to someone that has a higher social status. This difference is exaggerated to the point that businessmen have to exchange meishi (business cards) before they know how to address each other. Another considerable obstacle is the indirect way in which Japanese communicate. While Westerners like to put everything out on the table, Japanese are more prone to be afraid of saying the wrong thing. Our communication style is more like ping pong, where there's is more like pool. There is also the tendency in polite conversation for Japanese to avoid saying the word no. There are many expressions like chotto (a little), which mean essentially the same thing if you can read between the lines.

Things you should know about intercultural communication in Japan before coming here:
  • Just because English is abundant on shop signs and t-shirts does not mean people are able to speak it.

  • People don't actually speak like they do in the textbooks

  • There are regional dialects here just like in the states, each with their own slang

  • If you want to be polite make sure to throw in a "gozaimasu" or "onegaishimasu"


  • Attempting to speak the Japanese language will go a long way.. knowing a 2 word phrase might even get you a compliment

  • Generally speaking, gaijin (outsiders) are not held to the same standards as the Japanese, its not a learn our language or get out of here kind of environment

  • You will bow a lot, get used to it.

  • You will also communicate a lot non verbally, keep in mind that there non verbal signals are different (ex they refer to themselves by pointing at their nose)

  • Japanese people like to avoid confrontation at all costs

  • People that would never saying anything bad in Japanese are a lot more likely to cuss/be rude in limited english

  • Japanese people often try to gauge other peoples reactions before answering, in this case it helps to put your cards on the table

nihongo wa metcha muzukashi desu yo.

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